The effect of these two actions have been awful, but I do suspect that they weren't intended.

There are places where a particular colour is used by landowners. I can think of two - there's a village in West Sussex, possibly Midhurst, where most of the properties belong to the nearby big house's estate, and last time I drove through, all the properties were painted in the same shade. And along the South Circular, a bunch of properties belonging to a building contractor were all painted in the same colour. I imagine the same thinking went with the doors.

Where it started to go wrong was that the company concerned then decided to make its money by targeting the asylum seekers account with whichever government department was involved.

And then a nasty bunch of locals worked it out and made a point of attacking the properties. Of course, painting them different colours now will not help at all, because those nasty people know which houses they are.

As for the wrist bands, I dare say the original issuers thought of it as being like people using them for festivals.

It is, again, the nasty bits of work who spotted that they had a way of identifying people to bully who caused the problem.

It's quite different from the government deciding on a label, making the refugees wear it, and telling everyone else, via the medium of films and so on portraying the refugees as rats or similar, that attacking the wearers of the label is a good patriotic act.

Unless, of course, it's all been much more subtle than yellow stars, and the engaging of that obnoxious woman and similar shock columnists as people who can be identified as outliers when they do the labelling is part of a conspiracy to achieve the same effects as 1930's Germany without attracting the opprobrium. Until it's too late.

I do worry about the people I share this country with.