This will be an editorial, I will resume my alphabet with Mary Barnewall. All that will follow is my own opinion, but I wonder what John Henry Colclough or Caesar from 1800's, admirers of the French revolution, liberal John who favoured franchise to Catholics and opposed the tithe system, or 'Great Caesar' with his support of art, music sport and 'liberal' values would have made of 2016?

As I write, it feels we are living in tumultuous times. I am old enough to have been alive for the Cuban missile crisis,  but not old enough to remember it, and by extension not old enough to remember WW 2, WW1, Boer war and back into the mists of time of revolution, upheaval and political change..
I remember India and Pakistan warring, Israel and Egypt and of course the Vietnam War. I hitchhiked through the 6 counties at the height of the 'Troubles', sensed the British Army Guns on me in Aughnacloy and Strabane.
My upbringing was a strict Irish Catholic, where the ultimate sin was denial of Christ and the Catholic religion. To that end the consummate evil was Communism. Therefore it would make sense for my my enemy's enemy to be my friend. Thus the authoritarian Catholic hierarchy and most priests in the early to mid 20th century found the idea of a people's uprising and socialism an anathema.
Why all this? Well my mum - God rest her soul- if God exists, saw Margaret Thatcher as the defender of all that was good western, Christian values. She would have laughed with Boris Johnson, and voted Tory for ever, she wouldn't have known what to make of Farage, Trump and his Russian buddies. My dad- God rest his soul, if God exists, would avoid driving down a certain street when he knew people were living there in 'sin' as he was sure they would suffer eternal damnation, as second only to the denial of Christ (heresy or an apostate) was the sexual sin, notwithstanding the many thousands of clergy/ religious denying, at least in public their own sexuality plus the elephant in the room of child abuse. But my mum and dad were good people of their time and upbringing, good people whose legacy is a family of PhD's, BSc's, BA's, teachers, nurses, scientists and linguists and that's just their children, the grandchildren's list starts with high end university graduates...
I've outlined the above to try to explain why to myself why the gradual flow of liberal values, social welfare, emancipation of women, the NHS, sexual freedom, attempted redistribution of wealth, overseas. aid et cetera has given rise to populist damming with the likes of Trump, Farage, Gove, Putin, Le Pen and various other right wing populist opinion surfers. It is of course fear, fear of communists,  fear of Jews, fear  of Palestinians, fear of Gaels, fear of  Catholics, fear of Protestants, fear of Islam... Fear of the apostate... Trump et al feed on this. My parents weren't uneducated but were driven by religion. The populist bad people need Christian fundamentalism, the uneducated but they also need the ignorant. Which in Britain are the poor unemployed/unemployable who need to find a scapegoat for their hardships, sadly at various times these were were: Black, Irish, Polish, people from the Indian sub-continent et al. the list could be endless for the disenfranchised and disconnected, but there is no excuse. It is wrong.