December 25, 2005
BP is not PC for BC, or what happens when Tory MPs don't check their facts
Philip Davies, Tory MP for Shipley in West Yorkshire is challenging political correctness, which he calls ‘this silliness’.
His first target appears to be a Somerset museum. He told the BBC. “Somebody decided that BC - Before Christ - was going to be offensive to other religions, so they changed BC to BP, which was Before the Present, I think it stood for. Examples like this happen all the time and we’d like to try and make people aware of it so they can fight back and say to people, we’ve had enough of this nonsense.”
Hmm. Doesn’t Mr Davies know how to google? If he had searched for the term on the net he would have found that BP is a standard way referring to dates in the past, associated in particular with carbon dating. It has nothing to do with political correctness and dates back more than half a century.
What would be really silly - Mr Davies and other Tory MPs please note - would be to refer to early hominids, say the celebrated Australopithecus afarensis called ‘Lucy’, as being 3.2 million years BC. (Christ really has nothing to do with it.)
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4558668.stm
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Present
Posted by Simon Holledge at 09:33 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
October 04, 2004
The Tories: to KBO or not to KBO?
I haven’t considered voting Conservative since I was 8 years old, but there is something rather sad about the inability of this once-great party of pragmatism and excellence to attract votes.
There were some interesting reactions after the party came fourth at Hartlepool:
Nicholas Soames: “We should follow Churchill’s advice and KBO - keep buggering on. … The strength of a political party is its ability not to divert itself either to the right or the left.”
Boris Johnson: “We’re still thought of as vaguely uncool and unfashionable, like Marks & Spencer. We just don’t seem to be the buzzy thing on the shelf for the political consumer.”
There are probably lessons for all of us here. The Tories have been outmanoeuvred by New Labour’s (centre-right posing as centre-left) leadership and then humiliated by the goons of UKip. Despite Soames’s good advice, it really does seem that the Conservative party can be shunted to the right, and off the political stage.
politics.guardian.co.uk/byelections/story/0,11043,1318044,00.html?gusrc=rss
Posted by Simon Holledge at 12:40 AM | Comments (2)