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From Socialist Review, No. 181, December 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
‘Bushell has rather cleverly reinvented himself. Somewhere along the line a nice, quiet, lefty middle-class student became Sid Yobbo the bigot’
The argument about ‘political correctness’ has thrown up some pretty strange notions about whether there is a left wing ‘thought police’. This idea is in danger of allowing the most reactionary and bigoted views a cloak of respectability.
Now any old right wing half wit can defend any old obnoxious claptrap under the thin guise of ‘attacking PC’.
One right-wing half-wit – Sun columnist Garry Bushell – did exactly that recently on television. Bushell appeared on the Channel 4 programme Without Walls and launched a defence of the old television comedy Till Death Us Do Part and its lead character Alf Garnett.
Garnett, played by Warren Mitchell, was the invention of the writer Johnny Speight. Speight, an anti-racist, used his creation to expose the ignorance and double standards of bigotry and prejudice.
Alf was a creature of his times. He feared and loathed the recently arrived set of postwar immigrants, he was anti-Semitic, foul mouthed and unsophisticated.
He yearned for the glories of empire, loved Winston Churchill, and the queen ‘gawd bless her’. His racist language was the language of a section of bigoted white society, hurled at a relatively new black community, much less confident than it is today.
The antidote to Alf was his Liverpudlian son-in-law (the Scouse git), who was Labour voting, anti-racist, and anti-monarchist.
This mixture was a powerful, extremely funny product of its time. Yet even then there was unease about the programme. You sometimes wondered whether the audience was laughing at Alf or with him.
Times have moved on. The black and Asian communities have become an established fact of life, their members have grown in confidence and the majority of whites recognise the fact that they live in a multi-cultural society. Words like ‘nig nog’ and ‘coon’ are no longer common parlance, and belong in the main only to the hardcore of racists. Few under 60 give a stuff about Winston Churchill, and gawd seems to have well and truly turned his back on the queen and her libidinous offspring.
Alf, in other words, would now sound like the nastiest BNP sympathiser.
Which brings me to Bushell. Speight invented Garnett. Bushell has rather cleverly reinvented himself.
Somewhere along the line a nice quiet, lefty middle-class student became Sid Yobbo the bigot.
Perhaps he was ahead of his time in spotting the sort of anal cavity the Sun would start offering columns to, or perhaps it was that blow to his head when he drove it through a door to lead students into occupation at North East London Poly. Or perhaps there was always a sad wanker struggling to get out of a reasonable persona – who knows?
Anyway, Garry is very concerned that Alf is no longer on our screens. He sat in his little studio looking faintly ridiculous with his little Union Jack as he moaned to us all about political correctness, about trendy lefties from Islington, about a lost ‘English culture’, and about the fact that over the last 25 years the argument between Alf and his son-in-law has been won by the Scouse git.
I know, Garry, sad isn’t it? Gone are the days when you could call a spade a spade, refuse him a house to live in, a job or even a modicum of respect.
Why should Channel 4 have shown us such crap? I don’t believe that if Garry had gone to them saying, ‘I’d like to make a programme arguing for lots more coon jokes on the telly,’ he’d have got beyond the reception desk. But Garry says, ‘I would like to make a programme about political correctness at the BBC using Alf Garnett as my model,’ and – hey presto – he’s invading my living room.
The irony of all this is that as politically correct becomes less acceptable, so politically repulsive starts to become more respectable.
No longer is it just dunderheads in the Sun sprouting garbage. Now the respectable press find men of letters to sprout it as well.
On a visit to Ireland recently I found two respectable newspapers giving space to the reactionary crackpot theories of a Professor Lynn of Coleraine University. Let me just run one or two of them by you:
‘When blood tests are carried out it is found that the more intelligent negroes are those with a higher proportion of Caucasian blood.’
And as for the Irish:
‘The more intelligent have got out over a period of centuries ... Left behind each year is a slightly less intelligent stock from which to breed new generations.’
Lynn is not himself Irish, he merely lives there. Perhaps he could donate copious amounts of his sperm to the poor degenerating natives and – who knows – then Ireland could become a nation of Lynns.
Should that day ever come, the Irish joke will no longer be politically incorrect, but rather an accurate description of a degenerate race of morons.
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