And what does Ekeroth predict for the future of Sweden and its politics? “The Sweden Democrats will continue to grow and strengthen. When it comes to Sweden, I think it is going to crumble  fast. This summer is going to be a civil war. You see it now. They are running wild. Rapes and murders and stabbings.” It was a fear of this sort of xenophobic politics that created the climate in which Sweden opened its arms to refugees — and shut down criticism of that policy. That a conspiracy of silence existed in Sweden was clear when, after the New Year’s Eve violence in Cologne, it emerged that the Swedish police had played down the problem of sexual harassment at a music festival in Stockholm last summer because the perpetrators had primarily been young Afghan men.

Tino Sanandaji, an economist who runs a blog on Sweden’s immigration debate, told me: “You do have a serious problem of a racist subculture in Scandinavian culture. Worse than in Britain.” The spectre of far-right terrorism in Scandinavia has loomed particularly large since Anders Breivik killed 77 young people at a summer camp in Norway in 2011. Last October, a Swede suspected to have far-right sympathies killed a student and a teacher with a sword on a high-school rampage in Trollhätten, near Gothenburg. But what began as admirable opposition to the ideological backdrop to attacks of this sort has mutated into an un-reflexive anti-racism in which any divergence from bien pensant opinion on immigration is labelled racist. This, of course, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Tell people it is not respectable to say certain things and the respectable will avoid saying them, leaving only the far-Right and creating the illusion of a justification for your censorious instincts.

For his blog, on which he complained about the “unscientific” way in which statistics about immigration were used by the government and the media, Sanandaji has received considerable negative press. “I was provoked because they were just lying,” he said. In one case, Sanandaji was stirred to action when Swedish television reported that 40 per cent of Syrian refugees were highly educated. He pointed out, as the broadcaster had failed to, that this 40 per cent included anyone with any education or vocational training after school, including six months in the Syrian army as a mechanic and other basic vocational qualifications. “Readership just exploded,” he said, “even though it is poorly written and not well edited or designed. A lot of smart people started saying, what is going on with our media, with our society? What is happening? It feels like a nightmare to them. Suddenly the Swedish media sounds like East Germany.”

Sanandaji was born in Iran. He arrived in Sweden with his parents when he was nine. “We came to Sweden as refugees but I would not call myself a real refugee because we did not have grounds for asylum,” he said with characteristic bluntness. His background has served as useful body armour in Sweden’s increasingly shrill immigration debate. “Because I have brown eyes and I’m an immigrant with a PhD from the University of Chicago, I could write about this and get away with it.” What works on blue-eyed Swedes doesn’t work on him, he says. “It shuts them up if they threaten to destroy your reputation and call you a Nazi in public. Because Swedes are so sensitive on this issue, it’s sort of like McCarthyism: just accuse them of being racist and a lot of them shut up.