In 2016, it's all the rage to be post-borders, beyond tribes, a global citizen rather than a blinkered inhabitant of an old-fashioned, closed-off community. Among the new clerisy — those self-styled guardians of right-thinking, who are pro-EU, sniffy about national borders, and made positively nauseous by the sight of the St George’s flag — there’s nothing naffer than being tribal, than feeling like you belong to one community more than another. In fact in their minds, communities, especially local ones, aren’t only lame — they’re potentially dangerous, fostering narrow-minded thinking and in some cases even racist attitudes.

Modern-day commentary drips with contempt for community life and national sentiment and sporting or cultural tribes. Writing in the Guardian a few years back, Lynsey Hanley, author of the new book Respectable: The Experience of Class, came off like one of those Nietzsche-worshipping British snobs catalogued by John Carey in his book The Intellectuals and the Masses. She sneered at certain working-class communities as “paranoid, suspicious, mistrustful, misogynist and racist”. These shut-off worlds can come to be riddled with “social conservatism”, she said, where eventually the inhabitants “silently or violently [reject] anyone who is different or who expresses a different opinion to that of the crowd”.