While I think the original intent from Merlin John and Shoo-fly was to use a headline-grabbing PC gone mad story, I don't think they were actively bigoted, merely cynical and opportunistic and seemingly couldn't care less about the consequences. Our charming press supplied the bigotry, as usual, from their ample stocks.
Merlin John's site changed the headline on the story yesterday, by the way, it's a lot less inflammatory now.
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have simply handed more ammunition to those who despise the very people they set out to protect.
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Hmm. Not sure I buy this, as we've seen they fire it off whether or not they have any ammunition at all. If you'd said 'if you wanted to promote racial harmony and community relations the first thing you should do is actively combat the veiled racism and unveiled bigotry in the tabloid press' then I'd wholeheartedly agree with you. The fact that the only people doing this are Private Eye, me and some other bloggers (Obsolete and Five Chinese Crackers in particular) is the true scandal, since obviously we have a lot less power and money. This is probably behind the shocking rise in people willing to admit they're racially biased in this week's British social attitudes survey - if homosexuality rather than immigrants and Muslims were the current target this would presumably be reversed.
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It is genuinely unfair that the book was banned from being entered in the competition on that basis
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Except it wasn't solely on that basis, what's unclear is what weight was attached to it. The comments picked out by Merlin John, presumably supplied by Shoo-fly from the feedback sent to them, were presumably part of comments from some 70 judges, we have no way of knowing without access to the feedback what proportion of them are idiots or what weight the panel applied to each criticism or even what praise they offered. The basis of this story is cherry picked by one of the protagonists, which is hardly a recipe for a balanced view.
[It also wasn't banned from the competition but excluded from the final shortlist, which is a lot less inflammatory. Other books were excluded from the list on technicalities - nothing's been 'banned']
One other point that's germane to this is where the idea that pigs offend Asians or anything offends anyone comes from, which is of course the tabloid press puffing fictitious 'PC gone mad' rubbish*. Hence the story that the only people who actually do try and change 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' or whatever (which the Telegraph pulled out again, despite being long debunked) were some nursery teachers who'd read it in the Mail.
* Think about it - where else would they get it from, since there's we've established that there's no PC brigade? Even the Muslim Council of Britain, who are only really representative of themselves and are fairly extreme don't think this is an issue.