Todays dose of poiltical non-correctness

I read that what was still being called the "Manchester Guardian" when I was a youngster (it changed its title in 1959 and moved its editorial functions to London in 1964) might be moving back to Manchester to save money. I expect that will be a bit of a shock to some of its writers, even though they should be able to find essentials like hummus and polenta if they look hard enough. I'm deliberately using stereotypes here, because The Guardian has become the fount of so much political correctness which is one of the reasons I find it so indigestible. Forget Brexit: I don't think the metropolitan elites remotely realise how much this stuff gets the goat of us old fogeys.

One such recent intrusion into my consciousness, for which I should probably blame students rather than Guardianistas, is "Cultural Appropriation", the adoption or use of the elements of one culture by members of another culture. Cultural appropriation is sometimes portrayed as harmful and even claimed to be a violation of the intellectual property rights of the originating culture, for which I suppose it should be called cultural misappropriation. As if a culture can have IP rights.

Little did any of us realise that this is what Joe Strummer and The Clash were doing with songs like Police and Thieves and  Armagideon Time  nearly 40 years ago. Or UB40 come to that. And, in the decade before that, the Rolling Stones with Chuck Berry. In the 60s my teenage ears couldn't, or wouldn't, hear much similarity. But the BBC showed a newsreel clip of Berry when he died which was startlingly obviously where Richards got his guitar playing style from and Jagger his singing.

Anyway, we've been having lots of deliveries to our house lately. One such was brought by two men who were very pleasant, if not the best of drivers, executing an eleven point turn on the drive rather than reversing straight in or out, as most experienced van drivers do.  One was wearing a splendid rasta type wooly hat. I've often admired those rasta colours and nearly bought something like it when we were on holiday in the Caribbean a few years ago. Just as well I didn't, as now that sort of behaviour has apparently become an example of cultural appropriation and, if this isn't a pejorative phrase, beyond the pale. Or at least beyond what pale skinned folk should properly do. OK, but if that's how you want it, next time I see a West Indian man in a suit I might just accuse him of cultural appropriation. Or maybe it would have to be a knotted hanky.....

Which reminds me that the company I last worked for had an extensive policy on discrimination. The list of reasons for not discriminating grew every year. I used to joke that the policy (which, quite properly, explicitly mentioned not discriminating on grounds of gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, etc etc) blatantly allowed discrimination against ginger haired scousers, to which the HR director would jokingly reply "that should be compulsory". My constructive suggestion was that instead of the ever lengthening list - I don't know if it now includes the infamous list of lord knows how many sexual identities - the policy should have said that the company only discriminated on grounds of ability to do the job. Which would deliberately rule out positive discrimination, even though I indulged in it myself on occasion, giving the female of fairly equal candidates preference because we didn't have many women in engineering roles, for example. But it seems to me that the only group that now can be discriminated against legally is old, white Christian males. Or have I got a persecution complex?

I'm beginning to understand why the old feel they are strangers in their own land. A bit like some of the Guardian editorial staff will feel when they get out and about in Manchester, I'll venture.