As the Telegraph revealed at the weekend, Stewart wrote on X that the unrest stemmed from a ‘broken education system’ that deemed ‘anti-racist education inappropriate’. She explained: ‘It comes from people questioning “Why we make everything about race” instead of questioning people’s prejudice.’

Those last words illustrate precisely why many people distrust and even detest what passes for ‘anti-racism’ today. Modern anti-racism really does assume that everything is about race and that everyone is prejudiced. But since it’s also a tenet of anti-racism that people of colour cannot be racist (‘racism = prejudice + power’, activists often say), it necessarily follows that it’s only white people who are racist. This is the edifice upon which ‘anti-racism’ is built: ‘whiteness’ is supposedly the source of our woes.

Rather than blaming a dearth of anti-racist teaching for the riots, we might instead blame an excess of it. With increasing vehemence over the decades, anti-racist teaching has sought to instil a sense of social and historical awareness in white people, but has instead stoked resentment and rancour. It has nurtured a generation who ask themselves what they have done to deserve such constant, relentless vilification. It just doesn’t make sense to them.

Of course it doesn’t. That’s because this new ‘anti-racism’ doesn’t make sense itself. From the outset, it has been irrational and even mystical. Beginning with talk of ‘institutional racism’ and ‘unwitting racism’ 30 years ago, it has always been based on conjecture and unverifiable assertions that require no empirical evidence. It detects racism wherever it is perceived or imagined. The accusation of ‘structural racism’ is made without any quantitative evidence, bandied about, as Eric Kaufmann has observed, on the understanding that there can even be ‘racism without racists’. Worse, if you proclaim ‘colourblindness’, or deny you are racist, this is held up as proof that you need an anti-racist re-education.

Anti-racism is a paranoid cult, sensing the invisible demonic presence of racism everywhere. Its theology is Manichean. It views the human condition as a perennial battle between good and bad, black and white. Its morality is binary, too, painting all white people as guilty agents, all black people as passive victims.

The capture of our institutions by ‘anti-racist’ doctrine continues to bewilder and appal reasonable people, not just thanks to its neo-racialist belief that colour determines one’s way of thinking and moral worth, but also due to its authoritarianism and determination to expunge impurities from society. It demands displays of obeisance in signed diversity statements in the workplace. It seeks to ‘decolonise’ and cleanse the curriculum. It seeks to purge and traduce British history.

Anti-racism has been elevated to the position of state religion, propped up by the state’s corporate allies. Like many authoritarian creeds, it divides and rules. Resistance to the ideology is crushed with punishments that far exceed the crime, as happened to those who wrote racist posts online so foolishly and unguardedly this summer.

Why Carol Vorderman won’t stop tweeting

What is to explain Carol Vorderman’s transformation from daytime-TV numbers whizz to relentless right-on, megabore? My theory is that she is another casualty of ‘spotlight syndrome’.

Also known as the ‘spotlight effect’, this is the belief or perception that nearly everything one does or says is being watched by others with great attention, admiration and approval. It particularly afflicts prodigious users of social media, especially those with many followers. Where the perception is partly justified, the spotlight effect becomes addictive and cumulative. Those who are flattered into believing they are centre-stage then further seek – and receive in turn – ever more attention.

Vorderman is evidently caught in her own online spotlight. In her new book, Now What?: On a Mission to Fix Broken Britain, she admits to being ‘just an old bird with an iPhone’. One can imagine the temptation to issue forth on all matters once you have a large, fawning audience who will ‘like’ what you post and like you – no matter how half-baked and vacuous your pronouncements. Indeed, the more outrageous and attention-grabbing the better. This explains why such vainglorious tweeters as Alastair Campbell and Marina Purkiss waste so much time on the medium, seeking affirmation with their any utterance.

The irony is that the narcissism that drives these types could ultimately render them puppets of their admirers. In their addiction for attention, they risk becoming the unwitting mouthpieces of those who follow them, too afraid to say what they really think, lest they lose those precious likes.

How Brexit broke the brains of the middle class

It’s easy to laugh at the Liberal Democrat councillor who revealed this week that she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder following Brexit. As Antonia Harrison told her party conference in Brighton, when Britain left the EU, ‘Something died in me… I just gave up’. As a consequence, ‘I actually have in my medical history a diagnosis of PTSD over Brexit’, she said. No longer is Brexit Derangement Syndrome an inflated figure of speech. It now literally exists.

It would be tempting to dismiss her tale as an amusing aberration. Yet her case is symptomatic of a wider malaise. This UK still abounds with a minority of similar-minded Remainiacs who haven’t yet got over the 2016 vote to leave the EU. These are the petulant ‘Rejoiner’ types who live in a fantasy land. They believe rejoining a club whose chief members are beset with ever-deepening woes – Germany is in economic trouble and political turmoil, while France is a constitutional shambles – would resolve all our own. They also wrongly imagine that the EU would automatically and gleefully welcome the turncoat UK back to the fold. Never mind that this would also entail us adopting the Euro. Never mind the wave of Eurosceptic populism that has swept through EU countries since 2016. Never mind once more putting this country through the divisive ordeal we witnessed that year. These people don’t seem to read the newspapers, care about reality or care about other people.

Still, the solipsistic Rejoiners won’t go away. These histrionic neurotics pop up regularly to pronounce the counter-factual parrot cry that ‘Brexit has been a disaster’. They’re even planning a march through London on 28 September.

They hate Brexit because for them, the political is the personal. As Harrison herself explained: ‘I am European to my core, and my identity has been ripped out. I am European before I am English.’ That’s why the Remainers talk in such a strange, self-consumed manner, sobbing bitterly on the proverbial psychiatrist’s couch. To employ the language of therapy: they are in denial.

Patrick West is a spiked columnist. His latest book, Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times, is published by Societas.