After DEFRA staff were told to educate themselves on concepts such as “white privilege”, “intersectionality” and “microaggressions”, the Cabinet Office has now taken the politically correct crown. Yesterday employees received an email titled “An Apology for Inappropriate Use of Language in Our Email”; contrary to the accidental swearing civil servants presumed, the email apologised for using the phrase “whitelisting” in a previous email. The world of equality Martin Luther King dreamt of…

The email promises to take cues from a blog on the official National Cyber Security Centre, which explains while the terms whitelisting/blacklisting have been used in programming for decades, “It only makes sense if you equate white with ‘good, permitted, safe’ and black with ‘bad, dangerous, forbidden'”. Guido presumes a renaming of “Whitehall” can only be few weeks away – suggestions for less racially insensitive street names in the comments…