Outside London and Islamic city states such as Bradford and Leicester, there is still an England familiar to the English – pubs, parish churches, village greens. In hamlets in Hampshire Jane Austen’s England thrives. There may be more squires than yokels, more manor houses than peasants’ cottages; and what cottages there are belong to weekending stockbrokers and advertising copywriters – the descendants of the peasants now packed into little Persimmon homes, each with a Georgian portico; but here all can pretend that they live in a country with an English culture and an English history, not a polyglot global growth vortex that sucks in immigrants to build larger airports with more runways to receive more immigrants to work in supermarkets and schools and hospitals to cater for immigrants or the children of immigrants. Only 20 per cent of children attending primary schools in London are born in Britain. When Jomier keeps his hospital appointments surly West Indian women at the reception desk tell him to wait with the Ethiopian, Iranian, Malaysian patients to be seen by an Iraqi or Indian or Sri Lankan or Nigerian doctor. The only specialist Jomier has come across with a white skin was Czech. Her assistant was also white: a German. The male nurse was Albanian.

Is Jomier a racist? He reads the newspapers. He watches television. He knows that there is a thought police out there looking for racists among white middle-class Englishmen like Jomier. It is the first of the Seven Sins of the Secular State. These are:

Racism

Misogyny

Homophobia

Elitism

Smoking

Obesity

Religious belief

Jomier is innocent of faith and fatness, and he no longer smokes. But the others? Can one be a racist without knowing it, like the carrier of a disease? What is a racist? How is racism to be defined? Is it a mere awareness of the race or nationality of others? A preference for one race or nationality over another? Jomier likes the courteous Indians or Pakistanis who sit behind the counter in the newsagents and sub-post offices across London and dislikes the West Indian youths who saunter around in flash trainers and baggy trousers and drop chocolate wrappers and pizza boxes in the street. But Jomier’s prejudices have nothing to do with the hue of human skin. He dislikes the blarney-bullshitting Irish and, most of all, the sullen, sarcastic, shaven-headed, white-van-driving Sun-reading indigenous Estuary English.

Jomier’s prejudices, he decides, are not based on race but on characteristics that transcend race. Jomier likes people who are intelligent, articulate, curious, amusing, cultivated, considerate, kind. He likes people who share his sense of humour and catch his ironies; people who are oblique, unassertive, cynical, disillusioned. ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity . . .’