MICHAEL Howard thinks political correctness is the root cause of all that is wrong with modern life. He said so in a speech last week.

At least I think the Tory leader was making a speech. It is possible he was ranting and raving from a tall and very wobbly barstool at his local. It was that sort of speech, all slurred logic.

Howard's slogan was "political correctness has gone mad and is driving people crazy". Well, it certainly seems to be sending poor Michael Howard a bit bonkers.

As he trundled out his tired rant, he started to sound like his own version of Victor Meldrew; Michael Mildew, perhaps. Musical chairs banned for being dangerous... I don't believe it.

Frankly, I don't believe it either, Michael. What dog-eared examples these were, no doubt gleaned from the pages of the more cantankerous national newspapers. There were no statistics, few hard facts - just the latest urban myths, exaggerations or deliberate misunderstandings.

If this was intended as a defining speech, then the Tories still don't seem to have defined exactly what they are for.

At least we now know what they are against, which is this thing called political correctness.

But what is political correctness; who owns it; who started it; and who's to blame?

At heart, political correctness is merely a worthy desire to be even handed, fair and to avoid causing offence; so how is that bad? It belongs to no particular party, so is not even useful to an opposition leader on the make. Besides, is it really wrong, for example, to call someone disabled rather than a cripple; isn't there a touch more compassion in the modern usage?

Howard was here playing the old trick of pretending that modern life is rubbish. The daft thing is, every age thinks that; there always was a golden past, a generation or two ago, when life was better and untainted.

Such an age is usually just beyond recall, except by those flicking through the Bumper Book Of Rosy Old Clichs.

The way life rolls out, we are probably in a golden age right now, if only we knew it. Perhaps our grandchildren or great-grandchildren will wax loquacious about the way we live today.

Conservatives generally look back for inspiration, fingering over the crinkled past in an attempt to locate that lost golden age. Progressives prefer to look to the future. Perhaps both are wrong; maybe there never was a golden age, and there never will be one either.

Anyway, blaming political correctness is the puniest excuse around.

Surely we have reached the stage when anyone who even calls on the words "political correctness" has just lost the argument.

There ought to be a new rule introduced that sees the first person to use the words escorted from the room; or at the very least required to buy the next round.

So how odd that Howard should invest so much time and political capital in building a whole speech round this non-existent demon.

What he was doing, of course, was tapping into England's stubborn layer of conservatism.

This is still in many ways a conser-vative country, if not a Conservative one at present. Howard was dipping into that deep well and hoping to bring back to the surface a full bucket. Sadly, his bucket had too many holes in it; much like his argument.

All of this is not, by the way, to let off Tony Blair.

The Prime Minister tried a similar trick a few weeks back with his shoddy attempt to discredit the 1960s. When politicians start to look for easy scapegoats - political correctness, the lost hippie years - it is time to read the small print.

Howard may be wrong-headed to invest so much effort in attacking permissiveness, but anyone expecting to hear a progressive riposte from Blair could be waiting for a long time.

He is too busy darting in and out of the Conservative hinterland to do anything so daring.

Updated: 10:02 Thursday, September 02, 2004