In a column titled ‘Let’s not dwell on immigration but sow the seeds of integration’, the then Conservative Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, responded to that census by saying, ‘We need to stop moaning about the dam-burst. It’s happened. There is nothing we can now do except make the process of absorption as eupeptic as possible.’² Sunder Katwala from the left-wing think tank ‘British Future’ responded to the census in a similar tone, saying, ‘The question of do you want this to happen or don’t you want this to happen implies that you’ve got a choice and you could say “let’s not have any diversity”.’ But this was not possible, he insisted, ‘This is who we are – it’s inevitable.’³

Perhaps both were right and simply saying what any politician surveying the situation would have to say. But there is something cold about the tone of such remarks. Not least the absence of any sense that there may be other people out there not willing to simply ‘get over it’, who dislike the alteration of their society and never asked for it. Indeed, it seemed to have struck neither Johnson nor Katwala that there are those who may sustain a degree of anger about the fact that all the main parties had for years taken a decision so wholly at variance with public opinion. At the very least it seemed to occur to neither that there is something profoundly politically disenfranchising about such talk. Not only because it suggests a finality to a story that is in fact ongoing, but because it adopts a tone more ordinarily directed at some revanchist minority rather than towards a majority of the voting public.

In the same month that these insistences that people ‘get over it’ emerged, a poll by YouGov found 67 per cent of the British public believed that immigration over the previous decade had been ‘a bad thing for Britain’. Only 11 per cent believed it had been ‘a good thing’.⁴ This included majorities among voters for every one of the three major parties. Poll after poll both before and since have found the same thing. As well as routinely prioritising immigration as their number one concern, a majority of voters in Britain regularly described immigration as having had a negative impact on their public services and housing through overcrowding, as well as harming the nation’s sense of identity.

Of course, the political impetus to ‘draw a line’ and not get into ‘blame games’ raises the possibility that having got away with their mistakes to date the politicians may feel ready – after such suitable imprecations – to repeat precisely the same mistakes in the future. By 2012 the leaders of every one of the major parties in Britain had conceded that immigration was too high, but even whilst doing so all had also insisted that the public should ‘get over it’. None had any clear – nor, as it would turn out, successful – policy on how to change course. Public opinion surveys suggest that a failure to do anything about immigration even while talking about it is one of the key causes of the breakdown in trust between the electorate and their political representatives.