Unatural Selection

Around fifteen years ago, I was living in the US and working, among other things,
as a freelance journalist. The Group of Newspapers that I worked for gave every
new arrival a large tome that would have made War & Peace look like a pamphlet. It
included the style guide, which covered practical matters like where and how to
use apostrophes, the company's approach to freebies for journalists (Answer:
accept any and you are toast) and its dos and don'ts regarding what could loosely
be labelled relationships and discrimination.

Although I thought it unnecessary to spell everything out in such detail, at least

it left everyone who worked for the paper in no doubt about its attitude to
discrimination of any kind. Put briefly, one was not allowed to discriminate
against any group or individual based on gender, sexual orientation, religion or
race. I remember talking about it with friends and work colleagues whenever I was
back in the UK - about twice or three times a year. Generally speaking the
reaction was one of disbelief coupled with comments about bloody pc Yanks and a
general sense of relief that we, the British, were far too sensible to need any
such guidelines. Oh how easy it is to be smug: And wrong.

I look around the UK now and I doubt that there are many more politically correct
countries in the world. Occasionally I read blog sites that make the same claim on
behalf of Canada but, never having had to live there, I am happy to claim the PC
Cup on our behalf.
Well, happy is probably not the word I am looking for; resigned, disillusioned and
bloody furious would be closer to the mark. Because, as with all things in modern
Britain, we have embraced political correctness with a degree of enthusiasm that I
would never have thought possible twenty years ago.
Like most people I let the sheer irrelevance and pointlessness of most politically
correct policies wash over me andwhile I try to get on, probably slightly more
grimly, with my life. Recently, though, I have witnessed a prime example of what
happens when political correctness becomes the key driver in a decision making
process. My company - a global engineering firm- has recently decided, with no
small degree of satisfaction, to identify a number of female managers from
different parts of the global organisation that it will groom for future
occupation of the most senior management positions. In fact, so proud of this
initiative were they that they announced it on the company's global intranet. And
were, somehow, taken aback by the ferocity of the reaction. A reaction, it has to
be said, that was equally disillusioned from whichever side of the gender divide
it came.
The stated purpose of this initiative was to redress a perceived imbalance in the
number of women on the main board. Which was ironic in itself. You see, my company
is Scandinavian, but its reach is genuinely global, with subsidiaries in almost
100 countries many of which have been around for almost 100 years. Despite this
fact, the main board is composed almost exclusively of Scandinavians and is,
apparently, closed to almost everyone whose name doesn't end in sson, irrespective
of gender.
The point of this little anecdote is that "positive discrimination" is an
oxymoron. It is impossible to discriminate positively in favour of one group
without discriminating negatively against everyone else who isn't a member of that
select group. The truth of this is so self-evident that it shouldn't need
explanation or justification. Unfortunately, it's a measure of our PC times that,
simply for saying so, one can be labelled mysoginistic and anti-female. It
engenders the same kind of reaction - a mixture of pity and condescension - that
one receives for expressing doubts about Global Warming.

Anyway, since promoting discrete groups seems to be the order of the day, I am
currently lobbying for people of the Romany persuasion to be promoted to the main
board. If that fails, I might be tempted to turn my lobbying skills to the benefit
of left handed, ginger-headed Albanians.

The Elephant in the Drawing room