Reflecting back, I can still vividly recall the collective groans from both the audience and panelists on BBC’s Question Time when I advised young people to leave the country while they still had the chance.

This was back in October 2013. Today, I suspect that far fewer people would respond with the same disapproval.

Among those who scoffed at my suggestion was none other than Liz Truss, a political figure with a track record of questionable decisions. She claimed that Britain’s best days were yet to come (although, in terms of her political career, it was perhaps her best weeks). She also made the astonishing assertion that the ‘comprehensive’ school she attended in Leeds’ pleasant Roundhay suburb was ‘average’.

Given her evident struggles with practical mathematics, she might genuinely believe this claim.

This morning, I awoke with an even stronger conviction that those who have the opportunity to leave should seriously consider it.

However, I do not count myself among them. I hold a firm belief that if you relocate to another country, you should be able to support yourself and contribute positively. At 74, I am past the age to fulfill these expectations, so I must remain and face the consequences of my inability to improve this nation.

But the temptation to go was especially strong over the past few days.

Lots of people I know feel something similar, turning away from politics which once engaged them because it is just a pudding of lies, nasty-looking and impossible to swallow.

‘When I lived in Moscow, I bought a special powered aerial so that I could conjure the BBC radio World Service and its stately bulletins out of the grubby, censored Russian air, even during solar storms. I wouldn’t bother now. It has stopped being news’

How tiring it is to listen to political rubbish about immigration, a problem which the major parties have laboriously created.

They have done this by repeatedly stoking foreign wars in places where we had no business, so creating one of the biggest mass migration waves in the history of the world.

They have also deliberately robbed themselves of the power to act, by handing over our sovereignty to foreign bodies and treaties and by handing over domestic government powers to Left-wing courts.

Do you really think they have to obey the European Court of Human Rights? They just find it a handy way of imposing changes in the law which they would not dare put in their manifestos.

And then they have made millions of British people unemployable by destroying hundreds of good schools and replacing them with the worst education system in the advanced world.

Having been found out, far too late, they claim to be worried and promise, yet again, to solve crises which long ago floated away, far out of their control.

Anyway, why should I care what these nonentities say?

Where do they find these dull, uninspired, idea-free people who appear to have done nothing in their lives except to scramble up the greasy pole of career politics, and whose most dramatic battle-honours come from some clash in the struggle for control of the National Union of Students?

‘The major political parties have made millions of British people unemployable by destroying hundreds of good schools and replacing them with the worst education system in the advanced world’

At the same time they have so completely fouled up the economy that there are no answers except politically impossible cuts and/or politically impossible taxes.

And the national defences are a grotesque monstrosity, top heavy with supersized but wonky aircraft carriers and clapped-out, barnacled nuclear missile submarines, while the essential workaday navy of frigates, destroyers and support ships is largely immobilised, too decrepit to move.

There is only one end to this sort of mess, and this will be horrible levels of inflation, a catastrophe that leaves its victims alive, dwelling on in a blasted society as ghosts of their former selves.

I know this is coming and that nobody will stop it. I just don’t know exactly when.

This is why I keep turning off the TV and radio news, often within moments of switching them on. It is fake news, though not in the way Donald Trump means it. It may be true in its way, but it isn’t news.

When I lived in Moscow, I bought a special powered aerial so that I could conjure the BBC radio World Service and its stately bulletins out of the grubby, censored Russian air, even during solar storms.

I wouldn’t bother now. It has stopped being news. Much of it is an extended edition of Woman’s Hour with soft-focus interviews and thinly-disguised comment.

This week Ukraine has been in turmoil over vast accusations of corruption, and if it has had any prominent coverage, I have yet to hear it.

There’s no real debate, no real opposition, no true confrontation between thought and action, just propaganda and gossip.

Since my schooldays, I have been enraptured by politics, as others are by sport, horse-racing or music. I can remember when I knew the constituency of every single MP. Now I am not interested, and look back at my teenage fervour, baffled and disappointed.

It’s as if there is a Dalek on permanent duty in the corridors of the BBC, instructing its vast legions of staff to ‘Exasperate! Exasperate!’ And they do. Stand against any aspect of it and – if you have a platform – you will be excluded from the airwaves and so rendered powerless. If you have no platform, it is even worse.

Did you not want to howl at the fate of the public-school teacher John Wright, found dead, probably by his own hand, after being sacked for ‘inappropriate’ comments about something or other?

What sort of despair must he have felt? How many lives apart from his own are wrecked? The school is offering ‘heartfelt condolences’ to his family. Oh, good. I have no idea what he said, or is alleged to have said, but how has the world gained by his treatment?

Yet we have created a society in which what would once have been called informing, against ‘inappropriate’ speech has become not just permissible but normal.

This is a marshmallow totalitarianism, a slippery dictatorship which takes care not to imprison dissenters but instead snatches away their livelihoods.

If they then go crazy or kill themselves or fall off the edge of society, that was their fault. Amnesty International is never going to intervene on their behalf.

And however often such things are exposed in what is left of the independent media, it just goes on happening.

If you toil in almost any workplace – town hall, school, police force, university, bus company or whatever it is – you know what you must do to ensure a quiet life and what you absolutely must not do or say.

No wonder so much of what is wrong in our society goes unchallenged. Wiser to shut up.

If only we had learned the key skill of voting against what we did not want, we could at least have avoided some of this stupidity.

The current government, for instance, is significantly worse than what it replaced. But people would not vote against it, as they would not vote against the obvious dangers of Anthony Blair in 1997 and David Cameron in 2010.

They continued to treasure the illusion that, by giving fools a mandate, they would get wise government. And next time? Millions still have this illusion.

How many more disappointments can we bear before we turn away from democracy altogether in disgust and dismay?