PopCon Director, Mark Littlewood, says that "Britain is hanging by a thread – and measurable chunks of it have gone mad."

In 1998, in a football match between Italian rivals, SS Lazio and AS Roma, fans of the former club unfurled a 160-foot banner reading “Auschwitz is your town, the ovens are your houses.”

The very next year, Lazio came to Birmingham to play Mallorca in the European Cup Winners Cup final at Villa Park and left with the trophy after a 2-1 victory.

I don’t recall any suggestion at the time that Lazio supporters should be banned from attending the fixture on “public safety grounds”.

Roll forward to 2025. The West Midlands police force seems enormously less equipped to deal with what should be, on the face of it, a fairly rudimentary football match.

Maccabi Tel Aviv are due to face Aston Villa in the Europa League next month. As it stands, fans of the Israeli team will be prohibited from attending due to public safety concerns.

In a rare show of political unity, Keir Starmer, Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch and Ed Davey have all condemned the decision. Not before time, the Prime Minister seems to have discarded his view that politicians should not comment on “operational matters.”

Whilst it is true that in a recent match in Amsterdam, travelling Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters were involved in major disturbances and arrests were made, this is a mere fig leaf. Sadly, such occurrences aren’t enormously uncommon at football matches. It’s unpleasant and concerning – but not wholly untypical. A relatively competent police force should be able to pre-empt or deal with it. It is impossible to construct a case to suggest that Israeli football fans are disproportionately likely to engage in acts of hooliganism.

Of course, the reality is not that we are worried about Tel Aviv fans rioting in Birmingham, it’s that we feel we can’t protect them. We now formally have “no go areas” for Jews in Britain.

Fear not, though. Division in Britain surely will be overcome eventually – we just have to look to the younger generation for hope.

At Nottingham University, history students are being taught about a key element of racism in our country.

The real victims of “ethnic chauvinism” are, apparently, the orcs in JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Other minorities that we should be concerned about - according to Dr Onyeka Nubia who leads on this part of the syllabus - include Middle Earth’s Easterlings, Southrons and men from Harad. All of these groups apparently suffer from “anti-African antipathy”. This is despite them generally hanging out in Mordor rather than in Africa itself.

I can’t comment with any real authority on how any of these chaps behave at sporting events, but if you do find your local team facing them in an upcoming FA Cup fixture, you should probably check your privilege before donning your own club’s colours and going to the game.

Until quite recently, I believed that Britain was going through a rather grim period – but not obviously worse than the sort of bumpy times that have occurred before in my lifetime. We would keep calm, carry on and normality would naturally and rapidly return.

I no longer take this view. I think Britain is hanging by a thread – and measurable chunks of it have gone mad. Adam Smith’s famous phrase that “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation” was supposed to reassure us that a country can withstand an awful lot of instability, bad policies and economic shocks before it is truly ruined. But it feels like we are swiftly getting to that point of no return.

The next government of the UK will have to engage in enormous and intricate surgery to save Britain. The good news is that the electorate seem alive to that necessity. The bad news is that very few of our political leaders have yet to articulate either the nature or the scale of the task before us. That needs to change or we are, to use a technical term, stuffed.

Keep the flag of freedom flying!