Why is anyone surprised that young Conservative students at St Andrew’s University made an effigy of President Obama, wrapped it in an EU flag, and burnt it on a bonfire to the cheers and amusement of all present? It is a bit rude on the eve of Thanksgiving but the taboos that once might have restrained such behaviour have now all but disappeared.

The language used about President Obama on rightwing blogs is little different from the denunciation of President Roosevelt in the 1930s by the  antisemitic Fr Charles Coughlin who said Hitler and Mussolini had better ideas on running the economy than FDR.

Earlier in the autumn, the Oxford University Conservative Association was treated to one its members singing this charming ditty to the tune of Jingle Bells:

‘Dashing through the Third Reich
In a black Mercedes Benz
Killing all the Kikes’

and the OUCA undergraduate finished off the ditty  with the ‘Ra Ta Ta Ta’ of a machine-gun in the killing fields of what is called the ‘Shoah by Bullets’ after the Nazi invasion of Russia and eastern Europe 70 years ago.

To be fair and to her honour, the Conservative party chair, Lady Sayeeda Warsi, was swift to announce an investigation into this crude antisemitic outburst. Apparently the Oxford association is not formally linked to the Conservative party.

But what then to make of two students at St Andrews who earlier this year burst into the room of a Jewish New York student doing a one-year exchange to study chemistry. They called him a ‘Nazi terrorist’,  urinated into his sink and one of them pulled a  Star of David flag down from the wall to wipe his genitals on it.

St Andrews moved to expel the main perpetrator of this grotesque racist act and he also faced a court case. The Scottish Palestine Solidarity Committee defended the act on the grounds of freedom of expression.

Students will be students and when drink is taken the mores of the Bullingdon Club can turn pretty nasty. In the 1980s, Norman Tebbitt had to dissolve the Young Conservatives after revelations that their favourite song was the Nazi hymn ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’ from Cabaret. Others sported badges saying ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’ as the apartheid and Pinochet regimes were seen an exemplars of sound conservative politics.

It would be invidious to name current senior members of the political establishment who were involved in such student political extremism or active in the Race and Repatriation Committee of the Monday Club. Today repatriation is back in vogue but now it refers to the EU not sending immigrants home.

Some on the left too with their admiration for communist tyrants like Castro or democracy-crushers like Chavez are also open to criticism. And when the University and College Lecturers’ Union adopts a policy of boycotting Jews at universities in Israel – in contrast to the fake PhD some of its members gave to Saif al-Islam Gaddafi – why should students think ragging a pro-Israel American Jewish student is not forgivable behaviour?

St Andrews seems to have a specific problem with unpleasant rightwing students and the alma mater of Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge should be asking itself hard questions. But this is today’s Britain. All sorts of taboos no longer exist. Burning the effigy of America’s first black president or pre-1939 style Jew-hate incidents now take place and other than some tut-tutting no one much cares.

The other evening I was crossing the Strand to get the tube back to my flat when I heard a man calling out to his friends: ‘That’s a f*****g MP. Hey you! You’re one of those f*****g MPs, you vile c**t.’ I took no notice and went on my way. A west London Labour MP who gave up his Saturday night to attend a fundraising function and bought a bottle of House of Commons wine and chocolates as raffle prizes was greeted with the sneer ‘I suppose you bought all that on expenses.’ He left the raffle prizes and went home. This new coarseness in Britain represented by the campus behaviour of young Tories and Israel-hating anti-Semites as well as the open loathing of any elected public official is a problem that no one knows how to deal with.

Denis MacShane is MP for Rotherham and chair of the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism

Photo: Avi Dolgin