The Battle of Lewisham in 1977 (Picture: BBC)

What my old editor Roger Norman would have thought about the home secretary referring to asylum seekers as an ‘invasion’ cannot be known, as he died in 2006. But he would not have been impressed, for sure.

The reason for raising this is not only the smudged nostalgia of a man regarding the start of his career from somewhere near its end. It is because Roger stood against the National Front while he was editor of the South East London and Kentish Mercury.

He would surely be horrified to know the right-wing racism he confronted in the 1970s finds an echo today in the language used by Suella Braverman.

As my old colleagues Peter Cordwell and Pat Greenwood noted in an obituary for the Guardian, the 1970s and 1980s were crucial decades for the Afro-Caribbean community in Lewisham.

“When the National Front wanted to march through his patch of New Cross in 1974, Roger’s front page lead spelling out in words and pictures exactly what they stood for was headlined ‘You’d Better Believe Us!’.”

He also, they wrote, numbered among community champions who by “tirelessly giving a sensible steer towards harmony, helped create the ‘live-and-let-live’ ethos among south-east Londoners that set the scene for today’s multicultural society”.

That is certainly true, although from this distance it seems as if that multi-cultural society is both a good and undeniable part of our lives – and something to be given a kicking by right-wing nasties.

There is not a direct comparison between the white-power National Front marching against the local Afro-Caribbean community in the 1970s and Ms Braverman’s deeply hostile portrayal today of the ‘migrant crisis’ (that’s if such a crisis even exists).

But what seems horribly telling is that the sort of vile language once found in the rank silos of the right now flows into our lives – much as all that shit flows into the sea.

Ms Braverman seems only to have increased the difficulties faced by asylum seekers living in the overcrowded Manston migrant processing centre in Kent.

The senior Tory backbencher Sir Roger Gale told Sky News that the overcrowded facility, where outbreaks of MRSA and diphtheria have been reported, were “wholly unacceptable”, adding: “These circumstances, I believe now were a problem made in the Home Office.”

The Times reported yesterday that senior Conservative MPs feel the home secretary risks fuelling support for far-right extremists, with one unnamed former Home Office minister describing Ms Braverman as “facile, totally uncompassionate and insincere”.

Antipathy towards asylum seekers is a deeply unattractive facet of British life. Mostly we are, or should be, a kind and reasonable nation. So where does this dislike, hatred even, of outsiders and otherness come from? We’re all an outsider somewhere; all an ‘other’ somewhere; all human wherever we are.

So why do so many people succumb to this inciteful hatred? Perhaps in part because we allowed Nigel Farage’s base racism to be treated as if it were normal, to be aired on the BBC far too often, and to become the main but unacknowledged force behind his beloved Brexit. And now, with a smack of irony, the Brexit fought for by Farage and his ilk has not improved our life one jot – but seems to have increased the number of small boats crossing the Channel.

Worth remembering, with a sigh at having to say it again, that there is no such person as an illegal asylum seeker. Under international law it is not illegal to seek asylum.

The ‘illegality’, or perception of such, is down to the likes of Ms Braverman trying to make asylum seekers seem illegal, and down to cruel and wasteful schemes such as the Rwanda deal (asylum seekers despatched via that route: none).

As even the BBC News acknowledged the other night in a report by Mark Easton, the UK receives far fewer asylum seekers than most other EU countries.

Perhaps it’s our island mentality – or its misappropriation by those who love to spout hate. Also, people crossing the Channel in small boats are highly visible, especially when Farage, that shabby study in tweedy vengeance and unsatisfiable spite, stands on the shore pointing.

We could ease matters by opening a process centre in France, run with the French (they’d be willing to co-operate). But that way the small boats would disappear, and Nasty Nigel would have nothing to point at.

As for Roger Norman, stout is not my drink, but perhaps I should raise a pint of the milky-frothed stuff in his memory, as that was his lunchtime tipple, back in the days when people still tippled at lunchtime.