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I first met Anthony Browne, Boris Johnson's new policy director, in the newsroom of The Observer in 2002. He had a square jaw, square glasses and square shoulders. I assumed he was a placid and conventional man who went home every night to cocoa and the crossword.
I realised my mistake when he started to rave about dentists. They were conning the public, he bellowed. They yanked out healthy teeth so they could extort fees from patients and the NHS.
Journalists on liberal papers didn't criticise health workers in those days and I assumed his plan to take on the dental profession would get nowhere. Wrong again. Every one of Browne's criticisms turned out to be accurate and an impressed editor organised a campaign against rip-off dentists.
A concern for fact and a hatred of conventional wisdom have marked his progress from journalism to the Conservative think-tank Policy Exchange, and now on to one of the most powerful jobs in London.
Browne has stood up for free speech and against liberal alliances with radical Islam, and exposed the civil servants who were pretending that a rise in HIV was due to poor sex education rather than immigration from African countries where the virus is raging. A former press officer at the Department of Health staff told me that his arguments caused consternation, not least because they were true.
He says he's fighting "political correctness", but here his use of language lets him down. Like many on the Right in their thirties and forties (and perhaps more people on the Left than you realise), he's a liberal. The last thing he wants is to force women back into the kitchen or to go back to insulting "pakis" and "coons". He accepts the liberation of women and the campaigns for racial and homosexual equality - how could he do anything else when there are more gays in the London Tory party than Old Compton Street?
It's not political correctness he (and they) are against but the perversion of liberalism by Whitehall and the BBC, which holds that it is somehow wicked to talk about racial attacks on whites, anti-Semitism or tensions between immigrants. After the hysterias of the Livingstone administration, his arrival in City Hall ought to be a welcome sign that London is at last moving on and becoming a more honest city.
And so it is, but I sense a fault in Browne because I have sensed it in myself. If you are not careful, you can allow yourself to become so blinded by the hypocrisies of the liberal establishment you can't see what is in front of your nose.
What may soon be in front of his and Johnson's noses is a Londonwide recession. For all his jusifiable desires to tackle the problems left by Livingstone, I hope he has the capacity to adapt and face up to it.
Reader views (1)
This is interesting. I have also reached the same conclusion. I have often tried to talk about issues such as knife crime effecting/enacted by different ethnic minorities as often this gets branded as a racist remark. Far from it, the truth is, I want to establish a debate around the facts but we are not allowed to do that nowadays - all in the name of political correctness.
Any direction away from this politically correct 'no go' area has to be a good thing. He has my support.
- Andy, London, 10/08/2008 18:09
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