So why should Lee Rigby be any different? Wasn't his death — carried out by barbaric extremists who singled him out purely for what he objectively was, a soldier — the very definition of a hate crime? The case is unanswerable, but somehow the local Labour council has managed to wriggle and writhe its way out of it. Citing mealy-mouthed concerns that a memorial might attract extremists such as the English Defence League, it initially refused. Then under pressure, it announced that a memorial would be built after all. But in an odd manoeuvre it has recently announced that the new memorial will be dedicated more widely to the fallen but without Lee Rigby's name on it; instead this would be added to a scroll kept within the town hall.

This amounts therefore to little more than a gesture, a half-hearted, half-baked one, arrived at by a process dictated seemingly by fear, and one which flies in the face of the enormous popularity of our military. A poll by Demos a few years back showed that the armed forces were one of the top three reasons people cited for their pride in being British. That, I believe, comes not just from our recent experience of foreign-fought wars but from something closer to home: the realisation that, compared to the self-absorbed and entitled who populate our everyday public life, the young men and women of the forces are, as they were a hundred years ago, the very best of us.

And it remains their job to protect the worse of us, too. A recent poll which, given its findings, received remarkably little coverage, found that around one in seven young people had "warm feelings" towards the decapitators of IS. It also found that around a tenth of all my fellow Londoners felt the same. You almost hope that many of these are the indulged numbskulls of the Brand variety. Otherwise, taken at face value, such figures represent a truly terrifying picture.