The speed of change has been mesmerising. Indeed, lacking any real sense of overarching identity, the need to impose a sense of community has become paramount. Whether locally or, as we see, nationally, never have we heard the word community so bandied about. But it’s all pretend, really. Community was never talked about before, simply because it didn’t have to be. 

The trouble with well-educated, international people like [Kristian] Niemetz is they fall into the trap of meeting foreigners who are much like them except for the accent and assume cultural differences stop there. Of course, if you hang out with academics and white-collar professionals it doesn’t matter if you’re in Berlin, London, Singapore, or Rio de Janeiro, it’s all the same.

But if you live beside someone who has no reason to get up in the morning and decides to play music at full blast until 5am, or deals drugs in the stairwell of your apartment block, or uses it as a toilet, or keys your car on a regular basis, all of a sudden you realise the character of your neighbour becomes central to your quality of life. The only reason Niemetz doesn’t know his neighbour is because the latter is culturally conditioned to be considerate, and to get up at 7am each morning to go to work. If he wasn’t, I suspect Niemetz would know him intimately.

If you start dispensing with old-fashioned ideas like sovereignty and believe a neighbour is no different from a Brussels bureaucrat, you’re going to be in a for a rude awakening when diversity and vibrancy moves in next door. Of course, those who advocate such policies rarely have to live with the consequences.

Given the self-satisfied ignorance on display – or malign perversity – I’m guessing Dr Kotsko doesn’t live in a neighbourhood rapidly being enlivened with Congolese and Somali borra gangs, whose social skills, and machetes, are so much in the news here.

Schama showed something a lot of us had suspected – which is that for a certain type of globe-trotting international celebrity, any concern for borders, national identity and cultural continuity are not just beneath them, but actively ‘common’.

Of course, like so many other advocates of mass immigration, Simon Schama can live pretty much where he wants. And if the area around him goes somewhat downhill because the neighbours all start to come from the rougher corners of Eritrea, then Simon Schama can move. And he will probably move to a very nice area. But not everybody has that choice.

And one thing we can all be certain of is that Simon Schama will never choose to live in Bradford, Malmo or any of the (dare I say it) ‘suburbs’ outside Paris. Yet all the time he will urge other peoples’ neighbourhoods to more closely resemble those great success stories, and look down at people from an ever-loftier height when they dare to object.

In the comments, Liz notes the unhappy combination of baby products and bondage harnesses, and asks, not unfairly, “What the hell were they thinking?”

Well, quite. I was in John Lewis recently, buying towels, and at no point did I feel a need to know about the cross-dressing bondage activities of the sales staff. Whether the person bagging my towels likes to dress up as a pantomime dame while brandishing instruments of torture was not, it has to be said, foremost in my mind…

Whether female customers, the backbone of John Lewis’ customer base, will be inspired to shop harder and more often by the thought of employees bringing their autogynephilia to work remains to be seen. Ditto bondage fantasies and wearing rubber dog costumes. Perhaps well-off ladies in search of posh frocks and upscale furnishings will be dazzled and enchanted by the thought of sad, cross-dressing men in thigh-high boots who like to share photos of themselves smeared with unspecified white substances.

Needless to say, the accompanying prose is quite extensive. The words “sustainable heterotopic space of discourse” crop up, obviously, and which, as you can imagine, is an enormous help. Quite how one might “exchange ideas” with a plant is, alas, not divulged. 

I’m tempted to ask how these target percentages relate to any actual expressed interest or aptitude – say, among school-leavers – or to any tactical utility, according to which an unusually high number of women and racial minorities would somehow confer a military advantage. Or are they, as seems to be the case, entirely arbitrary?

The paragraph immediately above was posted as a comment on the Personnel Today website. It was held for moderation, then disappeared. 

And so, the preferred, progressive trajectory entails a more demoralised, more dangerous, low-trust society. In which pretty much anything one might wish to buy will be out of reach or shuttered away, and in which every customer will by default be treated as suspicious. Because apparently, we mustn’t acknowledge a difference between the criminal and the law-abiding. Except, that is, to imagine them as more vulnerable than we are.

We will lock up the product, but not the thief. And utopia will surely follow.

Ms Gill is not alone, of course. According to her Guardian colleague Owen Jones, expecting persistent shoplifters to face consequences for their actions is now among “the worst instincts of the electorate.” Because shoplifters are “traumatised,” apparently. The real victims of the drama.

At which point, a thought occurs. If repeated thieving is so high-minded and so easily excused, perhaps Ms Gill and Mr Jones would be good enough to publish their home addresses, the whereabouts of any valuables, and the times at which they’re likely to be out, or at least preoccupied or unconscious.

Or do our betters only disdain other people’s property?

The “I can just will myself to have high trust” thing amongst urban liberals sounds almost exactly like when people try polyamory and obviously fucking hate it, but have philosophical commitments that force them to work through it anyway.

You can say you have high trust, but I know that you got screamed at by a crazy person one night when you were leaving the bar and now you’re scared to walk home alone, and I know that your bicycle was stolen last year and now you feel a low level of panic about securing your new bike every night.

If you want to wake up every morning and repeat into the mirror that you don’t actually mind that there are strangers fucking your girlfriend, then that’s your own private business. But the world exists independently of your framing of it.

That cat will start behaving like a dog any day now.