Jonathan Jones

From the archives: Are you politically sound?

This evening, we’ve dug out a fun piece from 2000, in which Matthew Parris gives an A-to-Z of the right-wing alternative to Political Correctness: Political Soundness.

A lexicon of conservative cant, Matthew Parris, 19 February 2000

Are you politically sound? 

Are you sound on field sports, sound on the countryside, sound on immigration? Are you sound on the Union, on buggers and on the Common Market? Are you sound on the monarchy? Are you sound on Diana? Are you sound on Enoch, Margaret, Jonathan and Neil? 

Ever ready to laugh at others, we on the Right are in danger of losing our ability to laugh at ourselves. As we ridicule the po-faced puritans of the Left, we forget how ripe for ridicule are the sniffy certainties of our own creed. Alert to the pursed lips and whining intolerance of the politically correct, we have lost our ear for the bark of the patriotically correct.

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