I WANT YOU TO become a Jew. No, really, I insist. I also want you to become 42 years old, live in Pinner and have a wife and two children. I demand that you hold exactly the same opinions as me (this isn’t hard, I manage it without difficulty). I require you to become a journalist, support Chelsea, order saag ghost in Indian restaurants and buy an iPod that you can’t get to work. In other words, I want you to be me.

Unfortunately, there is a slight complication. Roy Hattersley is determined that I should become him.

Now, I think being Lord Hattersley must be quite fun. I’ve read his memoirs, How I’ve Been Wrong About Everything, and his life sounds like a riot. But I wouldn’t want to become him, any more than you want to become me. And for you to try to become him and me at the same time would simply be confusing. For one thing, he supports Sheffield Wednesday.

When, 20 years or so ago, Mr (as we then were) Hattersley was running for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party, he declared that he did not believe in equality of opportunity, he believed in equality of outcome. As one commentator pointed out at the time, Hattersley’s was not an argument that he should be Deputy Leader but rather that we all should.

If equality of outcome means anything at all, it means there is no wiggle room. It means that we all become the same. It means that we choose the same occupations, have the same skills, want the same things for our children, make the same choices about how much to spend and how much to save. If we don’t make the same choices on these things, how can we have the same income, live in the same houses, or enjoy the same pension? I wouldn’t be bringing this all up again after so many years if Roy Hattersley hadn’t done so first. He started it, right.

He has been pressing the Home Secretary to change the law to introduce so-called “positive” discrimination into police recruitment procedures. That is the only way, he argues, to get a representative number of black officers.

Here we see the practical effect of his old error. He is not concerned (as he should be, and I am) merely with ensuring a totally equal chance for all, regardless of ethnicity, to be police officers if they wish. He wants to set quotas so that exactly the right proportion of police officers come from given ethnic minorities. Presumably if there are not enough applicants, they will have to be dragged to recruitment stations screaming: “But I want to be Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. ”

One might overlook Lord Hattersley’s intervention if Hazel Blears, the Home Office minister, had not attended the conference of the National Black Police Association last week and told them that she thought the idea of racially discriminating between candidates for police jobs was interesting. She welcomes a debate, she informed them courageously.

Let me contribute.

In a recent book on Affirmative Action Around the World, the distinguished academic Thomas Sowell explains why positive discrimination doesn’t just sound like a terrible idea. It has proved to be just that in practice.

The biggest problem is that though the policy may start with one ethnic group in one limited circumstance for a short period of time, it quickly becomes more than that. Politicians find it hard to accept the idea that a preference given to one group of voters should be denied to another.

In India, positive discrimination devised in 1947 to benefit what was then called the “untouchables” has been expanded to all “backward classes” — 75 per cent of the population. Members of non-preferred groups either lobby to become preferred or recategorise themselves as members of preferred groups.

“Positive discrimination” has become, then, simple discrimination. And permanent discrimination, too. Though originally intended to be a temporary measure, lasting 20 years, the policy has been extended repeatedly.