POLITICAL correctness is bad for your health.

Discuss… Back in the days of the Cold War, the Russians had a high regard for dissenters in the Western democracies. Hippies, Trots, Marxist-Leninists and in fact anyone who kicked at the system was one of theirs.

Personally, I’ve never believed the former Soviet Union ever had any intention of doing us any harm.

After all, why invade a minute country with exhausted national resources and a chronic population/available space problem?

All the same, if there were those who made a habit of bashing capitalism, then so much the better.

These people were known by the Ruskies as ‘useful idiots.’ The Cold War ended, to be replaced by al Qaida terrorism and a conversation with an old colleague still rings in my ears as an example of how the new ‘useful idiot’ serves the forces of evil, thanks to reason being placed in a strait-jacket.

It was one summer some years ago and I was talking to this old pal who happens to be half-Jewish. Abu Hamza was making one of his speeches outside the Finsbury Park mosque that day. My logic was this – free speech was one thing, but potentially putting people’s lives at risk was quite another.

My friend began to get increasingly uncomfortable, so I asked him whether his reluctance to condemn such extremism would have applied if it had been a National Front meeting. He just wouldn’t take the bait and I then suggested that political correctness was guiding his thought processes. The conversation came to an abrupt end.

A year later, terrorists killed and maimed in the 7/7 tube and bus bombings. Some of the perpetrators of this act had been at the meeting to which we had referred in our conversation 12 months earlier.

Yes. Political correctness can be bad for your health.

● A READER recently took a pop at us over a story we’d published about a charity. Apparently, this organisation was allegedly guilty of something or other and the person thought the journalist should have done more research. Our critic is in urgent need of some education. The red tops are solely devoted to celebrity. The so-called ‘qualities’ are mainly driven by agendas, most of this tosh being written by graduates who regard the world through the prism of a Londoncentric bubble. None of these papers are concerned with news any more. Meanwhile, out here in the sticks, papers like this one carries pages of the real stuff. I hope that answers our excitable critic’s concerns.