Delingpole: From ‘Sexist’ Advert Bans to ‘Racist’ Enid Blyton, the Left Has Ruined Britain

British Prime Minister Theresa May (L) speaks with former British Prime Minister Tony Blai
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A group of British ex-servicemen — former Labour voters with a military intelligence background — has released what it calls The Traitors Chart: a map illustrating some of the hundreds of reasons why they no longer vote Labour.

Essentially, their argument is that Labour is so dangerously left-wing that no patriotic Briton should vote for it.

This “J2 Assessment” was collated by a team with significant experience across academia and intelligence; in the military and political life of the United Kingdom.

It is with sincere regret that traditional Labour voters have had to point out that the Labour Party, as we knew and supported it, has been hijacked by groups of hard Left and radical Islamist cadres who, unlike Labour of old, do not have the nation’s interests at heart. These usurpers are too often antisemitic. These radicals say anything to get their hands on public money and power, deselecting mainstream Labour Party members.

Well, I agree, obviously.

But for me the chart is less useful as a warning against Jeremy Corbyn than it is as a warning to conservatives just how much work needs to be done to undo the damage that was wrought on Britain in the Blair years — and also, of course, under Gordon Brown and under Blair’s fellow travellers David Cameron and Theresa May.

The great Peter Hitchens has long argued that Tony Blair was much, much more radical — and dangerous — than his carefully cultivated popular image as a “Third Way” centrist. But even if Blair was not — as Hitchens hints in this interview — a deep cover Trotskyite revolutionary at heart, it is unarguably the case that in the last two decades British culture has drifted inexorably leftwards to the point where many of us feel like strangers in our own country.

This was borne out by a recent poll showing that three-quarters of Britons had had enough of political correctness.

As the Telegraph reported:

Political correctness has gone too far and “exceeds common sense”, three quarters of Britons have said in a wide ranging study.

More than half of people also said political correctness is “eroding the expression of Britain’s values and traditions” in a report by the LSE using findings from Opinium.

In the report due to be published next week, 76 per cent of people agreed political correctness “sometimes goes too far and exceeds common sense”.

Only 17 per cent of people surveyed said they want to see politicians determining what is or isn’t politically correct.

Political correctness is the outward expression of cultural Marxism — the takeover by the hard-left of every institution so that even when there’s a supposedly ‘conservative’ government in power it’s the values of the left which continue to dominate everyday life.

Let me give you two recent examples of this ubiquitous phenomenon.

First, the discovery by the Mail on Sunday that Enid Blyton — one of Britain’s most enduringly popular and influential children’s authors, creator of Noddy and the Famous Five series — was denied a commemorative 50p coin on the 50th anniversary of her death because a Royal Mint ‘advisory committee’ declared that “she is known to have been a racist, sexist, homophobe and not a very well-regarded writer”.

Enid Blyton was born in 1897. Pretty much everyone of that generation — and of every one preceding it — would qualify as a “racist, sexist, homophobe” by the standards of the modern left.

As for “not very well-regarded”, well she has sold over 600 million books — which probably counts for something, no?

We do not know the identities of this Royal Mint ‘advisory committee’ but we know exactly what type of person they are. They are the same type of people who make up the committee of the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) which has decided to make adverts that promote ‘gender stereotypes’ effectively illegal in the UK.

As a result, on the basis of just three complaints, the ASA felt within its rights to ban an advert featuring a mother with a pram and various men in sporty/adventurous activities.

The ASA said:

“By juxtaposing images of men in extraordinary environments and carrying out adventurous activities with women who appeared passive or engaged in a stereotypical care-giving role, we considered that the ad directly contrasted stereotypical male and female roles and characteristics in a manner that gave the impression that they were exclusively associated with one gender.

“We concluded that the ad presented gender stereotypes in a way that was likely to cause harm and therefore breached the

There is no shortage of similar examples of the ‘political correctness gone mad’ which has hijacked British culture. But the people enforcing it are a tiny minority of committed Social Justice Warriors — most of them educated in some worthless degree subject like gender studies, often ‘working’ either in the human resources department or one with ‘diversity’, ‘equality’, or ‘sustainability’ in their title — entirely at odds with the way most of the country still thinks.

Like the Soviet Politburo or China’s Central Committee, they are the very few who exert extraordinary — indeed, terrifying — power over the many.

True to Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s call for a ‘long march through the institutions’, these people have gained key positions of power the length and breadth of British culture.

The Traitors’ Chart illustrates the scale of the problem. The leftist web of influence extends from avowedly socialist organisations like Labour, Momentum, Sinn Fein, the trade unions to an organisations that pretend they’re about something else — Stop the War Coalition; Stand Up To Racism; Hope Not Hate, etc — to organisations that in theory ought to be above politics but are in fact largely in thrall to left-wing values (eg Channel 4 and the BBC; the universities; the British Medical Association; etc).

If and when Boris Johnson delivers Brexit, it will be only the beginning of Britain’s retreat from the abyss. Britain cannot be truly great again until these issues — and so many more — begin to be addressed.

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