Does political correctness make for bland villains?

In an op-ed column for The Daily Mail, writer Anthony Horowitz claims that political correctness makes it hard for writers to create compelling villains. Horowitz claims that fears of coming off as bigoted forces writers to create bland, indistinct villains. He writes:

I have a hero in my books. His name is Alex Rider and I'm about to launch him on his seventh adventure, Snakehead.

But I've found it increasingly difficult to create someone for him to fight: a bad guy who won't give offence, who won't break some new piece of politically correct legislation, who won't, in short, damage my career.

It seems that what began as the rather boring joke of political correctness has evolved into something much more sinister, with an ever more intrusive government using issues - particularly those that end with 'ism' - to undermine our national character and steer us towards a new flag of what it believes to be right.

Terrorism, racism, sexism, homophobia and, most recently, environmentalism, are the sticks with which it beats us...

How depressing it is that Herod Sayle, the Lebanese businessman that Alex Rider fought in his first adventure, Stormbreaker, quietly morphed into Darrius Sayle, Californian trailer trash, by the time the film came out last summer.

In the UK edition, he's the son of a failed hairdresser, but in the American edition that had to be changed when I was accused of homophobia - because to some people hairdressing would seem a gay profession.

Over there, he's the son of a failed oral hygienist.

Reading Horowitz' column, I find myself wondering if he understands that it's not the individual characters that matter as much as the big picture of how a group is represented. Villains can belong to many different minority groups without causing offense, providing that there are also positive representatives. On Desperate Housewives, Andrew Van De Kamp gets to be a vindictive schemer because he's not the first gay character to appear in a prime time soap.

Thanks to positive characters like Dynasty's Steven Carrington and Melrose Place's Matt Fielding, a gay villain like Andrew doesn't represent all gay men on television but is a part of a range of portrayals. If gay characters don't exist in a writer's fictional universe until he makes a failed hairdresser into a villain, people are going to wonder if that represents his whole view of gays because there aren't any other counterexamples to turn to.

I'm not familiar with Horowitz' writing, so I can't speak to the larger picture of his work. Does he include a variety of people among the good guys, or does he only look to minorities as a way to make a villain distinctive?

Then again, some of Horowitz' examples seem to work against his point. He mentions Harry Potter villain, Voldemort, as a memorable villain, but writer JK Rowling doesn't need him to be a minority to be an effective menace. Additionally, he speaks out against a British law, The Racial and Religious Hatred Act of 2006, but supports his opposition with an instance where Americans changed a character that was accepted by Horowitz' British editors.

What do you think? Do British writers have reason to fear portraying minority groups or is Horowitz missing the big picture?