Totalitarian is one word; incomprehensible is another. What drives these mad men and women to so ardently destroy their society, their heritage, and no doubt ultimately themselves? It is frightening, the passivity with which the population at large accepts these assaults upon common-sense and the subservience it shows to people and ideas that are totally contrary to everything that our civilisation purports to defend.

I read, initially with credulity but now increasingly with despair, Victor Klemperer's account of the way that the German population were cowed by Nazism, and fear that something similar could be happening here. How can our strong middle classes accede - grovel indeed - to the cowardly and treacherous policies of this so-called government. Can't they see that they are conspiring in the production of a catastrophe for this country?