Here is a lobby which presents itself as anti-racist, keen only to protect English footballers and fans from being racially abused in Ukraine, yet which simultaneously depicts that Eastern European nation as a weird hotbed of backward attitudes. Here’s a movement which publicly frowns upon expressions of racism, yet which treats Ukraine in a manner similar to when Victorian colonialists rolled up in an African backwater and stared in bewilderment at its strange-tongued natives. The boycott campaign confirms that modern anti-racism is, in the irony to end all ironies, more about expressing one’s superiority over uneducated peoples than it is about securing proper equality.

Read this opinion at The Telegraph website.