They’ve ruined the country. At least a dictatorship can get things done.

These words were spoken not in the USA, nor by a QAnon Shaman wearing animal horns. Such words are increasingly heard in England. Spoken not by under educated red necks, but by otherwise respectable members of the middle classes.

Immigrants are the new Jews. How short are our memories, how tragic that we never learn the lessons of history. How deeply disappointing that otherwise normal people are beginning to state that dictatorship has its merits.

Dictators have so often risen to power by demonising a minority. Just under 100 years ago, it was the Jews who were the source of all our problems. They were greedy, sly vermin. And eventually efforts were made to exterminate them.

Today, the far right are fuelling the flames with a hatred of immigrants. All our problems would be solved by shutting our borders and deporting those who are already here.

At my club in London, set in 40 beautiful acres by the river Thames, an American member was extolling Trump. It was time to respect the country’s “original borders” he said. I told him that there were no original borders and that in any event the white protestant immigrants of the 17th Century didn’t seem to care about borders, did they?

Another chap who I have known for many years pronounced recently on much the same matters in a similar vein.

People even closer to me have voiced similar shameful opinions and seem closed to arguments to the contrary.

I’m not going to continue at length and I will not deny that the country and much of the world is a mess. But the world has always been a mess thanks to the venal nature of our species and we are all responsible for that mess.

Not just the Jews. Not just the immigrants.

When people you have known your whole life talk of the advantages of dictatorship, when they start blaming a minority class for the country’s ills, you know the world has reached yet another disastrous tipping point.

Let us hope it is not too late to step back from the brink.