I had the strange, and dispiriting, experience of leaving Blackburn station yesterday and walking straight into a small scale British Fascist rally.

This was the first time, and I hope the last, that I have been close enough to see the podgy exemplars of the erstwhile master race in all their cheese and onion crisp, complexioned glory.

Heroic specimens.

A small, nervous, band of frumpy haus-fraus; a sprinkling of feral faced, lager swollen young men; and a timidity (there has to be some collective noun, so why not this one) of middle-aged men, in beige anoraks and mis-matched suits - bingo-caller chic really -who in a more innocent setting would not be out of place standing on the fringes of a real-ale festival or on a railway station platform ticking the passing trains off.

All of them probably friendless through school, through life, and only now, finding a weird unity in companionable inarticulacy.

They have the monopoly on boots and fists, but wit and acumen ?

An easy gibe, I know, to say I'm convinced I'm more likely to get a reasoned response from a cabbage than I would by asking anyone of them a question deeper than their flag-waving rhetoric can safely take. But really I saw no lights flashing. Did n't even glimpse a bulb. The scrutiny of even a reasonable, let alone semi tough, question, would be like putting them through the bends.

Their's is a bovine, albeit malign, dumbness, that is attempting to traduce the sense of society, tolerance and democracy that glues us together, and replace it with vicious sloganeering, fingerpointing, victimisation, deliberate misunderstanding, and mutual contempt.

Not in my country please. Not in any country.