So first of all it's Jeremy Clarkson, muttering the unexpurgated version of Eeny Meeny Miny Mo in an unbroadcast segment. Then a hapless Radio Devon DJ David Lowe playing The Sun Has Got His Hat On, unaware that it contained the lyric "He's been tanning n------ out in Timbuktu / Now he's coming back to do the same to you". Today the Premier League chief Richard Scudamore is in trouble for emails in which he advised a friend to keep a female colleague "off your shaft" and compared an ex-girlfriend to a double-decker bus - "happy for you to play upstairs but her Dad got angry if you went below".
(Hypocritical hats off to the Daily Mirror for laying into Scudamore whilst repeating the comments for the amusement of anyone puerile enough to be entertained by them.)
Let's deal with Scudamore first. His emails reveal him to be boorish and sexist, and his comments have been attached by such luminaries as Tessa Jowell and Women in Sport; a Labour MP comments that his position as Premier League boss has been "undermined". Well maybe. But if Scudamore is unfit for his post, so are an awful lot of other men. A brilliant doctor friend of mine once complained of "the creeping feminisation of the NHS", and observed of a woman we know that she was certainly "towards the danger end of the female irrationality spectrum". These half-serious musings on the temperamental differences between the genders, sexist if you like, are part of the small change of conversation between many men. You may find Scudamore a degree more loathsome, although it's not his fault that private musings - best kept in the locker-room - were published.
As for the n----- word, the idea that someone on Radio Devon should be sacked for playing The Sun Has Got His Hat On is surely just bizarre. Boris Johnson's contention that the BBC is hypocritical for showing Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, with its plethora of n----- words, doesn't quite wash for me, but nevertheless shows how complex the issue is. The BBC swiftly offered David Lowe his job back, but Lowe has had enough.
What banning "n-----" reveals is that these decisions are made by individuals according to individual tastes. The Scudamore stuff suggests more clearly, being borderline, that what's offensive is a matter of opinion. I personally find "n------" pretty horrible because it is redolent of a time when black people were regarded by (often quite nice) white people as little better than animals. But my view, although widely shared in Britain now, is not universally accepted, and its use by black people to one another shows, like Johnson's Pulp Fiction point, that nuances are at work. When black people use the word, it means something quite different from its use by 1930s English dance band leaders; itself different again from its use by a Southern redneck at a lynching; itself different again from its use by a portly petrolhead reciting a nursery rhyme out of English cultural antiquity. In other words, context is everything.
In 1960s or even 1980s Britain, the status of black people in society was sufficiently precarious to justify the argument that racist language should be outlawed. However even its most zealous defenders would have to acknowledge that something has been lost in terms of freedom of speech. There's nothing quite so insidious as the notion that certain things are sayable and other things aren't. In Britain today the penalty for transgressors can be unemployment or even jail. It's a tempting path as long as people who agree with you are holding the reins of power, but it leaves those who don't buy in to your value set excluded; and when the reins are taken away from you, what then?
Moreover, the outrage that greets the broadcast of The Sun Has Got His Hat On fails to recognise the transience of social attitudes. In 1932 people thought it was OK to say n------. Now most of them don't. Who knows what people will think in the future? One of the fatuities of our age is the notion that the attitudes we have are correct, perhaps even definitive, the rounded gleaming Platonic certainties towards which our forefathers were groping in their fumbling way. What rubbish. Our views are merely staging posts on humanity's long march, clung to by us, laughed at by our grandchildren.
I grew up in the 1960s with Eeny Meeny Miny Mo. It was part of my cultural heritage, along with Meccano, the Johnny Seven gun and Mamod steam engines. It was probably part of Clarkson's too. I'm surprised he hasn't tried to claim his own heritage is being denied. After all, the white liberal metropolitan elite is quite keen on protecting everyone else's culture. Why not its own?
There were traces of this in the Guardian the day after the Scudamore story broke. The G2 cover ran a spoof pointing up the tendency of the tabloids to run anti-Muslim scare stories, while inside the main paper David Conn, that most po-faced of journalists, reported the "growing clamour" about Scudamore's sexism. It's ironic that the sexism of Islam, often rampant, gross, inhuman and endemic, should be overlooked so frequently by the Guardian and its fellow-travellers, whilst some pathetically unfunny comments by a football administrator should attract the whole of its attention. There's surely an element of self-hatred here.
Ultimately the right not to be offended, which so many people seem to think should be a feature of an open society, is unworkable (who decides?) and in any event should be trumped by the right to free expression. If freedom of utterance means anything it means the willingness to listen to something you don't like, because not liking it is not as bad as the other person not being able to say it.
PS The version of The Sun Has Got His Hat On played on Radio Devon was by Ambrose and His Orchestra. What a delicious irony it would have been had Mr Lowe played instead a rival version of the song recorded in the same year. It was by Henry Hall's BBC Dance Orchestra.
