Don't point that St George and St Chad at me

There are times when the arrogance of those granted a modicum of power is just staggering.

Some must be so puffed up with their own self importance that is a wonder that they do not emulate Mr Creosote where one more tiny conceit rather than a wafer thin mint sees them exploding all over the council chamber.

Coun Tim Huxtable, cabinet member for regeneration, a grandiose title for a committee chairman, has taken it upon himself to rewrite history. He has expunged The Gun Quarter from the civic memory - from now on it is to be called St George and St Chad.

Presumably The Gunmakers Arms will become the St George and St Chad Arms, or maybe just the PC Pub.

Birmingham has made guns from more than 320 years and the area which straddles the A38 around what is now the Children's Hospital and St Chad's Cathedral, has been the Gun Quarter for 250 years.

I suspect in 250 years time long after Coun Huxtable has been reduced to a little noticed and hardly read footnote in the history he is trying so hard to re-write, it will still be The Gun Quarter.

He claims that he is merely responding to public opinion - hands up anyone who was asked - and tells the Birmingham Mail that there was "significant objection" from the local community to the use of the word 'gun'".

I suspect that you could probably fit all the people who actually live in The Gun Quarter in a taxi but that is hardly the point.

This is the social cancer of political correctness rearing its ugly head yet again with culture, tradition, heritage, history and anything that makes us who we are all thrown on the cathartic bonfire of PCdom.

Remember these are the wonderful folks who gave you Ba Ba Green Sheep, or even worse Ba Ba Rainbow Sheep, claiming, erroneously, that the traditional nursery rhyme was racist, something that had somehow been missed for 700 years until some PC zealot or other spotted the B word and put two and two together to make green.

Guns and The Gun Quarter are part of what makes Birmingham and Brummies. You might not like the arms trade, but it is a part of what forged the city. We also made the chains, shackles and manacles for the slave trade remember.

Neither should create a sense of either pride or shame - they just happened and as such are as much part of Birmingham's heritage as building Spitfires or being home to the Lunar Society and the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution thanks to Boulton and Watt.

In a forward looking city if there was a real 20-year plan then included in it would be The Gun Quarter and a decent museum to show its history - and what a history.

Birmingham-made guns were firing away in every war Britain was involved in since the 1690s fighting Napoleon, the Kaiser, Hitler . . . they were there in the American Civil War, the Russian Revolution, Crimea, Rourke's Drift . . . the list goes on.

There were sporting guns, competition guns, gold medal winning guns all made by thousands of craftsmen and tested at The Birmingham Proof House - where there is a museum.

But with that sort of opportunity for an educational tourist attraction, a facility for research and learning, we opt for St George and St Chads - and St George's, the parish church of Newtown, is not even in the Gun Quarter.

The Gun Quarter has seen a lot of wars and it is time for another battle methinks.