In his book Politics on The Edge, the former Conservative Party leadership contender Rory Stewart came up with a sentence that jumped out at me as I read it over the Christmas period.

He wrote: “Campaigning back in Cumbria, I began to notice if a house was filled with books, the occupants would not be voting Conservative.”

You might also want to check out a video clip that went viral around September last year, where Donald Trump said: “Smart people don’t like me, and they don’t like what we talk about.”

Of course, years earlier, in 2016, there had been a massive brouhaha when Hillary Clinton, then running for the US presidency, commented that half of Trump’s supporters could be put into what she described as a “basket of deplorables”, as many were racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic or Islamophobic.

Pat McArt: The working class need to wise up and stop being played for fools

It became one of the key talking point of the campaign.

But let’s move on… I’ll come back to this.

On Thursday, this newspaper again highlighted the fear amongst immigrant communities as night patrols of self-appointed groups confronted people on the streets, demanding ID and challenging them about their ethnicity.

On Wednesday, on my way from Letterkenny heading towards Strabane, I noted four or five tricolours floating in the breeze at the one spot. They weren’t there last year.

About two weeks earlier,........

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