This feels like such a low moment, don’t you think? A moment when no one is rising to the scale of the challenge we currently face.

We are living in a nation where the Westminster Government is a zombified mess of grievance politics and performative cruelty, where the opposition is more concerned with not spooking the horses than offering any real alternative to the failed nostrums of the last decade and a half.

In Scotland, meanwhile, we are rather caught up in a constant Moebius loop of our 2014 moment. And Northern Ireland still doesn’t have a government.

The UK National Debt is more than 100 per cent of our GDP. Everything seems broken. Our transport system is failing, our health service is struggling, the cost of living crisis is a real and present danger for many, homelessness is on the rise, we are paying the price for a decade of austerity politics and Brexit and not one of those responsible is willing to take any responsibility for what they have done.

We live in a culture that enthusiastically embraces the loudest voices even if they are talking nonsense. We are swimming in spurious conspiracy theories and our political discourse is being poisoned as a result. The Prime Minister - THE PRIME MINISTER - yesterday smeared the Labour Party and the legal profession in a tweet by associating both with “criminal gangs”.

There is a war in Ukraine. Israeli democracy is in peril, there are humanitarian crises in Sudan, Yemen, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Somalia and elsewhere. In the United States women’s rights are being eroded and books are being banned and Donald Trump, despite everything, may still be a presidential candidate again.

And all around us the world is burning. There are fires in Sicily, Rhodes and Algeria, heatwaves in central Europe as climate change bites hard. And yet Rishi Sunak’s craven, incompetent, careless Government is backtracking on Ultra Low Emission Zones rather than face up to the needs of the moment and find a way to make the policy work.

The thing is, I’m not normally a Jeremiah. I don’t tend to believe the world is ending this time next Tuesday. I know what political failure looks like. It looks like Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s, the place I grew up in.

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But in my worst moments at the moment I wonder if we’re approaching a juncture that could take us down the wrong path.

Because there is a danger when politicians start to compare the opposition with criminals, when politics becomes all about pandering to your electoral base and nothing more, when supposed “news” channels are really just vehicles for climate change denial, when regulatory bodies are toothless, when we dehumanise refugees, when governments see the law as something to attack, when politicians go for easy populist answers that all too often rely on division (and that ultimately never work), then maybe we are in bad place.

Or maybe I’m just having a bad day. Maybe the world is turning as it always does and some things will get better, some will get worse. I’d like to believe that, but … On Radio 4 yesterday morning Ken Clarke, in between praising Margaret Thatcher and Harold MacMillan and reminiscing fondly about his days in politics, pointed out that politicians today face greater challenges than anything he ever did in government back in the 1980s and 1990s. This is far from reassuring. Because if you look around you have to ask which of the current crop of political leaders are up to the job they face?

Let’s hope some of them are. If so, they’re keeping their heads down.

In the early days of the Second World War the poet W H Auden wrote his poem September 1, 1939 in which he wrote of the 1930s “the clever hopes expire/ Of a low dishonest decade”.

This is not the same moment. but we can ask a question. Does this feel like a low, dishonest decade? Right now, there are days when it has that odour to it.