IT’S a meme, or perhaps it’s a trope, and it sits among all the others beloved of right-wing commentators and their sponsors among the more phlegm-spattered of our national dailies.

It runs something like this: The political dominance of the SNP is bad for democracy and leaves Scotland looking like a one-party state. It sits with that other one about vile cybernats lowering the tone of political discourse in this country.

Both of these are cousins to that one about Scottish Nationalism being part of the populist tide that delivered Brexit and swept Donald Trump into power. I actually saw that one being espoused by a couple of boutique Labour types on social media last week. Their unhinged musings suggested that they are also familiar with the one about Jeremy Corbyn being far too left-wing for wanting to, er ... protect workers’ rights, pay a proper living wage and nationalise public utilities.

At the slightest hint of anything resembling left-wing or radically progressive politics in the UK the Right in this country begin to scream like banshees. Britain, they aver, is a moderate country that has always traditionally eschewed extremism, even when no-one has actually proposed to implement anything that could remotely be considered extremist. “The British people,” they claim, “are suspicious of anything that might upset the moderate consensus.”

Thus, Scottish Nationalism (and the Lord knows I am no lover of the SNP) went from being a harmless enough fringe movement until it somehow gathered enough grass-roots support to park its tanks on the front lawn of the unitary British state. Then it became a dangerous and sinister movement hell-bent on wrecking a political and cultural union that had served all the peoples of the United Kingdom so well. That this sophistry was being advanced even as the food bank industry was breaking all records for speed of growth in Scotland was cheerfully ignored.

Striking mineworkers in 1984 were thus also considered to be “the enemy within” by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. For exercising their right to protect their jobs and communities they had an apocalypse brought down upon them, comprising every arm of the British state. That these mining communities had willingly sacrificed hundreds of thousands of their youth to defend that same British state in two global wars was also conveniently ignored as Thatcher waged her squalid class war.

More recently, we saw Hillary Benn being hailed as a brave warrior prince for standing up to Corbynism and representing those moderate values so beloved of the British people. That he chose to summon his long-hidden reserves of courage to call for remote-controlled air-strikes on a third-world country with no guarantees that civilians would not be hit was also overlooked by the self-appointed guardians of British moderation in everything.

The Right in this country and their cheerleaders in the Unionist commentariat are fond of coining useful little phrases to demonise anything that looks suspiciously radical and therefore unmanageable. Thus what was once considered simply as socialism is now “the hard left”. Anyone who takes to social media to pledge support for Scottish nationalism is dismissed as a “cybernat”. In moderate, reasonable and cautious Britain you see, there is no such thing as “the hard right”, while some Unionist sympathisers on social media can make threats of violence and be considered merely to be “passionate” or “colourful”.

The Left in the UK are thus under 24-hour surveillance for any signs that they may be about to tip into territory considered dangerous or not-quite-British. And, in the main, left-wing politics has remained constitutional, law-abiding, decent and unthreatening. There have been no general strikes, no attacks on private property, no mass civil unrest when Britain has participated in the military adventures beloved of its two main and oh-so-moderate political parties. In the face of increasing inequality, one-sided austerity, a decade of corruption by bankers, and tax avoidance on a grand scale by the financial backers of “moderate” government the UK Left have been acquiescent, benign, supine and docile.

And look where this has got us. The UK Right might always have been considered “moderate” or perhaps “robust”; even during Margaret Thatcher’s class war. But by no reasonable measure can what has recently occurred in the UK over the last year or so ever be considered to be “moderate”. UK politics is now underpinned by a new paradigm in which extreme right-wing politics has, by stealth, become the new normal.

Since June 23 phrases such as “hard Brexit”, “soft Brexit” and “triggering Article 50” have served to camouflage the extremely distressing and unpleasant rhetoric that fuelled the campaign to leave the EU. Our future relationship with Europe has been entrusted to a grim assortment of Europe-bashing Tory grotesques. They thought that it was fair and doubtless “moderate” to knowingly mislead UK voters with claims that the UK gives £350 million a week to the EU and that post-Brexit that amount would be spent on the NHS.

They stood silently by when campaign posters were unveiled showing a queue of foreign migrants and suggesting that we were about to be over-run by them. Such posters have given birth to more recent ones encouraging normal and “moderate” British people to be constantly vigilant about the new “enemy within”: dodgy-looking middle-east types. In jolly old “moderate” England there was a sharp increase in the number of racially or religiously aggravated crimes recorded by police following the EU referendum. In July, police recorded a 41 per cent increase compared to the same month the year before, according to a Home Office report.

You can’t even blame Nigel Farage for this. At least he’s been honest and open about his support for anti-immigration policies for many years. But what can you say about someone like Boris Johnson? He doesn’t actually believe any of it, yet was quite happy for it to fuel his attempt at annexing 10 Downing Street. Still, he got to be foreign secretary.

Now he’s running around Europe making an ass of himself – and us – by issuing veiled threats about Prosecco exports to the Italians if they jolly well keep linking access to the free market with free movement.

This is what the triumph of hard-right politics looks like, but you’ll never hear anyone describe it as such. In 21st-century Britain, extremism belongs only to the Left and Scottish Nationalism.