Yeah, right, as they say in New York. No work of fiction was a worse guide to the future. No pretence that the elite were the new victims of injustice was as risible. From 1990 until the crash of 2008 the wealthy enjoyed a new gilded age so lucrative the obscure word “oligarch” — from the Greek oligarkhēs: oligoi “few” + arkhein “to rule” — passed from the lectures of classical historians into common usage. In London and New York, not one financier went to jail after the banking system they had looted so long and lustily collapsed. You do not find “masters of the universe” justly or unjustly detained in Anglo-American prisons. You find who you have always found: the poor, the black and the mad. A quarter of British prisoners were brought up in care, 29 per cent experienced child abuse, nearly half do not have a single educational qualification, and a good two thirds had been unemployed on the outside. I could go on, but I am sure you get the point: Old Etonians or Harvard alumni are not scratching their names on cell walls.

As for rape now, as always, the rapist is likely to be a man the victim knows, not a Muslim stranger or migrant who landed in Lesbos last month.

That said — and it is not said enough on the Right — suppose you were writing a novel about miscarriages of justice in 2016. What people and ideas would go up in flames in a modern bonfire of the vanities? Feminism would be the first to burn, because in our time of neurotic racial tension, certain crimes by certain men cannot be punished or even discussed. Their victims should lie back and think of multiculturalism. They should take one for the team.

In Britain it is hard to separate new prejudices from old. The women sexually abused in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, predominantly by gangs of British-Pakistani men, were white, working-class girls. Chavs, in other words, whose sufferings the authorities habitually ignore. But you have to be blind to ethnic politics to think that the race of their abusers did not help them get away with rape. Denis McShane, the Labour MP for Rotherham at the time, said:

I think there was a culture of not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat if I may put it like that . . . As a true Guardian reader, and liberal leftie, I suppose I didn’t want to raise that too hard.

Professor Alexis Jay’s report on the scandal said:

Several councillors interviewed believed that by opening up these issues they could be “giving oxygen” to racist perspectives that might in turn attract extremist political groups and threaten community cohesion.

The Victims’ Commissioner, Louise Casey, added a further fear: that truth-tellers would themselves be denounced as racists.