"Political Correctness" is a disarmingly anodyne epithet hiding behind one of those ill-defined portmanteau terms that is actually quite vague but intuitively disagreeable. We cannot always quite put our finger on what it is, but nevertheless know it when we encounter it.

In fact, its very latitude is part of its danger. PC is truly insidious.

Masquerading as a clone of common decency, common sense, common courtesy and consideration, it is anything but.

Common decency, common sense, common courtesy and consideration respects others and turns its back on language that demeans, hurts or insults. PC makes it a hate crime' to hold a valid moral opinion or take a moral stance and threatens perpetrators with imprisonment.

I was particularly disgusted some months ago when two British murderers were "severely" sentenced for the aggravated "hate crime" of murdering a homosexual man.

What disgusted me, of course, was not that they were punished severely (personally I believe they should have hanged), but the tacit admission that, had their victim not been a homosexual, their heinous act would have been considered less wicked by the law.

Had they raped and murdered some 89-year-old dementia patient in a care home, or fatally shot a policeman in the face, they could have expected a lesser sentence on the ludicrous grounds that what they had done was somehow not a hate crime.

What would it have been "a Love Crime?"

Yes, that is the extreme end of the PC spectrum, but the whole thing is an exercise in "frog-in-the-bucket" psychological desensitization. You know the idea: If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will immediately react and leap out, whereas, if you place it carefully in a pot of cool water and then gently apply heat, it will be lulled off to sleep and eventually die.

That is the very much the politics of modern Britain and increasingly, elsewhere else. Those of us who have lived long enough to have witnessed it at first hand know that if one percent of what passes for entertainment, public behaviour, or morality today, had raised its ugly head forty or fifty years ago, the nation would have risen up and nipped it in the bud instantly. Now, however, taking a moral position is being "judgemental".

But PC has its weak spots.

I recall watching a fascinating television documentary a few months ago about the Seventies extreme Feminist movement in Britain, where old feminists admitted that PC tore them apart as factions

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