Titter ye not, missus. Rolling your eyes is racist

NO, MISSUS. Titter ye not. How long before every rerun of a Frankie Howerd show has to come with a trigger warning? I’m not joking, missus. Rolling your eyes is now officially considered to be racist. Yes, no, really. I said, Francis. Fran-cis, I said. There goes the act.

You don’t believe me? Please yourselves. look, it’s wicked to mock the afflicted. But racist?

Where does that leave nookie Bear, come to that? Another eye roller extraordinaire. What about the great louis Armstrong? Are you telling me Satchmo was a racist?

What a wonderful world we live in today.

I kid ye not. Where would Frankie Howerd have been without his trademark, bugeyed expression of exasperated disbelief?

Yet if he tried it on at the Department for Transport he would have been drummed out of the Brownies.

The DfT is just one of a number of government ministries and agencies frittering away a small fortune on stamping out socalled microaggressions against women and minorities.

Civil servants sent on ‘diversity’ trainUBER ing courses have been told that rolling their eyes or looking at a mobile phone while someone else is speaking could be signs of sexual or racial discrimination.

What? If everyone who spent all day gawping at their iPhone was guilty of misconduct, there’d be no one left working in the civil service. Or anywhere else, for that matter.

Despite being told by ministers not to waste money on fatuous diversity, equality and inclusion brainwashing, the Sir Humphreys have continued to send staff on training courses.

More than £160,000 has been spent in recent years on consultancies peddling this divisive, woke drivel.

The Education and Skills Funding Agency, responsible for ensuring that money is well spent in schools, splashed out £1,000 a head on microaggression training. This is the latest scam, imported from the U.S., which is designed to detect racism, sexism and every other kind of ‘ism’ where none is intended, or even exists.

The charlatans who run these ludicrous courses even admit as much. One concedes: ‘ Microaggressions are usually delivered by wellintentioned individuals unaware that they have engaged in harmful conduct toward a socially devalued group.’

It only serves to feed the victim culture and create still more grounds for malcontents to file compensation claims for ‘discrimination’.

For instance, a British woman of Indian descent recently told a tribunal that she had been subject to racial discrimination because her bosses raised their eyebrows when she was talking. Fortunately, the case was thrown out.

ROLLING your eyes, or raising your eyebrows, when someone is talking gibberish or making a Horlicks of something is human nature. It’s not racist, it’s inherent in every race on earth.

But the search for new microaggressions to be punished continues apace, predominantly in the public sector, where taxpayers’ money is no object.

last year, the head of Manchester Fire Brigade wrote to staff banning the use of the word ‘firemen’.

Dave Russell, who is paid £172,000 a year to put out fires, deal with motorway pileups and rescue cats from trees, insisted ‘firemen’ had ‘no place in our vocabulary. Its connotation is sexist, exclusionary and represents a form of microaggression that is damaging to our culture.’

Anyone using this heinous, sexist expression could presumably face disciplinary action, up to and including dismissal. never mind Call The Fire Brigade. nurse! not even the royal household is immune from this madness. Staff who look after properties including Hampton Court Palace have been warned that telling a female colleague ‘you look so young’ is a microaggression.

You couldn’t make it up.

Try telling her how old she looks and see how far that gets you. You might just as well tell her how big her bum looks in this. Come to think of it, you shouldn’t even assume she’s female any more.

The way things are going, it’s only a matter of time before that famous old Carry On ditty about Henry VIII has to be rewritten to include the line:

On the day that good King Harry got her Hampton Court . . .

Titter ye not, missus. Frankie Howerd would have had a field day with that.

Oh, please yourselves.