It’s getting to the stage where, as well as establishing other people’s pronouns, it might pay to inquire as to their designated offence zones. This is necessary not just because of the obvious fact that offendedness has become infinitely elastic, but because officialdom offers increasingly contradictory guidelines.
In the same week that a British peer had a meltdown about Domino’s pizza chain offering a “disgusting” Cadbury crème egg wrapped in cookie dough for Easter, a medical tribunal ruled that a gynaecologist who called Jewish colleagues “big noses” and said his suburb would be better off “Jew free” was not being racist.
On one hand, Lord Bethell, who was prominent in the government’s pandemic management, was able to say from his public podium that the pizza executives should become unemployable for their vile act – adding a calorie-dense pudding to their already calorie-dense menu. On the other, Dr Dimitrios Psaroudakis got only a three-month suspension because his peers reckoned he was not racist, just “someone who is comfortable using discriminatory language”.
Thus, one authority regards chocolate as an ethical travesty while another reckons repeated antisemitism merits a mere wrist slap.
A General Medical Council tribunal said the doctor didn’t just insult colleagues about their Jewishness but called them things like “alky” and “leprechaun” as well. It was just his habit to make “offensive or derogatory [characterisations] about people whom he did not like”. On another occasion, he joshed that a patient’s husband had died because “he probably smelled her shoes”. A wild and crazy guy, apparently.
Lest this seem a mere blip, a paediatrician who, following a synagogue attack in 2018, posted, “zieg heil hahaha gas the Jews” online, did lose his position on a junior doctors’ committee but was still allowed to practise. See, he’s another “comfortable” guy, and how fortunate it is that someone like him is still allowed to treat children.
These cases might comfort the BBC, which – eventually, after complaints – sacked a staffer who for months had posted severely antisemitic sentiments online, including referring to “the holohoax”. It also sent a contestant on The Apprentice for diversity training after complaints about his posting that Zionists were a “godless, satanic cult” who look “odiously ogre-like”.
These cases are bewildering to the average person striving to avoid causing offence or straying cluelessly into hate speech because, only last month, a court judgment seemed to provide a more intuitive set of guard rails. Actor turned politician Laurence Fox lost a libel suit after calling two men and a woman paedophiles, and lost a counter-suit after they called him a racist. These results seemed informative. Calling someone a paedophile without a shred of evidence is surely the absolute pits. And given that Fox argued in the second case that it’s no more offensive to call someone a “Paki” or use the N-word than to use the term “Aussie”, it doesn’t take advanced linguistics to see his error. “Aussie” – even uttered by a New Zealander – is a neutral-to-affectionate term, whereas no one uses the other terms unless they seek to belittle or express loathing.
But to take it from the earlier examples, it’s not necessarily racist to insult people’s ethnicity if you also call them drunks and midgets, and/or if it’s just become a habit. And it’s fine for doctors to publicly wish death upon people of a certain ethnicity – even if they might be called on to treat children of that ethnicity. Also, vilifying a particular ethnic group is get-away-with-able unless and until someone complains – and even then, need not destroy one’s on-screen career.
At least on the ethics of battered Easter eggs there are clear social licence implications. His Lordship’s intercession will ensure soaring sales.
