Iain Dale carries a well-turned interview with David Cameron. Both interviewer and subject emerge well from a civilised and intelligent exchange.

This caught my eye:

How will you defend the right to offend?

This goes back to the ‘do you listen’ question, because on the one hand you don’t want someone inciting hatred of gays but on the other hand you want to live in a society where people don’t feel their free speech is restricted if it is about humour.

So there is a balance. We all rage against political correctness and there’s lots of political correctness which is ridiculous – silly health and safety worries that stop children grazing a knee on an outward bounds adventure. We have got to get rid of that.

But there’s one bit of political correctness which is terribly important and that’s about politeness. I have a disabled son and I don’t want people to call him a spastic. You are a gay man, you don’t want someone to call you a poof. If you have a black friend, you don’t want someone to call them something offensive. It’s about manners and I think what we’ve got to do is frame this debate in a sense of what is good manners and politeness and what is common sense.

Any normal person must agree with the broad sense of this. And hurrah for a politician talking about good manners.

Yet is the line of thought firm enough? Albeit in the heat of the moment (but maybe all the more revealing for that reason?) David Cameron seems to define manners as being ”one part of political correctness", whereas in fact they are something utterly different.

Political Correctness has two core goals:

(a) to stake out explicitly Leftist/collectivist ideological and positions on a huge range of subjects, as a sort of psychological artillery barrage to prepare the way for vastly increased bureaucratic-legal control over people’s lives;

and (b), to stake out a Leftist/collectivist monopoly on doing the staking.

This has nothing to do with manners, which are a subtle way of laying down informal but principled codes of behaviour based on freedom, privacy and tolerance (no doubt descending from all sorts of courtly ways of the privileged down the ages, but none the worse today for that).

So the last thing we want is to let the PC industry seize control of manners too, as something they and they alone define. That is the far enemy of good manners and politeness and common sense.

On the contrary, we look to a Conservative government to roll back the PC industry by simply abolishing large parts of its bureaucratic infrastructure and the accompanying legal framework.

Just think how many supremely undeserving parasitic people in all those Diversity/Bullying/Gender and other Units would have to find an honest job in the private sector if that happened.

Think about the exquisite loss of revenue to the Guardian et al when those public sector jobs can no longer be advertised at significant cost to the taxpayer, as they no longer exist.

The squeals of protest!

So let’s see if David Cameron can summon the strength to take this excellent if not quite tightly enough defined thought, and turn it into some really ruthless policy action.

As a former senior civil servant I hereby offer to advise a future government on how most deeply and most cruelly to wield the anti-PC axe,