My pet hate and seems to have become my favouite topic of conversation these days.
Anyway, as far back as I can recall .... common sense started a slow lingering death when the "Looney London Boroughs" started to get politically correct and banned "black boards" and rewrote nursery rymes (Farmer Has A Friend, Ba Ba White Sheep, etc). Didn't a certain "Red Ken" have something to do with that? I think that would have been in the late 1970s.
Was the the birth of the Nanny State?
[Edited on 22-10-2005 by HW]