They are pandering to the worst in people and it is working across the West.

Patriotism is being conflated with nativism and nationalism in far-right parties across the West and it is having a disturbingly successful impact. As Charles de Gaulle said: Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first, and we are certainly witness to this with the ongoing rise of the far right and their successes at the ballot box across Europe. These parties are successfully harnessing discontent about economic stagnation within certain groups of voters, to ride a wave of populist antipathy towards foreigners, ‘the political elite’ and ‘experts’. I fear that this hostility of other is not going to change any time soon, that this is the beginning of a much longer period of political destabilisation that is a real concern.

These populations that have been bamboozled enjoy the bollocks, racism, xenophobia and violent language that has been unleashed. Flag hugging, placard waving simpletons placing identity, hopes and aspirations into an empty box called 'nationality', and ignoring or downplaying the significance of pretty much any issue that actually matters as a consequence. Reasoning has gone out the door with these chaps and chapettes. Logic cannot defeat them…

The horrors of the early 20th Century should have cured us of nationalism. But self-deception and not learning from facts and history is seemingly a right wing trait that will not die...

Just sayin'