The rise of right-wing populism as a mainstream concept has distorted our perception of the refugee crisis

In the weeks before the bulldozers came to clear the travellers from Dale Farm in Essex, its community leaders had been trying to buy shares in the company that had been hired to wipe them out. “We couldn’t do it though,” one of the Sheridan brothers, Dale Farm’s ruling family told me at the time. “They’re not a limited company.”

Mainly, it was gallows humour. They knew they were done for. At Dale Farm, teenage boys had threatened to tie themselves to the gate posts, telling police officers that, “If you want to flatten my home, you can flatten me too.” And they were homes, too. They hadn’t moved in years. The static caravans had leaded light windows, fitted kitchens, soft furnishings and, without exception, grand figurines of Jesus on the cross.

Someone, no doubt, will be making a euro or two on the clearance of the Jungle camp in Calais, where on Monday, the bulldozers have been called in for what the French government hopes will be the final time. But it won’t be its residents cashing in. They’re not that savvy. Nor have they mounted such a spirited fight to save it. It is not their home, after all. Their homes are all thousands of miles away, and in most cases, already flattened long ago.

No, not everyone in the Calais Jungle is fleeing a warzone. Those politicians and journalists whose livelihoods depend on victimising the vulnerable like to point out how many of them are, for example, black Africans, as if Sub-Saharan Africa, by mere virtue of not being Syria, is suddenly a bastion of peace and stability. As if there are not, to name just one example, 6,000 child soldiers currently fighting in the Central African Republic.

The forces that have driven people to the Jungle are many and varied but one thing is clear. Not one among them has fled a liberal democracy with a functioning welfare state. There are no Germans, no French, no Swedes, no Americans, no Brits. There are none so lucky as the the unluckiest of us.

The two Syrian brothers I met earlier this year, who had come to west London from Syria via the Calais Jungle did not, you will not be surprised to learn, have warm hearted reminiscences of the place. In their long journey there, they had spent eight hours shivering in the Mediterranean after their inflatable dinghy was deliberately slashed by border guards. They had hidden in the cold in the Hungarian countryside for several days when their convoy of taxis laid on by people smugglers had been intercepted by police. In the camp itself, on one of their many unsuccessful nightly forays to the tunnel, a close friend who had travelled with them all the way from Syria was crushed and killed under the wheels of the Le Shuttle train.

These are the people who, in 2016, appear to be testing the patience of the great British public. Neither Lily Allen nor Gary Lineker can be permitted to offer sympathy. Never mind how utterly shaming it is that, since 2014 ten times as many Syrians have settled at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea than in our country. Never mind that Britain’s response, as Italy, Greece. Malta and everywhere else tries to find ways to cope with the thousands of people arriving each day – three million and counting – has been to turn its back and beat a cowardly retreat from a problem that, in comparative terms, is barely affecting it.

These are the sweet fruits of Brexit. These are the base emotions validated by a foul campaign that never deviated in a meaningful way into any subject beyond immigration. Brexit, the likes of Hannan and Gove and Johnson will tell you, was never about immigration, but they never considered for a second the possibility of seeking to win it via any other means. This hatred is sentiment its holders are allowed to enjoy in these rarefied moments after they summoned the earthquake which they think toppled the establishment, and before they come to realise it will topple them too.

Oh to hear the rage among the BBC Question Time audience in Hartlepool last week, that their precious Brexit appears, they think, to be being delayed by Westminster politicians. Do it now! ... Do what we say or clear off. Who will these people blame, in the coming years, when their standard of living is further crushed? When petrol and food prices carry on going up. When jobs are lost. When – oh yes – immigration doesn’t come down. When they realise that even non-EU migration, the bit for which control has not been taken back as it has never been lost, is at 200,000 and will not come down?

A decade or so ago, the two Syrian brothers I interviewed to mark the anniversary of the death of Alan Kurdi, both now in their mid-thirties, were learning carpentry at a college in wealthy, prosperous, if undemocratic Damascus. Then came a terrorist attack in New York, a disastrous foreign war waged by the west, a tsunami of civil unrest set forth across many nations by a self-immolating Tunisian fruit and vegetable seller. Now, the brothers have run across two continents, their friends have been killed. Back home, one of their wives is missing and is highly unlikely to be alive. Who among them could have foreseen how little it takes?

On 23 June, Great Britain, the unrivalled home of four hundred years of political stability and good government, had its first taste of instability in quite some time, and we face a genuine crisis of political leadership. A centrist, election winning Prime Minister is gone. A well-meaning tweak to Labour Party rules has led it its own self-immolation. Scotland has said no to nationalism but yes to 54 nationalist MPs. The Liberal Democrats have been exposed as a party whose voters don’t actually want them to govern. Politics is failing.

Since the people in liberal democracies were empowered through widespread democratic franchise, in most cases a hundred or so years ago, they have all been engaged in the same struggle. Between those who can see the future coming and prepare for it, shape it, and those who fight against it. It is a tale told in just the same way through the struggle for rights for women, for black people, for gay people.

Today, the fight is over the movement of people, and the same class of people who are always on the wrong side of history, act as if, to borrow a phrase from Nigel Farage’s midnight concession speech, the genie can be put back in the bottle.

Bulldozing the Jungle camp, shaming child refugees on the front pages of the newspapers (which is precisely what happened, regardless of the age of the specific face in question), will not hold back the future for long. Of course, there are many people – Katie Hopkins, Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and so on – who can’t see this. And of course, if these people had been alive in the 1960s and 1970s, they would be fighting to maintain segregation in American universities, upholding South African apartheid, keeping homosexuality illegal. They will deny that, of course, but they’re wrong.

For the first time in decades, these people have the upper hand. It is real and it is serious. When nationalism rises above liberalism and cooperation, history could not be less ambiguous about where it leads. And it doesn’t take much. The people yet again fleeing their homes, this time from the French bulldozers, know that well enough – not that anyone is listening to them.