Good afternoon. Let’s get one thing straight - I am not a numbers person! My business is words. I am a journalist and I am here today in my role as a "steward of freedom of expression", a phrase coined by an American, Ed Lambeth, to describe the role of the journalist. I am enlisting your support in protecting ourselves against the latest form of censorship that is threatening both our individual expression and the integrity of our media: political correctness.

I love the English language. It is a beautiful, rich and eloquent language that is rooted in classical and other languages giving us a pool of expression from which to draw a complexity of ideas and a subtlety of meaning. If you want numbers, there are over 500,000 words in the English language, more than in any other language in the world. The English language is now at risk. It is being undermined by the rubber-stamping of political correctness.

Political correctness has come about not only to protect those disadvantaged by race, gender or disability, but to protect ourselves against any uncomfortable emotion or concept such as death. "Death", "corpse" and "body" are now dirty words in the funeral industry since the takeover of our funeral businesses by American companies, and the corpse is now referred to as "the loved one"…..

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Carol Middleton