I believe you! But I was referring to the prior incident that the Hate Mail picked up and spun into the (false) story that gave rise to the other peoples’ misapprehension. That part was reported by the BBC at the time.

Of course the idiot got it wrong, but why let the facts get in the way of a good old-fashioned PC-bashing story?

As regards the history of the term, Harry is about right (though in Australia we said “ideologically sound”). The Wikipedia article gives most of what can be found on this.

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/broadcasting/a77078/uk-stars-less-politically-correct.html

In fact, IIRC, the nursery workers had (on their own initiative) sung “Baa Baa Green Sheep”, and any other colour anybody could think of. The point being that this sort of thing is hilarious to nursery age children, as any fule kno except the editor of the Daily Mail, who was probably beaten if he laughed audibly as a child.

A column by Ralph Peters that attributes it to army counter-insurgency doctrine;

A review of a book on Civil War history, that attributes it to historians who don’t see enough union atrocities;

A book that attributes it to almost everything non-white-supremacist;

A “dictionary” attributes it to using the word “torture” to describe torture.

I could’ve sworn I saw it used sometime to describe revulsion at Iraq war atrocities, but I can’t find it.

Here’s what I wrote on Junius a few years ago:

“Back in 1987 I had a job as a member of a media research team at Goldsmiths’ College in London led by James Curran. In the run-up to the general election we were particularly interested in a Tory campaign to discredit Labour as being in the grip of the “loony left”. The epithet “loony left” was the term used, in Britain at least, for “politically correct” before that term was imported from the US.

The press, particularly the Daily Mail but also the Daily Express and the London Evening Standard ran a whole series of stories detailing the “loony left” actions and policies of London Labour-controlled councils. Sometimes the stories were true, but often they weren’t and, indeed, appeared to have been fabricated by journalists. In one case the Daily Mail ran a story claiming that one council had banned the singing of the nursery rhyme “Baa Baa Black Sheep” as racist and had instructed nursery workers to change the song to “Baa Baa Green Sheep” (there being no Martians resident in the borough). The interesting thing about that story is that it came true! Once nursery workers had read in their newspapers that “Baa Baa Black Sheep” was “racist”, many of them assumed that they must have missed the memo or something and started implementing the non-existent directive. (It will be interesting to see if this has happened in the hot cross bun case).

Another episode concerned an alleged ban by Hackney council on the use of the word “manhole”. “Drainage inspection cover” or something similar was the “correct” terms. In this instance there had, again, been no council decision or directive and when we published our report we made this clear. But here again, there were complications. Our report was picked up by agencies and reported in all kinds of trade magazines. A few weeks later I had a call from a reader of Drains and Sewers Monthly (or something like that!) who was adamant that an instruction had been issued to ban “manhole”. It turned out that a remark by a councillor at a committee had been taken by officers as indicating how they ought to conduct themselves and that they had thought they ought to stop “manholing” even without a directive.”