Golliwogs and Eyeties

This whole row is taking on absurdist proportions with the BBC apologising this morning to a striker for making him appear to be racist by editing his comments about foreign contractors at that wretched oil refinery outside Immingham. The story is here, God bless Media Guardian.

Well, let's be clear, whatever else the man on the picket line said, he certainly did say Eyeties, so why is his use of a single derogatory word worse than the gormless Thatcher girl saying what she said? The weight of historical oppression did anyone say? Bollocks. She used a term that people find offensive and so did he, so why is the BBC kowtowing to him and blighting her?

It all brings to mind that Dave Allen sketch from years ago, the substance of which involves some sort of man in holy orders uttering a profanity after an irritating setback - spilling a box of Communion wafers, catching his knuckles in the door of the confessional box, whatever: "Jesus! Oh, Christ, I said Jesus! Oh God, I said Christ! Oh fuck, I said God! Oh damnation, I said fuck." etc, etc, etc.

How long before the only thing - the only thing - that it is permissible to say in company, let alone anywhere near a microphone, is: "Can. I. Have. A. Glass. Of. Water. Please?"

The point is that although language is not a trivial matter - both these words are deeply wounding because they objectualise and speak of otherness - we have grown so hypersensitive about it that it has become a fetish for genuine and well founded concerns about racism and xenophobia. And the real trouble of course is that the shrieking and the clamouring is mostly just lip service - it must be, because how otherwise do we explain the lack of opportunity, the barriers, the near absence of non-white faces in, for example, parliament, the media, the arts, public life? It is changing, and thank God, but not fast enough. Is this a case of a lot of pious hand fluttering about a lesser problem (language), because the big problems are just too big? Discuss.

You can't change human nature, and suspicion of otherness - as witnessed on the picket line - will always be with us: it has tripped humans up since before history was written. Try to remember that the next time you hear or read about some ostentatious display of indignation.