As a tot growing up in a provincial proletarian Communist household in the 1960s, I’d been led to believe that socialism was colour-blind. But when I moved to That London in the 1970s, I quickly became aware that the non-working-class Left operated what was best described as Paint-Chart Politics – the further from white, the more likely you were to be right. This began in a small way, with reggae bands who believed stuff about women that would have had them condemned as fascist Neanderthals had they been white playing under the Rock Against Racism flag; in recent years, it has seen the Left support similar Islamist stone-agers just because they're the right (Left) side of beige.

Thus democratic Israel, which gives full civil rights to women and gays, is worse than the countries which surround it, which don't but are darker – it’s always particularly funny to see pasty-faced Western Pals Of Palestine being bundled into vans by dark-skinned mizrahi or Ethiopian IDF, their simple Paint-Chart Politics brains trying to take in the fact that Israelis can be brown and black-skinned too. Similarly, in Darfur the Left were thrown a curveball when it turned out that the Arab Muslims were terrorising the black Christians. Um, Islam good, Christianity bad – but hang on, Christians darker here! DOES NOT COMPUTE!

Events of recent weeks prove that PCP shows no sign of doing the decent thing – going into the safe-space study with a bottle of brandy and triggering itself – and that the identity politics (politics for narcissists) which spawned it are thriving. Writing in Everyday Feminism, one Nico Dacumos suggested that that light-skinned people of colour such as himself should ban themselves from political gatherings of dark-skinned BIPOCs (Black, Indigenous and People of Color); as Mr Dacumos signs off as one who ‘instigates non-binary transgender faggotry in Oakland, CA’ you might be forgiven for shrugging ‘Ah, it’s the lunatic fringe.’ But as history shows, the lunatic fringe has a way of becoming the mainstream.

The insistence that race is more important than common humanity, but this time mooted by the Left rather than the traditional racists of the Right, began to blight this country in the 1970s when Labour councils began to believe that it was wrong for black children in care (as it is laughably known) to be adopted by white families - ‘transracial placements’ as they were called in a phrase worthy of apartheid-riven Rhodesia. By 1983 this madness was at its height, when the Association of Black Social Workers told a Commons select committee:

“ ‘Transracial placement as an aspect of current child care policy is in essence a microcosm of the oppression of black people in this society … it is in essence a form of internal colonisation … a new form of slave trade.’

Which must have come as a great comfort to the untold numbers of black children denied loving families due to a disparity in skin colour.

In more recent years, Paint-Chart Politics has been ruining the lives of even more children, though this time exclusively female ones as the police forces of Newcastle, Rotherham, Rochdale and Oxfordshire chose to turn a blind eye to the rape, torture and trafficking of thousands of girls simply because the men doing it were darker-skinned than their victims. As Sarah Champion - driven out of the shadow cabinet this week for daring to state the obvious case that this country has ‘a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls…because people are more afraid to be called a racist than they are afraid to be wrong about calling out child abuse’ – has proved, the messenger will be routinely shot for speaking plainly; far better to tie oneself in the knots the media is now entangled in where by fearing accusations of racism by naming the rapists as being of Pakistani origin, they have slandered a whole continent by repeatedly using the weasel word ‘Asian’. As Douglas Murray wrote in this magazine:

“ ‘preferring to hide behind ‘Asian’ and thereby showing a willingness to mislead their readers into thinking that organised gangs of Koreans and Japanese have been gang-raping young white girls across Britain over recent years.’

Such a grasp does Paint-Chart Politics have on some ‘Silly led by the sinister’ (the Sainted Hitch) swathes of Social Justice Warriors that the Holocaust can be dismissed as ‘a white-on-white crime’ by some activists. How appropriate that PCP is also the name of a pesticide sometimes used as the recreational drug ‘angel dust’ whose side effects include paranoia, hallucinations, depersonalisation, detachment from reality and severe changes in body image (think of Rachel Dolezal, who was so obsessed with race that she pretended to be black.) If this week’s hounding of Sarah Champion is anything to go by, it’s unlikely that practitioners of this most pointless persuasion will come to their senses any time soon.

Incidentally, on a happier note, the Cotswold village of Bledington – listed in the last census as 95 percent white British – were delighted to discover that their average DNA was only 42 percent English (as little as 3 percent for some) after the first study of an entire community carried out by the genealogy company Ancestry. Marketing manager Kristen Turner, on discovering her Indian heritage, told the Daily Mail ‘It’s rather exciting to think I have something in common with people in India and it does make the world seem like a smaller place.’ What topsy-turvy times we live in when the alleged Left believe that race is all, and Middle England celebrates the glorious melting pot of humanity!