THE most bizarre aspect of New Labour’s ghastly self-evisceration in Worcester is no better demonstrated than by the women-only parliamentary shortlist saga, an issue that shows no sign of abating.

The nub of this mad ideology is that men will be barred. So it’s discrimination, then? No. This is positive discrimination, comrades, suddenly made honest and upstanding by prefixing the incriminating evidence of discriminating with a handy adjective.

Anyone who can’t see through this mealy-mouthed tinkering with morality needs their head examining. After it’s been extracted from the sand, that is.

Can’t these supremely stupid people see that if discrimination is indeed wrong then the mere presence of a qualifying word makes not a jot of difference?

Never has the worryingly dysfunctional Blair logic of “I think it’s right therefore it must be right” been more to the forefront of a party that is allegedly desperate to change its tune after the May massacre.

Worcester Councillor Marc Bayliss can’t stick it anymore and says he’s standing down. In the Tuesday, November 2, edition of your Worcester News he said that he didn’t feel ‘hounded’ even though there had been claims that he was sexist for daring to disagree with ‘positive discrimination.’ Yes, you’re right Marc. It doesn’t look a bit like hounding… Meanwhile, foot soldiers of the Old Guard come staggering out of the woodwork. Former firebrand David Barlow put his beloved banjo to one side and had a letter published in this paper on Tuesday, January 4, prefaced with the startling admission that the opinion which followed could well get him booted out of the Labour Party.

That’s interesting, David. So you belong to a democratic organisation that may punish you for expressing an honestly-held view?

The letter wound up with a typical Barlow-esque blast on his old verbal shotgun, ensuring that anyone who exploited “this single issue” would of course be exploitative, shallow, unprincipled, self-serving bla-bla-bla.

No one with half a brain could take any of this huff-and-puff seriously.

The facts of the matter are that Worcester people were abysmally represented during the New Labour years. The remaining rump is merely ensuring that the party stays out office for the foreseeable future, helped on its way by notions of ‘positive discrimination’ that serve no one but ideologues and their fellow travellers on the armchair Left.

And Marc Bayliss? I’m so glad he’s going to take his considerable talents elsewhere.