It was with a macabre sense of relief that I woke up on Saturday morning to discover that the monster who drove a truck through the Bastille day crowd watching fireworks in Nice was not affiliated with any terrorist organisation.

The Islamic State has now claimed the man as their own but I feel that is just capitalising on the outrage which is their stock in trade.

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In fact the man (who I will not honour by naming) was a petty Tunisian criminal with a history of depression, domestic violence, and anti-social behaviour. He drank, he took drugs, he wore European clothes, he didn't go to a mosque. He was a deeply disturbed psychopath with an axe to grind. But not solely an axe of religion but also an axe of poverty and disenfranchisement. He hated his adopted home because his life was so miserable in it.

I was on air on Friday afternoon and, even though Barry Soper kept saying that it may not be a terrorist but a madman, the talk quickly turned to radical terrorism. Obama was blamed, the Syrian refugee crisis was blamed and Islam was blamed. I hope some people are regretting their words today. Words of hatred. More than one person suggested the eradication of a religion followed by more than a billion people, which is frankly naive and totally achievable.

On Friday, I did mention the societal makeup of Nice. A city I lived in for 3 years in the early 90s. Before Al Qaeda and Islamic State. A decade before 9/11. A quarter of a century before the shootings at the Bataclan.

When I was there the Arabs and the Muslims and the Blacks from French colonies in Africa had arrived in force. They were the considered lowest of the low. They were hated by the European French. If they had a job they were lucky. And if they had a job it was menial and poorly paid. They did not live near the Mediterranean. They lived in the valleys North of Nice in skyscraper ghettos. The Bastille Day monster's family lives in one of those today. You never went there. Unemployed Arabs slouched on the streets waiting to relieve you of your possessions. In the weekend gangs of Arabs would come into town and cause havoc. Fighting, stealing, stabbing. They took particular pleasure in terrorising blonde tourists. A Swedish au pair friend of mine had her cheek broken by a gang of Arabs for no reason.

That was 25 years ago. Now their children are the third and fourth generation immigrants and the chip on their shoulder is immense and permanent. And these societies are reaping what they have sown.

When you marginalise people, disenfranchise them, dispossess them, they will eventually turn against you. Ripe for radicalisation or conversion to violence. We've now seen the Bastille Day killer. We've seen the unemployed North of England rejecting the EU. We've seen the dispossessed of America adopt a rich man, Donald Trump, and a socialist, Bernie Sanders, in the hope that they were listening. And if you need a reason for the failed Turkey coup its in the way Erdogan rewards the elite and ignores the poor.

A number of people have been warning of the costs recently of inequality and we're seeing it right before our eyes. As Peter Garrett said on this programme last week, there's nothing wrong with the global capitalism we've seen for the past 40 years that rewards the winners. As long as you make sure that the losers are cared for too.

And that is the lesson for me from the past two days. I'm more worried about the poor than the radical Islamists because there's an awful lot more of them. And New Zealand is not immune.

Shamefully we have plenty of poor in this country too. We have been warned.