A peculiar thing happened the other day on Times Radio with Andrew Neil. The legendary broadcaster was discussing the intricacies of the Henry Nowak murder with The Times’ Southwest and Countryside correspondent, Will Humphries. While recounting the 999 call made after the stabbing, Humphries dropped this gem into the conversation:
“It’s repeatedly pressed by the 999 operator what has been said to make this a racist attack. And when the brother presses Digwa on what he was actually called during the attack, he says “the P-word”. And then the operator is heard to say that’s what I needed.”
You can watch the full exchange here:
My immediate thought was: Which bloody P-word?
Pussy? Prick? Poof? Paedo? Ponce? Pikey? Palestinian?
I’m assuming it was “Paki”, because that seems the most likely to send British media into full pearl-clutching mode. But it’s not immediately obvious from the context. “Paki” is an outdated insult from my childhood not Nowak’s. In addition, Digwa is visibly a Sikh. Calling a turbaned Sikh a “Paki” is about as accurate as referring to an Englishman as a “Yank”.
What struck me as even stranger, was that Neil didn’t push back. Not a single follow-up. Not even a raised eyebrow. Just quiet acceptance, as if “the P-word” alone satisfied journalistic curiosity. This is Andrew Neil don’t forget – the famously grizzled, Belfast correspondent during the Troubles; the scourge of ISIS, and a no-nonsense working-class Scot, who doesn’t usually let anything go. Just ask Diane Abbott and Michael Portillo, who’ve battled him unsuccessfully for the last drop of Blue Nun on many a late-night BBC sofa.
Perhaps you got there faster than I did, but then that begs the question: why? Did you not, in these hyper-sensitive times, commit some form of thoughtcrime the moment you heard “the P-word”? And if it’s acceptable to think it, why the hell can’t we just say the word out loud? Especially when a young man was arguably killed over the mere allegation of using it?
Alas, we are becoming conditioned to this linguistic infantilisation. While polite society tiptoes around the F-word and the C-word, whites especially are voluntarily self-censoring to avoid all possibility of offence. Piers Morgan will tell anyone who’ll listen, how unacceptable it is to say the N-word “with a hard ‘R’ – and that’s the point when I really start to worry. You can’t have words that only certain tribes are allowed to use, and you absolutely cannot have words that nobody is allowed to use. Yet that is precisely where we are. Indeed, the disease is spreading.
These days, the list of forbidden letters grows longer by the week; matched only by the alphabet soup we are compelled to utter in reference to gender (I believe the acronym currently stands at ‘LGBTIQCAPGNGFNBA’ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, Queer/Questioning, Curious, Asexual, Pansexual, Gender-Nonconforming, Gender-Fluid, Non-Binary, Fluid, Bigender/Androgynous, for those interested).
In addition, we must now extend our list of naughty schoolboy euphemisms to include the R-word (retard), the M-word (midget), the G-word (gypsy), the K-word (kaffir), the T-word (tranny), the S-word (spastic), the H-word (handicap), while the poor P-word is forced to do double duty for both “Paki” and “paedo”.
I am trivialising of course, but this is hardly a trivial matter. Words denuded of meaning or routinely asterisked out simply cease to be. For Christ’s sake (apologies, C-word already taken), we only have 26 letters in the alphabet. Twenty-six. How many of them are we going to hand over before the entire lexicon becomes unusable, before we literally cannot describe reality any more? Maybe that’s the point. Maybe rendering us mute is the whole point of the exercise.
I believe it was Orwell who warned the first attack is always on language. By acceding to the use of linguistic devices such as “the P-word”, we are willingly and enthusiastically allowing ourselves to be robbed of our adult autonomy. For Britain, a nation steeped in free speech; one which has survived world wars, the three-day week, and the advent of James O’Brien, this is particularly damning.
How long before he said, she said becomes: “He used the N-word about the P-word community, while committing the R-word in the M-word area.” At that point we can do away with journalists altogether, replace them with euphemism translators, and an ever-expanding thesaurus of approved synonyms for “bad”.
Soon they’ll be teaching toddlers a whole new alphabet: “A is for the A-word, B is for the B-word…” What a bright and glorious future that is going to be. And if even Andrew Neil feels compelled to play this pathetic game, what hope is there for the rest of us?
Welcome to modern Britain. Now shut up, and mind your P-words and your Q-words.
Frank Haviland is the author of Banalysis: The Lie Destroying the West and The Frank Report Substack.
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The use of (any letter of the alphabet) word, is a childish cop out – say what you mean with confidence and stop hiding behind ‘niceness’ or use another word instead.
Increasingly my bugbear has become the phrase ‘little man’, still used freely and unchallenged by middle and upper class types of anybody they deem lower (but useful) in the social stakes than themselves.
Personally I’ve never understood why Paki is more objectionable than Brit and both have uses without being used as slurs.
I totally agree with Nathaniel.
Thank you for the initial laughter you gave me, followed quickly by tears, not of laughter. This world has gone totally mad, how on earth did we get here?