It may be, in its own way, as vile as any of those 9/11 videos; the ones capturing the moments of impact as terrorists fly into skyscrapers.

No, nobody dies in this utterly disgusting video of an effigy of a tower in flames. This Grenfell Tower is just cardboard. The screaming figures in the windows are just felt tip pen and paper.

But the goons who burned this effigy atop a brazier and recorded themselves laughing about people dying and “not paying the rent” are real enough, and they walk amongst us in number.

© PA Photos

What they represent is a very real evil lurking within our society, and increasingly brazen with it. They, and those like them, are part of a stirring force of Far Right thinking that should terrify us all.

They may not always make the mistake of exposing themselves as directly as these idiots, but they are a permanent and endemic part of British society.

Evil as they are, they don’t exist in isolation. They are represented at the height of our establishment - from newspaper editors to parliamentarians, their sickness is given validity on a daily basis.

It’s there, writ large on the front pages of some of our best-selling tabloids, broadcast shamelessly under the guise of “telling all sides of the debate”, and splashed across billboards warning of the perils of immigration.

Britain is, was, and will continue to be for quite some time, a profoundly racist, intolerant society.

Sickening as it is, this video is not anomalous. Britain is, was, and will continue to be for quite some time, a profoundly racist, intolerant society.

Growing up in Merseyside, I lived through the surreal sight of an entire district of my city being reduced to something like a warzone. I say surreal, because for me - a lucky little closeted 12-year-old white boy, living in a pleasant dormitory town on the outskirts, the idea that an entire city could be racist was beyond my understanding.

But Liverpool was a racist city. Like Brixton, and Chapeltown and Handsworth, Toxteth was the explosion of decades of mistreatment, abuse and denigration of black people in a city that would tell you with a straight face it was one of the most cosmopolitan in the world.

The racism that produced inner city riots in the 80s never disappeared, it just became unfashionable. In the last few years, racism is back in vogue. People who, ten years ago would have been nervous about openly articulating their racism are now making videos of themselves burning cardboard towers at Bonfire Night parties.

It’s not the preserve of an older demographic. Racism is not something old-fashioned, like cigarette smoking, that will eventually be bred out of us over time.

I like to think my kids, going to a central London primary school complete with a full spectrum of race and tongues, are going to grow up completely colour-blind when it comes to racism.

Racism is not something old-fashioned, like cigarette smoking, that will eventually be bred out of us over time.

Yet even our universities, the places we’d hope would be at the vanguard of enlightenment in the UK, are infected by this disease.

In Nottingham Trent university in March this year, a student captured on video her peers chanting “we hate the blacks” towards her and had to lock herself into her room. A Sikh student was forced from a bar for wearing a turban. And in Bournemouth, a student uncovered schoolmates describing her as a “big black ape” and a “gorilla-looking motherfucker.” Why are they so emboldened? Because they see their type of thinking on our newspaper pages and our TV screens.

When Nigel Farage unveiled his Breaking Point poster in the run-up to the Referendum, there was about as much nuance to it as the boarding house signs of the 50s that infamously read “No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs.”

And yet, this poster - as blatantly racist as it was - has been justified, is still justified, as representing a truth that cannot be spoken because society has become too weak to speak it. It is “political correctness” that is at fault, they say, not the message.

This perverse attitude against the trajectory of civilised progress is repeated every time a newspaper splashes on the dangers of immigrants or a TV channel presents an overtly racist scumbag as a legitimate part of a national debate, or even when a publication as august as The Economist gives a platform to a neo-fascist like Steve Bannon.

There are things that need to be called out. We cannot, as a society pretend that a claim to free speech is an entitlement for every view to be given a platform. It’s the responsibility of editors, both print and broadcast, to understand that the arguments they give air to will be interpreted by many of their audience as affirmation of racism.

The typical response to these stories, just as it will be with this appalling Grenfell effigy, is a burst of initial outrage, then a few days of rationalisation, deconstruction, politicisation, and finally the story goes into remission.

But the attitudes that create the environment that give permission for racism do not fade.

Stuart Cundy, the Metropolitan Police Commander leading the Grenfell Fire investigation said: “I can’t imagine the distress this video will undoubtedly cause to bereaved families and survivors.”

He’s right, of course. He can’t imagine, and nor can I. But this brutally sick video, and the sniggering morons who made it, will not shock those bereaved families and survivors nearly as much as it shocks him or I.

Living in modern day Britain, they’ll be well used to it.

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