This is what he had to say on offensive words in an interview with Iain Dale…
“There’s one bit of political correctness which is terribly important and that’s about politeness.
“I have a disabled son and I don’t want people to call him a spastic. You are a gay man, you don’t want someone to call you a poof. If you have a black friend, you don’t want someone to call them something offensive.
“It’s about manners and I think what we’ve got to do is frame this debate in a sense of what is good manners and politeness and what is common sense.”
Considering the Carol Thatcher incident and the sacking of Notts MP Patrick Mercer a while back, his words will have been carefully chosen here.
Notice how he says the words “poof” and “spastic”, but when it comes to race relies on “something offensive”.
I imagine as he’s speaking to a gay man and as the father of a disabled child, he feels there is a sort of ownership of those particular words.
If the interviewer had been black and not gay would he have changed the words he used? Or does he simply consider the race issue more of a hot potato?
The full interview appears in Total Politics on Wednesday
Monday, 16 February 2009
Cameron engages in “golliwog” debate
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
2 comments:
Seemed pretty "straight" talk on the whole!
There seems to be some connotation here that Cameron did a bad thing sacking Patrick Mercer but that is I think only the belief of those that somehow never could grasp the imperative why Mercer was rightly given his marching orders. He appeared to be entirely indifferent to the fact that someone was taunted for being black or bullied and nobody in his position can be allowed to be indifferent to that.
Not that it made much difference to Mercer, indeed it gave him more freedom and things continued along the same lines. Mercer is now the chairman of the House of Commons’ counter-terrorism sub-committee and likely loving every minute of it, so all is well that ends well, and for Patrick Mercer it somehow always does.
I think the worst thing that Cameron did was to invite David Freud. Freud believes that people registered "unfit" to work should be forced to search for work also there will be no special treatment of disabled people or lone parents with children at school
Freud’s draconian methods sank upon a lack of enthusiasm from Brown but if Gordon Brown would not implement them and inflict greater suffering upon the poverty stricken to force the sick into low paid taxpaying jobs then perhaps David Cameron’s invitation to Freud is an indication he will not be so conscientious.
Post a Comment