This is The View from 22 from The Spectator. Subscribe from just £1 a week at spectator.com.

Welcome to The Spectator podcast. I'm Isabel Hardman, the assistant editor of The Spectator. In this week's episode, we will be discussing whether political correctness has a valuable role in society.

We'll also be looking at whether today's budget shows how the EU referendum has changed

the government's approach to politics. And finally, we will be discussing whether young people

just don't know how to rave anymore. So in this week's issue of the magazine, Simon Barnes

says that he understands why political correctness is seen as being

so silly. But without it, life would be very difficult for his son, Eddie, who has Down syndrome.

50 years ago, people with Down syndrome were shunned by society. But thanks to political correctness,

Eddie is now treated with kindness, generosity and respect by most people. I'm now joined by Simon and Tom Slater from

Spiked to discuss whether political correctness is actually a good thing. So Simon, could you

describe how you changed your mind on political correctness? Not exactly changing my mind on

political correctness, but becoming directly involved in the whole question

came when going public with the fact that my youngest son, Eddie, who's now 14, has Down syndrome.

And so when you're walking out into the public ways and dealing with the general problems of bringing up any child,

you come across against the world.

And the world, as I find it today, is prepared to tolerate and do good things for and to accommodate Eddie as

best it possibly can. Back in my day when I was at school, we used to have terrible jokes about

such people as Eddie, and we called them names. They were not particularly nasty playground names,

the names everybody used for Down syndrome people,

which I think physically rather than psychologically unable to utter.

These were people despised.

They were kept mostly out of sight. And if you came across

...