What a long way, in politics, a few foreigners will get you. Last week in Bournemouth, the day after Gordon Brown’s big speech, I stopped off in a newsagent. The local paper carried a big front-page headline – something like MIGRANT DANGER – which topped a story about bad Eastern European drivers killing everybody. The young woman at the counter, with her high cheekbones and soft accent, was obviously a migrant from somewhere Slavic, but she somehow managed to sell me a magazine and a flapjack without either of us suffering.

It was a minor irony, of course. I am sure that she wouldn’t have felt targeted by the article, any more than she might have been by Julie Spence, the Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire, seemingly blaming migrants for overburdening her force with demands for translation – or the rash of “Migrant Assaults Child” yelps that accompanied the tale from Chatham of the Slovakian mother who set about a junior Ku Klux Klan tormentor with the sort of peremptory dispatch that many regret the police no longer using.

That’s the mood that the parties are catching, and that’s why the word “foreigner” as a term suggesting both threat and blame, has become almost fashionable. Foreigners, said the PM, would get ID cards first, would be expelled if they had guns or sold drugs, would be asked to play by the rules and to learn English. “Wealthy foreigners”, we were told by the BBC news yesterday, would pay for the abolition of stamp duty for first-time housebuyers under plans announced at the Tory party conference.

There is a constituency in this country – one that often writes to me – that was well represented by Lord Tebbit when he was wrote in the latest edition of The Spectator. He wondered why – in this anarchic shambles of a country in which teachers are routinely assaulted in classrooms, illiteracy is rising, where “foreigners” have even taken our doctors’ jobs (gaining access to our quivering, vulnerable bodies) and all is debt, profligacy and woe – the Tories were trailing the treacherous new Labour architects of dystopia.

A sporty Tebbit might have added something else to his list of fallings-off: the weekend’s Welsh rugby defeat at the hands of the Fijians. Not so long ago Wales was the great rugby-playing nation of Great Britain. On Saturday the Welsh were surpassed by a team from a collection of islands that was only just getting its independence when JPR was the best full back in the world. The Welsh coach was sacked. It was “the darkest hour” in Welsh rugby.

But why shouldn’t Fiji win? Why was the story not about how much the Fijians had added a steeliness to their game to accompany the brittle “flair” that we had patronised them for possessing for all those years? Over time the people of Fiji, like those of Argentina, have been practising their rugby, working at it, until they are as good as us. That’s also why it was Ludmila who was selling flapjacks in the corner shop.

This seems to be a safety-first political season aimed at pretending that Britain is somehow insulated from the world and its changes, save for foreigners unfortunately coming in. It’s a narrowness that began at the TUC with the PM’s linking of full employment to restrictions on foreign labour, under the offensive rubric of “British jobs for British workers”. What about taking the people who are willing to work hard at the jobs we need doing? Only in David Miliband’s speech, promoting once again the EU accession of Turkey, was the myth of isolation challenged.

Not long ago it was about global interdependence, Africa and climate change, and now politics is all about sly nods to the antiimmigrants and, in Blackpool, pointless bribes to the electorate. Yesterday George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, triumphantly announced that the Tories would change inheritance tax so that instead of just being levied on the wealthiest 6 per cent of estates, it would now only be taken from the top 1 per cent. And, I wondered, what problem exactly was this the answer to? Have we discovered that the unearning rich are somehow not rich enough? So, if David Cameron becomes PM, you can inherit £999,999 without paying a penny in taxation: well, there’s an incentive to work!

What a difference a year makes. The late, now unmentioned, Tony Blair used his last conference speech to touch on how globalisation was transforming the world, presenting opportunities but also discombobulating many people, whose communities – often in areas unused to immigration - weren’t prepared for the change. He also pointed out that British citizens have been making the best of their opportunities to follow their guiding angels into other people’s countries.

How we adjust to all this is an essential question, but it is being lost in the electoral triangulation. Gordon is a horrid Scot; English votes for English matters; Boris and David are just toffs. In Bournemouth I came across good progressives scoffing at Mr Cameron because he decided to fulfil his commitment to visit Rwanda, instead of wandering pointlessly around his mildly flooded constituency commiserating with the owners of ruined carpets. It was loathsome.

Lord Tebbit was wrong about Britain but he was surely right, in the same article, to demand fearless leadership. Bribes, mild xenophobia and snideries don’t add up to a charting a clear direction of travel for the country. It may be that the British people were indeed tired of Mr Blair and what they see as his international grandiosities, but that doesn’t mean he was wrong about the world and where it’s headed. The essential question for Britain is whether it continues to be progressive, internationalist, open, liberal, free trading and unafraid, or turns in on itself and consoles itself in decline – whether Left or Right – with tinkering and complaining, all the time wondering why it cannot get the genie back in the bottle.

I had big hopes of both Mr Brown and Mr Cameron, believing that they must see this too, and must have wanted to lead their country, not follow it. But this has been a bad fortnight and I am now wondering whether the era of flawed statesmen hasn’t given way to the tyranny of the parish populists.

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