The same happened in Germany, where the authorities covered up rapes by migrants for days, and then blamed the victims by telling women to be more careful in future. In Sweden, where liberal ideals have turned rancid to a degree few foreigners comprehend, Peter Ågren, police chief in central Stockholm, said his officers dared not tell the truth about sex attacks on Swedish women at festivals because they did not want to play into the hands of populist politicians. Police officers in Stockholm, it transpired, are instructed not to reveal the ethnicity or nationality of any suspects lest they be accused of racism.

My colleague David Paxton looked at these and other examples of fear of the far-Right and aptly described them as a “noble lies, told to prevent us idiot yokels from becoming a mob. People are stepping out from their job descriptions and moonlighting as censors.” He might have gone further. The refusal of the police and public authorities to follow the law they are meant to uphold demeans the societies they are meant to serve.

They see Britain as a 21st-century Weimar Republic where the smallest incitement could lead to pogroms and tyranny. The white men and women around them are not fellow citizens but closet fascists, who must be kept in ignorance for fear that they will dress up in black leather and attend torchlight parades. In these circumstances, abused girls aren’t victims, but inconveniences who must be suppressed for the greater good.

They do not notice that only a tiny minority engage in violent far-Right politics in Britain and the rest of Europe. More culpably, they do not understand that the best way to encourage racist politics is to practise them yourself: to discriminate against victims if they are white; and in favour of perpetrators if they are not.

I do not need to be told that there are sexist rabble-rousers, who will turn into feminists when Muslim men or migrants rape and abuse. I am not shocked to learn that their protests are insincere and they no more care about the rights of women than any other right. The point is to fight them, not to become like them. 

Whether in Britain, Germany or Sweden demagogic hucksters can now say that whites are the victims of new injustices, and, unlike Tom Wolfe, they have truth on their side. “Liberal” society has provided them with everything they need to power a backlash: victimhood, a corrupted establishment abandoning its duties for the sake of “political correctness”, official mendacity, and a hypocrisy that at one moment announces that modern Europe is all for equal pay and the emancipation of women, and at the next is unwilling to even acknowledge the facts of a rape.

Our demagogues would have another reason to be grateful. Crime is individual; the responsibility lies with the perpetrator. But identity politics deny individuality and bring collective calumny. Sometimes because of benign motives, sometimes because of the fear of allegations of prejudice, its devotees mirror racists. They do not understand that by ignoring individual crimes to protect a wider group, they are implicating the innocent.

What is a refugee from Assad meant to think of alleged liberals who believe they are protecting him by acting as if all migrants are potential rapists? Why should a British Pakistani  be grateful for policies that tar him by association with abusers?