OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: The L-Word is triggering ever-so-sensitive British actors:

Calling actors ‘luvvies’ is as offensive as using racial slurs, Tom Conti said yesterday.

Shirley Valentine star Conti, who lives in a £17.5million mansion in Hampstead, told the Daily Mail that to use the word ‘luvvies’ was ‘as abusive as “Yid” or “n*****” and it’s a horrible expression.

‘It’s pejorative, denigrative and demeaning. I know a number of actors and certainly the actors with whom I have mixed over my entire life have been very bright people.’

Conti’s fellow luvvie, Downton Abbey star Peter Egan, agrees:

‘If actors are voicing an opinion, in many cases a true opinion, the way to dismiss that is to downgrade them with a diminishing term for a name.

‘It was exactly the same in Vietnam. The American troops used to call the Viet Cong “Charlie”. It’s how you degrade your enemy.’

Yes, it was exactly the same in Vietnam. And don’t get Egan started at British troops calling the Nazis “Jerries.” The L-word is the same as that. Exactly the same.

Thank God — or perhaps someone even more stentorian; Patrick Stewart or Ian McKellen perhaps! — we have the Luvvies to enlighten us and show us the evils of our wretched ways.

Related: A reminder from one of Tim Blair’s readers, who notes, “It never ceases to amaze me how some people simply make things up thinking no ones ever going to call them out. The Americans along with their allies, that being us,referred to the Viet Cong as Charlie not out of a form of degradation but because that was their call sign according to the phonetic alphabet. A-alpha b- bravo C-Charlie etc. V was Victor. So the radio call sign for the Viet Cong was Victor Charlie or simply Charlie for short. Amazing how some can twist somethings to suit their agenda.”

Everybody must be a victim in the 21st century — even luvvies and folkies, “We’ll always be victims of powerful people.”