RECENTLY there have been claims that events in and around Stroud “show yet again why the town is at the leading edge of enlightened innovative thinking and why increasing numbers of the country’s most eminent progressive activists are moving to the area” (Dr Richard House, Stroud, various publications).

One tranche of this enlightenment is political correctness – as pernicious a philosophy as one could imagine, a bleating of self-righteous indignation designed to draw attention to its practitioner’s disruptive, “progressive” thinking.

My “progressive” thinking regards it as a narcissistic endeavour beyond the pale, designed to foment divisiveness wherever it’s practised and should be banned immediately.

Its origins can be found in the elitist encampment which also provided the country with the “shocked and offended” members of the Remain wing in the recent referendum.

The ones who railed against ‘the “ignorant and great unwashed”’ who had the temerity to vote Leave in June and dared to challenge, by way of democracy, the superior attitudes of “our betters”.

Great examples of PC (pernicious claptrap) can be found all over the West Country – a veritable breeding ground for the stuff.

One of the more laughable examples was that of a member of the Wiltshire Racial Equality Council who objected to the phrase “jungle drums” being used at a council meeting.

Thankfully, this pathetic cri de coeur was voted down in no uncertain terms.

Jungle drums was a method of advanced communication, invented and learnt by jungle dwellers, which was far in advance in efficiency of anything practised by Western societies at the time.

It was highly innovative and showed the remarkable intelligence of its originators.

In short, something to be celebrated –, not derided.

In 2014 our local MEP, Molly Scott-Cato complained publicly of the, then-, new £2 coin featuring Lord Kitchener.

“2014,” (she suggested,) “should be about remembering the monumental folly of war”.

Does a depiction of one of the main First World War I protagonists not encourage us to do that?

We are all surely aware of such folly – thank you Ms Scott-Cato –- even though PC practitioners would have us forget the “nastiness” of those events and would see the subject removed from school curricula.

Dreadful stuff.

Updating, we find that the “Beach Body Ready” advert on London’s Tube system, featuring a happy, attractive, bikini-clad white woman, is offensive to the capital’s Muslim mayor. So offended is he that he’s banned it.

As I write I’m looking at the image, culled from the pages of The Guardian newspaper – the very cradle of PC and probably the Mayor’s organ of choice –- of the upper torso of a very happy, attractive, young black woman wearing nothing but a lacy bra.

Both images are designed to sell products so can anyone explain why one is PC and the other not?

I would suggest that any explanation would have to rely, in part, on Mr Khan’s racism.

In the same paper (September 922.09.16), the writer Suzanne Moore berates the sale in the UK of toy gollywogs as being “racist” yet conveniently forgets to vent her spleen at the new ITV show “Newzoids” which regularly features toy representations of Asian shopkeepers.

(It’s funny – do watch it. Oops, no, sorry, it’s not funny. Forgot myself there for a moment).) And then we come to Stroud (where I have seen within the past two years the blacked-up faces of local white children on the steps of The Subscription Rooms).

In the near future the same venue is hosting a comedic enterprise unashamedly advertised as “The Hate Speech Tour” by a groovy young funster jumping on the PC bandwagon, presumably to elicit laughs from a fraught situation involving racism that is allegedly sweeping our nation.

It’s no laughing matter, as Stroud’s intelligentsia will undoubtedly confirm, and so I say, here and now, ban it – it’s very advertising is provocative – and someone at the Sub Rooms probably knows it because one of its larger posters has been adjusted to re-brand the production as “uncensored” -– presumably to make it more palatable to PC practitioners and not frighten the horses. He’ll be pushing the envelope that’s for sure – let’s hope it’s not a brown one.

Roger Gough

UKIP Gloucester and Stroud

Minchinhampton