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Something strange and disgusting has happened to a country, you couldn’t help thinking, that gives tens of millions to Comic Relief and just two weeks later echoes Mr Blair’s “am I bovvered?” about the easily avoidable deaths of innocents; a country in which the liberal centre has become so cowed by 25 years of brutal right-wingery that no senior politician from either Labour or the Liberal Democrats will risk the wrath of the right-wing press by venting their outrage that sick asylum seekers (“economic tourists”, in Geoffrey Howe’s deathless phrase) are treated like criminals, seized at dawn and moved to holding pens in their nightwear – in Caroline’s case, not even being allowed to fetch her epilepsy pills – for obeying Norman Tebbit’s diktat about getting on their bikes in search of a better life.

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