I’ve only recently become aware of Sean Thomas’ writings on the website of the Telegraph, and I’ve been impressed by his pugnacious, anti-PC takes on various matters. This recent piece is particularly notable in that regard:

The self-loathing of the British Left is now a problem for us all

I think Thomas is on to something here, and its application is not just limited to British cultural and political life. In fact, you could delete the word British from the piece’s title, and you’d be approaching, as others have already, a dead-on observation of situations greater than Scottish devolution and the Rotherham scandal — and certainly applicable to things happening on the US side of the Anglosphere’s Atlantic divide.

Compare Thomas’ thoughts with those expressed by Will Self on the BBC News website:

A Point of View: Why Orwell was a literary mediocrity

Could there be a better illustration of Thomas’ point, than Self whining that Orwell’s defense of writing and speaking standard English, in as clear a manner as possible, simply isn’t diverse enough? As Self slags off the admirers of Orwell’s writing: “… the clarity they so admire in his writings is simply another kind of opacity, since in the act of revealing one truth it necessarily obscures many others.” Hmm — apparently, per Self, what gets “obscured” by writing clear, standard English is the sort of “truth” that can be revealed by masquerading in one’s ethnic pretender garb: You feel me?  Yeah, that’s hip, all right. And of course, as Sean Thomas no doubt would be able to predict, any old-fogeyish dissent is to be reviled in the language of the modern, self-loathing Left: “Expose the Orwellian language police for the old-fashioned authoritarian elitists they really are”! Yah, mon.

So the question becomes, in regard to matters such as the Rotherham atrocities, which language is better suited for describing and revealing them for what they are? Orwell’s clear, standard English, with its ruthless stripping away of bureaucratic waffling and fog, or Will Self’s clunky “white boy shamed of hisself” stylings?