"This present age of idiotic nationalism"

It is one of the innumerable disadvantages of this present age of idiotic nationalism, political and economic, this age of passports and visas and quotas, when every country is as difficult to enter or leave as was the Czar’s Russia or the Sultan’s Turkey before the war, that it is no longer possible for this leavening process to continue. Bradford is really more provincial now than it was twenty years ago. But so, I suspect, is the whole world. It must be when there is less and less tolerance in it, less free speech, less liberalism. Behind all the new movements of this age, nationalistic, fascistic, communistic, has been more than a suspicion of the mental attitude of a gang of small town louts ready to throw a brick at the nearest stranger.

JB Priestley, as quoted on Matt Carr's blog on April 25, 2017 - coincidentally the same day when another blogger received an unwelcome visit from the small town lout, convicted fraudster and Caudillo of the English Defence League, Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley Lennon), flanked by a couple of his knuckle-dragging minions. I wonder where sub-Ukip troglodytes like this got the idea that it was OK to go around trying to intimidate people with the old "We know where you live" schtick?

Any ideas?