DICTATORSHIP: can it be all that bad? Political correctness aside, perhaps there’s something to be said for tough-minded autocrats, who cut the crap and don’t take fools gladly. So suggested Clare Foges, David Cameron’s former speechwriter, in an extraordinary epistle to authoritarian “strong men”, like Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Vladimir Putin, in a newspaper column this week. We may not like tyrants much, she said, but “at least they get things done”.

It’s an updated version of the claim that Mussolini, like him or loathe him, got the trains to run on time. (He didn’t actually, but the myth endures.) However, the idea that we should give up civil liberties, press freedom, tolerance and diversity in order to build airports more quickly (one of he examples Ms Foges gave of Mr Erdogan’s ruthless efficiency) is outrageous. The idea that Mr Putin “gets things done” in Russia is risible. He and his oligarch cronies have ransacked this former super power which now has the GDP of a medium-sized American state. The notion that Mr Trump is a Nietzschean uber-mensch is confounded by one look at his Twitter account.

Normally we’d dismiss such ramblings as a bad case of look-at-me journalism. Unfortunately we can’t. As Britain sinks into the mire of Brexit, there is a distinct air of Weimar about British politics. Democratic politicians, as in Germany in the 1920s, are deeply unpopular: not just mistrusted, but despised. There is an almost visceral revulsion toward elected leaders unable to resolve Brexit. A YouGov poll at the weekend suggested that 24 per cent of British people would now vote for an anti-immigrant party of the far right, like the Alternative fur Deutschland or Marine LePen’s National Front (now Rassemblement). It’s perhaps no accident the UK Government appears to be prepared to accept the death penalty for British Islamic State terrorists in America, something that would have been unimaginable until recently. This is pure populist politics.

But we shouldn’t be surprised. Right-wing populism is the dynamic force in European politics, and not just in Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Slovenia has just elected a right wing, anti-immigrant government. Italy is now under coalition led by Lega’s Matteo Savini, who has talked of “a mass cleansing” Italy of immigrants. Norway and Denmark have right-wing parties participating in government, and the far right Swedish Democrats are leading the polls in the ru- up to September’s election in that former liberal bastion. And of course, the Brexit vote had a vivid xenophobic strand running through it like Blackpool Rock.

Into this volatile mix steps the dark lord himself, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former strategist. This week he’s declared himself a right-wing alternative to billionaire philanthropist George Soros, who has been financing liberal causes in Europe for 25 years through his Open Society foundation. Mr Bannon’s rival, called Movement, intends to unite the disparate nationalist and right-wing parties in Europe and give them a central focus, “message discipline” and provide sophisticated voter-targeting technology. He revels in the image he has acquired as a “Bond villain” since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. “I kind of dig it” the former Breitbart chief told the Daily Beast.

That throwaway underlines how this modern right-wing politics has a style very different to the conventional picture. The antiquated image of fascist jackboots and goose-stepping paramilitary organisations, recycled by the British left and media, is highly misleading. We are looking at a sophisticated, media-wise Alt-Right, not 1930s National Socialism. It is a new form of nationalist populism, which targets white former working class communities, hit hard by globalisation, and feeling abandoned by the left.

To many marginalised working class men, the left today looks like a gaggle of querulous racial and gender minorities, trying to outdo each other in claims of victimhood. The alphabet soup of LGBTQI++, and the media’s preoccupation with transgender issues leave them cold. They’re intimidated by the feminists of #metoo seemingly threatening them with prosecution for wolf-whistling, or the sack if they tell the wrong joke. Even trade unions seem to have abandoned young working class people. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies noted recently, “union members are now overwhelmingly public sector, white collar and middle-aged”.

This alienation of the white working class provides the dynamic for very different right-wing politics from the revanchist nationalism and fascism of the 1930s. It is still nationalist, but isn’t based on imperialism or racial supremacy – indeed, we live in a time where ideas of racial (and gender) equality have never been more widely accepted by all classes. Instead, there is a seething resentment against “elite” politicians who seem to have abandoned the indigenous population and left them at the mercies of a globalised economy that is destroying jobs, lowering wages and inflicting mass immigration.

Of course, much of this is misguided. Immigrants contribute to the British economy and don’t on the whole suppress working class wages, despite what Jeremy Corbyn suggested in his speech yesterday. But we ignore the attitudes of the white working and middle classes at our peril.Mr Trump is the mirror image of left-wing identity politics – a white reaction against multiculturalism and internationalism. A man who is contemptuous of feminism and is almost wilfully politically incorrect.

Can it happen here? Well, it already has. Nigel Farage is one of the leading lights of Mr Bannon’s Movement, and is planning a right-wing “supergroup” to fight the next European elections. His Ukip party has been moving significantly to the right recently, adopting the cause of the alt-right provocateur Tommy Robinson, who it claims has been imprisoned for telling the truth about Muslim rape gangs. In the chaos of no-deal Brexit, anything could happen, and probably will.

Could it happen in Scotland? It is naïve to believe that Scots are immune to racism and xenophobia as the Herald poll yesterday confirmed, but an Alt-Right movement has an uphill struggle here. Immigration is much less visible in Scotland, and the dominant nationalist party, the SNP, has long foresworn ethnic or racial politics. But don’t think Scotland will be unaffected. We’re entering a new age of the European strong man, and he just doesn’t give a damn.