Some years ago I heard a moving story about Roy Jenkins. An unpromising start to any anecdote but stay with me. It involved a croquet match during the late period of his life – as Chancellor of the University of Oxford – when Jenkins had become one of the grander, not to say more pompous, figures in our public life. According to someone playing with him, his Lordship had appalling luck. Although he wielded his mallet with all requisite skill, his ball would not go through the hoops. Eventually the grand old man stormed off the pitch in a great huff. Only after he had left did the other players discover that the ball Lord Jenkins had been working was from a different croquet set, and too big to fit through the hoops.

I have been thinking of the incident of Lord Jenkins and the crooked croquet match lately. Not just because I enjoy the image of his Lordship puffing off the pitch in a fury, but because it feels like something similar is going on at a national level. Someone has queered the game, forbidding us from winning even on home turf.

It seems that absolutely anyone can turn up in Britain and tell us what is or is not British

Our much overpraised Home Secretary used her party conference speech to condemn the ‘racists’ who marched in the south of England the other week with their faces covered. She had nothing to say about the far larger number of people from her own Muslim community who have marched through Tower Hamlets and elsewhere, covering their faces and being infinitely more thuggish. On Question Time a panellist whose grandmother came here from Bengal claimed that the men on that south of England march were not just racist but exhibiting ‘small penis behaviour’. What’s more, this woman – a self-described communist – said the people objecting to illegal migration were not patriotic and not British.

We seem to be facing a slew of similar pronouncements of late – often from people who have either arrived in the country recently or whose parents arrived comparatively recently. It seems that absolutely anyone can turn up in Britain and tell us what is or is not British. But if we quibble with this lack of manners we are, of course, called ‘racist’. This is deeply unfair.

As I have pointed out before, if my parents had chosen to move to, for example, Pakistan and given birth to me there, I think I’d regard my position in the country as something like a visitor or a guest. I can say with considerable certainty that the entire population of Pakistan would regard me in such a light. But if I went around telling the Pakistani people what their country was or should be, and what Pakistani values were or were not, then I think people would think me a little presumptuous, to say the least. Yet the British public have to hear arrival after arrival tell us who we are or who we should be and they do so with the confidence that comes from knowing that most British people are too polite to clear their throat, say ‘ahem’ in a meaningful manner, and then give them both rhetorical barrels.

But it isn’t just recent arrivals who have joined this game of telling us what we are or should be. This week the Labour government’s under-secretary for nature, one Jenny Riddell-Carpenter, warned that the ‘far-right’ are likely to co-opt the countryside in the next election. Specifically she said that they will summon up ‘a Britain that never really existed’. She continued: ‘It’ll be that warm ale, a black labrador by your feet in a pub that doesn’t exist. It’ll be a very far-right nostalgic vision of Britain that we don’t want to have, [that] never really existed.’

About which there are many eloquent things to say. One of which is ‘WTF?’ Are the presence of black labradors around the feet now another dog-whistle? Must our ale only ever be cold? And who is Jenny Riddell-Carpenter to tell us that we are ‘far-right’ if we engage in any of these activities?

More importantly, the image of Britain she tries to evoke is not some ‘far-right’ mirage of a country that never existed. It is in fact a small part of a Britain that exists very nicely for many of us. A Britain that exists and is neither political nor invented.

And all this happened in a week in which any opportunities to object to the disaster this country is being led into seemed to contract yet again.

On Tuesday, an activist known as ‘Danny Tommo’ was refused bail. The crime of which he stands accused, and to which he has pleaded not guilty, is damaging a migrant boat. Tommo is alleged to have slashed the dinghy having taken matters into his own hands, apparently as a result of British government claims that it can do nothing to stop boatloads of illegal migrants arriving each day. If he’s found guilty, the full force of the law – the same force that takes no interest in your own burgled property – is likely to come down on him in predictable fashion and he could well spend the coming weeks in jail because he harmed the property of an illegal smuggling gang.

It is not surprising. This week we also learned that a Muslim lecturer has been teaching British police officers about ‘Islamophobia’ and the threat of Nigel Farage. Meanwhile, our Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband, was sucking up to his counterpart from the world’s number one terrorist-sponsoring state – Iran – and declaring himself ‘humbled’ in the presence of the Palestinian representative to the UK.

Which brings me back to Roy Jenkins. By all accounts, Jenkins’s fellow players didn’t realise their error. But it seems to me that as a nation we are playing on a pitch that has been deliberately queered. I have this lovely column in which to voice my own frustrations. But most of the British public do not, and as they notice that the game is rigged they may do more than simply leave the pitch in a huff.