A plea for help

I am writing a book about threats to freedom of speech – real threats that is – and wonder if I should include a chapter on political correctness. I find it a hard question.

In many ways, political correctness has improved British manners. That people no longer screech about the niggers and the pakis and the yids, strikes me as all to the good. It is reasonable for a university, say, to suspend a lecturer who keeps making sexist jokes to women. His attitudes directly affect his ability to teach women students. Such speech codes are not a form McCarthyism. The organisers of the anti-communist purge in 1950s American got Hollywood actors fired for holding beliefs that had nothing to do with their ability to act. The context in which PC speech codes operate is everything. Do they enforce professional standards? Or are they a modern McCartyhism which targets ideas that are out of favour regardless of whether they are private or public vices?