Some of the most important and illuminating court cases in recent British history languish in obscurity. One such is the 1997 challenge to the Northern Ireland Fire Authority by a woman called Gillian Maxwell, who argued that the minimum height requirement of five foot six — in place across Britain since the 1947 Fire Services Act — was indirectly discriminatory against women (average female height in the UK is around 5ft4, and 5ft9 for men). The tribunal accepted her argument, meaning that British fire brigades could no longer impose a blanket height requirement. Subsequently, other traditional physical requirements, such as the ability to carry a man 100 yards, have been dropped.
If you ask a politician, or a senior fire service official, why these changes were made, they will tell you with a straight face that it is purely for operational reasons. Recently, the Humberside Fire & Rescue Service scolded members of the public who appear to have raised the question, in a recent consultation exercise, of whether fitness standards had been lowered to enable more women to become firefighters. Such thoughts are, naturally, Not Appropriate. It is, we must believe, a massive coincidence that in a period when the equality and diversity doctrine was being imposed across public life — in 1999 Home Secretary Jack Straw insisted that the proportion of female firefighters should increase to 15 per cent from 1.4 per cent within a decade — physical strength requirements were being radically amended in a way that had the effect of making them easier to pass for women.
The expectation that we will accept this kind of obfuscation, and often outright lies, is a fascinating by-product of the political culture of post-1997 Britain. In a 2005 interview, Dr Theodore Dalrymple, of this parish, said the following, reflecting on the propaganda published by Communist regimes: “its purpose was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate … When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity … A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
This is a perceptive point. Complicity in deceit — forced or voluntary, active or passive — has a literally demoralising effect, in the sense that it reduces your ability and willingness to step outside the lie and tell the truth, and habituates you to dishonesty. And there are multiple people at all levels of the British state and administration who have, consciously or self-consciously, become complicit in this way.
Consider senior police officers who must carefully dance around the truth when discussing, say, crime committed by residents of asylum hotels, or the foreign organised crime gangs that plague most of our major cities. They know that if they are too straightforward about the situation, their own position and future advancement could be at risk, and so they repeat the standard platitudes. Possibly the officers truly see nothing wrong in what they are saying, after years of EDI catechism classes, but even if that is the case, it is an abdication of intellectual and moral responsibility to merely repeat without thought the worldview of a thousand PowerPoint presentations.
Further examples abound. Official Britain’s increasing attachment to the Windrush mythology — the idea that the rebuilding of post-war Britain was undertaken as a kind of philanthropic project by legions of immigrant workers invited here expressly for that purpose because of labour shortages — is a sign of either astonishing ignorance of relatively recent events, or of a breathtaking cynical dishonesty. Neither explanation is very encouraging about the personal integrity of the people making the claim. There is such a thing as culpable ignorance.
The same is true of claims like “diversity is our strength”, and the oft-made assertion that Britain has always been a nation of immigrants. In his now-notorious “island of strangers” speech from May 2025, the Prime Minister stated that “migration is part of Britain’s national story” — a classic example of what the lawyers call suggestio falsi, i.e. a statement which is not itself untrue but is intended to imply a falsehood. In this case, the correct statement that migration has occurred in British history is used to support the obviously incorrect claim that the huge migration that has occurred since 1945, and especially since 1997, is nothing out of the ordinary in historical perspective.
Suggestio falsi, and its counterpart suppressio veri — “suppression of the truth — could plausibly be called the dominant rhetorical modes of the contemporary British establishment and their cultural outriders. Books like Black Tudors by Miranda Kaufmann, and historical dramas in which numerous roles are filled by ethnic minority actors, are clearly aiming to establish in the public mind a vague sense that contemporary levels of ethnic diversity are not that unusual in our history. The same sleight of hand is at play in the Horrible Histories “Been Here From The Start” song, which implies a longstanding significant population of sub-Saharan Africans in the country, without ever actually making a specific factual claim which could be rebutted.
In 2023 the BBC reported the findings of a new scientific study of the remains of plague victims under the astonishing headline “Black women most likely to die in medieval plague, Museum of London says”. Again, the clear intention of both headline and story was to confuse the reader about what fourteenth century English demographics, with academics talking airily about “population diversity” and the lack of written sources from people of colour, and no attempt to give a realistic estimate of the size of the African-descended population of London in the 1340s. And this was not merely journalistic failure; the paper on which the story was based suggests that their theories about the greater vulnerability to plague of people with African ancestry “may reflect premodern structural racism’s devastating effects.”
There is something genuinely Soviet about the way in which government, administration, academic and the media toe the line on controversial matters. The Metropolitan Police still has an official long-term target to achieve a 50:50 split of the sexes in officers, an absurd state of affairs when you consider the large differentials in strength and height between men and women and the need for physical forces and the ability to impose oneself upon a situation.
Taboos are eternal, of course. Any civilised society will have subjects that are hedged round with euphemism and allusion, and not mentioned in polite society. The question is whether you have reasonable taboos aligned with reality, or bizarre ones intended to uphold an essentially fantastical and anti-empirical worldview. At present, we have the latter. The egalitarian and anti-national dogmas that now animate the British state create what is best described as a form of endemic corruption. This is not the financial corruption of bungs in brown envelopes and cash for questions, but something worse; a creeping self-censorship, a deliberate use of weasel words and rhetorical tricks to avoid difficult topics. In many cases the deceit is not even conscious, or at least not entirely conscious, but that is no excuse. A self-respecting person, with integrity, should not allow themselves to repeat lies or slogans.
