The rightwing American political philosopher Roger Kimball warned against the march of a "new, soft totalitarianism" under the guise of political correctness.

In a scathing lecture at the Guardian Hay Festival, he railed against the "campaign to legislate virtue" which was spreading like a bacteria on the "rotting flesh of anxious bureaucracies like the European Union, Oxbridge, the BBC and the United Nations".

Kimball told the Charles Douglas Home Lecture, set up in memory of a former editor of the Times, that "the lust for equality is the enemy of freedom", the Trojan horse for a "new, soft totalitarianism".

He argued: "Benevolence is an instinct that should be subject to the greatest scrutiny. People have become virtue intoxicated, with imposing what they see as good - and the freedom of western society and its very identity is under threat."

Kimball, the bow-tied managing editor of the New Criterion magazine and author of Experiments Against Reality and Tenured Radicals, How Politics are Corrupting our Higher Education, accused "politically correct" thinktanks like the Runymede Trust of trying to destroy the idea of Britain.

The trust commissioned a report three years ago which found that the term "British" had racial connotations and was no longer an accurate description of the wider, multicultural society unless it was qualified with appropriate rejoinder of "black British" or "Indian-British" etc.

Kimball accused the trust of wanting to rewrite history, revising or jettisoning whatever did not meet the demands of inclusivity. "I don't believe anyone here or in America is living in an oppressed state. This is the freest and the richest society there has ever been."

Because of two decades of PC thinking, the chances of getting into a top school in America are now actually significantly lower for a white male.

But his sharpest words were saved for the "ominous activities of the European Union, that bastion of political correctness" which he claimed was a part of a trend for "Olympian world government".

Kimball said: "Last year it decided that racism and xenophobia were crimes that could carry a prison sentence of two or more years. Racism they define as harbouring an aversion to people on the basis of 'race, colour, religion, belief, national or ethnic origin'."

Totalitarian societies cannot take a joke. "When telling an ethnic joke becomes not just impolite but criminal, that is a problem."