‘I don’t feel safe’ is the cry of students the western world over at the prospect of hearing terrifying opinions such as ‘there are two sexes’ or ‘your skin colour shouldn’t matter’. This bluff talk of ‘hate’, terror and even, incredibly but regularly, ‘trans genocide’, used to come over merely as pathetic and entitled. Singer Will Young telling the Labour conference that he was ‘terrified’ of the Tories winning the next election would, the week before, have been merely laughable. Coming days after the slaughter in Israel, it sounded unforgivably crass and narcissistic.

This is, I think, less a coherent political ideology than a sickness of western affluence mixed with old-fashioned stately snobbery

Perhaps partly because of the Young-style claptrap that’s accumulated over the last decade, genuine fear has become an almost embarrassing thing to express, even in our emotionally incontinent age of public confession on ITV2. But as jazz pianist Blossom Dearie sang, in the final recording of her long career, ‘It’s All Right To Be Afraid’: ‘There are shadows, there are strangers, there are problems, there are dangers’. Let’s be honest. We are worried and for real this time.

This was particularly clear in our attitude to the demonstrations this Saturday in support of Hamas, for that is obviously what they were. How else could we understand the images of paragliders worn by some protesters? They blew the lid off our polite fictions, all of our ostrich-heading and finger-crossing. Because there you had it – thousands of people marching through British cities celebrating unimaginable savagery, cheering its perpetrators and blaming its victims. The worst display of ethnic hatred this country has seen in centuries. And still, we are expected to squirm and nod and look the other way. To not even acknowledge to ourselves that we feel afraid.

How did we get here? This has all been enabled by that section of the white middle class we still call left-wing, liberal and progressive, despite the fact that they are not left-wing, liberal or progressive. As many have noticed, they’ve said very little about it or muttered about it all being very sad and  ‘complex’, which is a far cry from the customary infantile simplicity of their view of the world.

I think this is mainly because they’re only interested in racism when the white working class can be blamed. That’s what it was always all about for them. Let’s consider their schtick. There was the preening and posturing over Black Lives Matter (now revealed for what they always were to anybody with eyes to see). There was the enthusiastic adoption of crank American academic ideas like white privilege. There was an endless stream of TV dramas about how awful and easily led the lower orders were and are.

It has all been a pathetic, proxy class war, a game to reinforce their social status. All the while, they have ignored the ethnic hatreds of a sizeable minority of immigrants who they welcomed in large numbers seemingly because they hoped it would annoy their social inferiors. In Orwell’s memorable phrase, they are people playing with fire who don’t even know that fire is hot.

This is, I think, less a coherent political ideology than a sickness of western affluence mixed with old-fashioned stately snobbery. (And for the avoidance of doubt, if there are a group of people I truly detest in this country, it is these people. They’re always accusing their detractors of hate for this or that ‘community’ – I want to correct them, ‘no, no, it’s you’.) Are we really going to go back to taking them seriously, despite this clear illustration of what they have brought to us?

Yes. We will have no choice – because, after all, they have the workings of our society. Almost every institution is corrupted top to toe, riddled with this rubbish, including the ones that are there to protect us. Westminster Council approved the erection of a stand marked ‘No Apartheid’ in Whitehall, right next to the Cenotaph. The BBC almost totally ignored the marches in its Saturday night news bulletins (they were all over Will Young like a rash days before).  They won’t call Hamas terrorists, but they will call a rapist ‘she’ if that rapist so desires. The famously vocal ‘anti-racist’ celebrities like Gary Lineker, usually so keen to compare everything to 1930s Germany, have tweeted not a dicky bird about either the slaughter in Israel or the mass display of racial hatred on Britain’s streets.

It is, understandably, preferable to hold on to the belief that the institutions are still functional. Their weakness and obliviousness is a horrible and scary thing to have to confront. And that brings us back to fear.

Suella Braverman, incredibly, released a strongly worded statement – ‘the police are coming for you’ – the day after the marches. On the day itself, the police stood meekly by as the marchers chanted anti-Semitic slogans and waved Hamas flags. This is the same police force that swoops on people who post edgy memes on Facebook. It’s easy to intimidate middle-aged women in their homes, after all. Actual crime and real, visceral racial hatred must be very upsetting for the police.

But then, we are all cosseted and cradled, and we’ve all been living in a strange and unprecedented historical bubble of peace and plenty, in which we have routinely assumed that western liberal democracy is up to the job of nullifying the eternal human potential for evil. It is rational to be afraid of what we saw this weekend in London. Acknowledging that fear would, I think, go a small way to start bringing us back to reality. Maybe then we can begin to figure out what to do about it.