Thursday, May 15, 2008

Merry Olde England?

Britons are living in segregated ghettos in a culture bedevilled by political correctness, novelist PD James warned yesterday.

The celebrated crime author and peer described the country as a fractured society where communities were living in isolation.

In a speech on policing in the 21st century, Baroness James, who is a former senior civil servant in the criminal policy department of the Home Office, said, "Our society is now more fractured than I in my long life than I have ever known it.

"Increasingly there is a risk that we live in ghettos with our own kind, with a strong commitment to our local community but little contact with those outside it. Mutual respect and understanding and recognition of our common humanity cannot be nurtured in isolation.

"And in our relationships we are bedevilled by the cult of political correctness."

The award-winning author also told her packed audience in the Palace of Westminster: "If in speaking to minorities we have to weigh every word in advance in case inadvertently we give offence, how can we be at ease with each other, how celebrate our common humanity, our shared anxieties and aspirations, both for ourselves and for those whom we love?"

She said it would be unfortunate if the police became 'enamoured' of political correctness, which she described as 'a pernicious, if risible authoritarian attempt at linguistic and social control'.

Read it here.

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