Comment: Mind your language…

Oh dear, Network Rail has fallen foul of the anti-woke police.

The company has produced a booklet, oddly titled Speak Passenger, about the language and tone staff should use when talking to… passengers.

But NR advocates not using the word passenger wherever possible, and suggests using ‘you’ instead - presumably not as in “you there, what the hell are you up to?”

This issue has only recently been covered in the national media, following a Freedom of Information request by the Daily Telegraph. But the booklet was issued in 2020 and there is actually a 60-minute video to go with it.

As someone who has numerous woke opinions (woke means awake to various prejudicial views, and used to be called PC - politically correct), I would instinctively want to side with Network Rail over this.

However, the authors of the booklet have fallen into all the traps that anger people who think that supposedly liberal values have gone too far.

It suggests that pregnant women should be called pregnant people, presumably on the basis that just perhaps there may be a pregnant man somewhere.

It counsels against using mother and father, and suggests parent.

It says partner should be used instead of husband and wife.

This is all nonsense, predicated on the notion that ordinary people might get upset if the wrong term is used, or that they may be of a different gender than the railway person talking to them has assumed.

Much of this supposed oversensitivity is the result of an aggressive campaign by a few transgender activists to push for ‘trans rights’. This swept through many organisations in the past few years, but there has now been a lot of pushback and the requirement (for example) to cite how one wants to be addressed is now thankfully being ignored even among left and liberal circles.

Network Rail should therefore scrap this ridiculous document, simplify it (why is it 124 pages long?), and move away from woke excesses to rational thinking - liberal values and common sense are not incompatible. And cut out all this stuff about offending people. Most people are tolerant.