It's a PC World, By Edward Stourton

The distinguished broadcaster Edward Stourton has created a little bit of a splash with his fifth book, by employing the simple expedient of shopping the Queen Mother. Setting out a couple of conversations that piqued his interest in the phenomenon of political correctness, he recalls a private interview with "the nation's favourite grandmother" in which she explains to him that the "EEC" will never work with "all those Huns, Wops and Dagos".

This expression of explicit racism he compares to his on-air experience 15 years later, when interviewing Major General Patrick Cordingley, who commanded the Desert Rats during the first Gulf War. The general, live on Radio 4's Today, used the phrase "nigger in the woodpile", prompting a slew of complaints, and apologies both from the BBC and from the general himself.

Stourton claims to be interested in understanding why it should be that the Queen Mother's remark was unforgivable, while the general's remark was, in his opinion, far less so. Yet the difference is surely not difficult to comprehend.

The Queen Mother was deliberately expressing her prejudice, and suggesting that certain people, by dint of their racial characteristics, were unfit to organise themselves. The general was merely employing, unthinkingly, an ugly metaphor from a time when views such as the Queen Mother's were routinely paraded, to express a worry about the unforeseen difficulties that might arise from the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. When he realised he had used inappropriate language, the general was sorry. The Queen Mother did much more than use inappropriate language – she voiced what are widely held to be "inappropriate thoughts".

Perhaps unfortunately, since the chasm between the Queen Mother's sins against PC and the general's is presented as the foundation of Stourton's researches, he fails from the start to nail this important difference. However, he does, later in the book and through the agency of his teenage stepdaughter, define PC as "what you are meant to think". Stourton also, again after much thought, suggests that an unsettling thing about PC is that it is not "a coherent belief system".

But he never manages explicitly to get to the nub of the matter. Political correctness prompts distrust and controversy because it is accurately viewed as a project to expunge "inappropriate thoughts" from the minds of free humans, led by self-appointed and unaccountable arbiters who have taken it upon themselves to decide what "inappropriate thoughts" should be. I have to admit that I'd never quite worked this out, until I read Stourton's book.

That's just what makes it a good book, despite its longueurs. It's a PC World does not fall into the trap that political correctness sometimes falls into, of telling people what they should think. The book always leaves room to flatter the reader that she is merely being helped along in the incomparably satisfying task of thinking for herself.

At its most benign and effective, as Stourton recognises, PC simply encourages empathy. It asks people to consider how they might feel if they were of African origin and listening to the radio, only to hear a hidden difficulty described as "a nigger in the woodpile". Any reasonable person, encouraged to think from that perspective, would surely not feel like celebrating. This sort of PC has not gone mad. This kind of PC is useful, thought-provoking and sane. Stourton is in favour of this kind of consciousness-raising.

He is less sympathetic to the PC habit of combing the language to find phrases whose origins are so obscure that offence is neither meant nor taken. He examines suggestions that " the nitty-gritty" should be placed beyond the pale, because there is a theory that "the nitty-gritty" is the hardened residue left behind when slaves have been imprisoned en masse, and the "waste", including the bodies of the dead, has been rendered into granular sludge. He adds that "beyond the pale" refers to the fence around a border region of Russia created by Catherine the Great in 1791, beyond which Jews had to have permission to live. Armed with this recondite knowledge, he is unlikely to have much truck with these figures of speech.

Stourton sensibly traces the origins of PC as a recognised intellectual strategy to the impact of French post-structuralist thought on US college campuses in the 1970s and 1980s. Since post-structuralism held that literature and art should not be simply enjoyed for themselves but "analysed only for what they can tell us about the social, political and economic conditions" in which they were created, this explains why PC has so often presented itself as the enemy of sensual pleasure and fun.

The pithiest comment about the sort of people who use PC as a self-righteous weapon rather than as a tool for the stimulation of lateral thought is attributed to Trevor Phillips, who as head of the Equalities Commission can be seen as PC's answer to the Queen Mother. He pinpoints people who tend to inspire misleading headlines about "political correctness gone mad" as "A small, misguided... grim group of nobby no-mates in public authorities".

Stourton is very much alive to the contradictions of political correctness, and the hierarchy of minority rights that it sometimes dictates. Yet this is the aspect of PC that he explores least well. Stourton spends a lot of time pondering on why some countries – the US and Britain – should have been so open to the "infiltration" of PC thought, while others – mainly France – should have been so impervious. An analysis of why some "identity groups" have been able to use PC more effectively than others might have been more illuminating.

Consensus within specific groups is important. Feminists have not made much headway with the idea that women should not be treated as sex objects, because so many women aspire to being treated as sex objects. Few African-Americans ever insisted that they really liked being banned from using certain water fountains.

Stourton thinks that US susceptibility to PC is linked to its roots in Puritanism. I believe that other factors played a large part too, not only the civil rights movement but also the fact that the nation's constitution is a tract that can be viewed as a wonderful document of sane PC. Few people mind being elegantly inspired by self-evident truths. At its most pure and benign, Stourton concludes, that's all PC seeks to do.

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