We’re all prisoners of political correctness now

What connects a loopy geologist, the Welsh Government and the hounding of Allison Pearson ? Well, the lines between these dots illustrate how an ideology evolves from conception, to structure, to enforcement – and how free speech dies in the process.

Last week The Telegraph quoted Kathryn Yusoff, a professor at Queen Mary, University of London, describing geology as "riven by systemic racism". It began as a "colonial practice", created a "geo trauma", and operates within a "white supremacist praxis."

Very funny: another misguided academic in a world of their own. But we concurrently reported that the Welsh Government hopes to change the "beliefs and behaviour of the white majority" as part of an official "anti-racist" strategy. This strategy – which utilises public bodies, mandatory training etc – strikes a similar vibe to our angry geologist, all the way down to "delivering a balanced, authentic and decolonised account of the past".

What's often dismissed as the isolated rantings of the university elite in fact shapes policy – either because academics are educating the politicians of tomorrow or they're directly contributing to said policy. The co-chairman of Wales's strategic plan is one Prof Emmanuel Ogbonna CBE who, in a recent paper, identified "two competing approaches" to reducing racial disparity: "volunteerism" or "compulsion". Both, he said, were necessary: after all, "slavery would have taken a lot longer to abolish had we waited for slave owners to change their hearts and minds."

This is both fair comment and an insight into the moral imagination of the Left. If you assume that the West is racist, you've got to fix it. If you believe racism is morally corrosive, you can't leave a racist population to do it for itself: you've got to reprogram society from the top down.

Raising objections to such therapeutic brainwashing is hard because its motivations sound so good. The recording of non-crime hate incidents, as happened to my friend Allison, is a legacy of the botched investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993. The police had failed to see that this vile crime was racially motivated. Henceforth, they would acknowledge anti-social thought, log and monitor it, to prevent it escalating into violence.

The Soviet Union had a word for this: "profilaktika". After Stalin, the security forces moved away from arbitrary arrest, finding it crude and likely to provoke resistance, embracing preventative measures instead, such as correcting poor-taste jokes told in the workplace. Go too far and you'd be subject to "besada", or chat, with a couple of coppers who, oozing paternalism and menace, would put you back on the "righteous path".

Profilaktika used religious terminology, much as wokery deploys narratives of sin and confession, and was psychologically perceptive. Who doesn't want to fit in? To spot where others are going wrong and be the first to correct them? This is why the oft-stated claim that police officers who visit Telegraph columnists are unhappily following orders is probably false. Most of these officers have been raised and trained in PC culture. I'd wager that they believe in it and enjoy enforcing it. If we've learnt anything from lockdown, when neighbours ratted on each other and people felt compelled to applaud a health service they would normally curse, it's that the British are inveterate conformists and the national myth of libertarian eccentricity is the exception, not the rule. There are 65 non-crime hate incidents reported each day. It's not the Germans or the Chinese doing this. It's us.

Allison's visit is the end result of an ideological revolution begun on campus, codified by Labour governments, and upheld by Tories – often by the same Tories who now express shock that anything like this could happen in the land of the free. Why didn't they change the rules when they were in office? Because many of them share the first principles articulated by anti-racist academics, namely that the state has a duty to inform how citizens think. Faced with a choice between protecting the old right of freedom of speech vs the new right to freedom from offence, they've come down on the side of the latter – part of a suite of elite preferences that also puts immigration over social cohesion, social justice over the real thing.

Allison joked that had she stolen £199 in groceries, the police wouldn't have spoken to her. That's nothing. At the same time as the authorities are letting drug dealers out of jail to free up space – and a trainee teacher who shared videos of babies being raped dodged a custodial sentence altogether – a 23-year-old care worker has been given nine months for live-streaming the aftermath of a riot (note: not the riot itself).

This is objectively mad. But one of the great cruelties of any totalitarian thought system is that it generates madness and then, when you refuse to believe in it, calls you insane – just as the final destination for many Soviet dissidents wasn't the jail cell but the psych ward.

We've all become prisoners of PC logic, whose contradictions are grimly inescapable. To paraphrase Joe Orton's satirical copper, Truscott of the Yard: "If you accuse the police of brutality one more time, I'll take you down to the station and give you a thrashing."