THERE was a time when I occasionally bought the Daily Mail for research purposes, to take a peek at what its readers were thinking. I felt it was part of my job, to witness those stories about scroungers and benefits fraudsters. But over the past year it got too much for me. The ugliness seemed to be getting uglier. Or was it me that had got more sensitive? Drip by drip, the xenophobia and racism have become so aggressive that it seems to me the paper delivers, all too often, the kind of punch that comes from stumbling upon a piece of degrading pornography.

Such was the case when, last week, the paper carried a front cover featuring pictures of “foreign” lorry drivers caught on mobile phones and declared: “As Polish lorry driver is jailed for killing a family while on his mobile, we catch SEVENTEEN foreign truckers using their phones at 50mph.” The Mail had crossed a line in using the tragic deaths of a family as an excuse to point another finger at immigrants.

The truth was, though, that this was just one of many lines crossed, part of a connected thread one could trace back through cover lines like, “Migrant on the way to UK kills girl, 9, in Calais”, “4000 Foreign Murderers And Rapists We Can’t Throw Out” and “The ‘Swarm’ On Our Streets”, or the Katie Hopkins column comparing migrants to “cockroaches”. The paper has delivered punch after punch and it shows no signs of stopping, or of willingness to take responsibility for the impact this is having on the national psyche.

Of course, it’s not only the Daily Mail that has voiced these sentiments. They belong to other papers, like the Express, The Sun, and politicians too. As Andy Beckett put it in The Guardian last week, “the tabloids and the Conservative right are collaborating with a closeness and swagger not seen since at least the early 90s”.

But the Daily Mail is one of the mainstream forums where such a view has been aggressively given legitimacy. In its headlines it’s possible to follow the story of how the unspeakable became speakable, how it has now become OK in a major newspaper to blame foreigners for almost anything. The window of discourse has clearly shifted, lurching hatewards around the time of the Brexit vote, though it had been edging that way long before then.

The scapegoating of a particular demographic group isn’t a new story. It’s an old one that has gained strong traction since the financial crisis and the onset of austerity. Replace the word “immigrant” or “foreigner” with “disabled” or “benefits scrounger”, and it’s possible to see that both are just part of a dominant narrative. The anger of those in society who have felt “left behind” has long been systematically directed at particular groups. Forget what’s wrong with the economy, the message has been, look at what these people may be stealing from you.

One of the most tragic elements of this is what it has done to British attitudes towards those who might be deemed in need of help. These people are now viewed with knee-jerk suspicion. We live in an era of obsession over fraudulence, and of use of dehumanising testing methods to distinguish fake from deserving, from work capability assessments through to MP David Davies’s shocking proposition of dental checks on refugee children to assess their age.

Accusations of fraud are something the tabloids seem to revel in. A recent Express article ran photographs of Calais jungle children and declared: “Facial analysis gives Calais refugee children an average age of 25.” Never mind the fact that a 20-year-old refugee might be almost as in need of help as a child. No, what really matters is the tiny percentage of people who might arrive in Britain pretending to be children.

Hate-crime, we have learned, has risen in England since the Brexit vote. Part of me likes to imagine that Scotland exists outside this. After all, Police Scotland reported that hate crimes fell following the Brexit vote.

But this disturbing narrative still impacts upon us. The Scottish Daily Mail’s circulation north of the Border is around 81,000. Immigrant friends living here still talk of being made fearful by this climate. Only just a couple of weeks ago I was heading up Leith Walk when I came across a man reassuring a woman who was begging. He was making a promise to help her because he had witnessed racist abuse against the woman, who he said had been spat upon.

The surge in hate after the Brexit vote was something that many of us hoped would just be a blip. But in England it lingered, hate crime figures remaining higher than in previous years. They are unlikely to drop any time soon – not just because the Daily Mail and other offenders are likely to still churn out hate-fuelled messages, but also because the feeling they play on, that sense of being “left behind”, is not likely to disappear.

Clearly both need to be addressed. More answers, with less hate, are needed.