George Orwell's Newspeak sought to change the language to prevent people even thinking any thoughts the party disapproved of. A speaker on BBC Radio 4 said that political correctness, by making people talk differently, forces them to think differently. She approved.

Political correctness counts on good manners. We do not like to offend. If people object to some words, we switch to others. Many terms of racial description were originally descriptive, not intended as insults. They were dropped from polite speech, however, because they were regarded as such.

I myself use 'they' to mean either he or she. It makes language more awkward, but it no longer leaves out half the human race. Unfortunately some people trade on our good manners. Persistent sales representatives rely on people being too polite to silence them. Similarly, many advocates of PC rely on our reluctance to offend.

At student conferences speakers were booed for talking of lame excuses, blind to the problem, or deaf to the arguments. This language was alleged to offend disabled people. If it were only about language we might grudgingly acquiesce, making jokes about Snow White and her Seven Vertically Challenged Companions. But it is not just about language. It goes with attitudes which attempt to make outcasts of those whose thoughts and habits are currently unfashionable.

This includes smokers, drinkers, and those who eat hamburgers, drive cars, and use disposable nappies, as well as those who use unreformed language. Incessant propaganda tells us that these anti-social types are causing disease, violence, death, and ruining the planet. In fact, these people are like us. They are friends who enjoy a cigarette, or a drink. They find fast cars as convenient as fast foods, and they hate washing nappies.

PC is preaching intolerance. It tells us to castigate those whose lifestyle choices we do not share. If we do not smoke, drink or hunt we have to be anti-smoker, anti-drinker, anti-hunter. The harm of the PC attitude is not that it tries to make us talk differently but that it tries to destroy the easy-going glue of tolerance which holds a civilised society together. It seeks to turn us against each other, and to turn intolerance into a virtue.