Yet it is not only the political class who cannot speak to the concerns of the majority of the general public. On the night that the 2011 census results were announced the BBC’s flagship discussion show ‘Newsnight’ held a discussion of the news on which three-quarters of the participants expressed themselves perfectly delighted with the census and could see no cause for concern in the results. On that occasion the philosopher A. C. Grayling, himself a hugely successful immigrant from Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia), said of the findings of the census, ‘I think on the whole it’s a very positive thing, a thing to be celebrated.’ The critic and playwright Bonnie Greer, also a highly successful immigrant (from America), agreed that it was a positive thing and said, like Boris Johnson, ‘It cannot be stopped.’⁵ Over the whole discussion the allure of this ‘get with the beat’ attitude prevailed. Perhaps the temptation to ‘go with the flow’ is so strong in this argument because the price for stepping outside the consensus is so uniquely high. Get a studio discussion about the budget wrong and you might be accused of financial ignorance or poor interpretation of the public mood. But nod to the overwhelming public mood, let alone speak for it, on immigration and reputations, careers and livelihoods are on the line.

Yet somewhere, lost in the middle of all the hip consensus of that Central London studio, what was almost entirely absent were the views of most people sitting at home, a world that few people ever appear to want to put their finger on in public. The upsides of migration have become easy to talk about: to simply nod to them is to express values of openness, tolerance and broad-mindedness. Yet to nod to, let alone express, the downsides of immigration is to invite accusations of closed-mindedness and intolerance, xenophobia and barely disguised racism. All of which leaves the attitude of the majority of the public almost impossible to express.

For even if you believe – as most people do – that some immigration is a good thing and makes a country a more interesting place, it does not follow that the more immigration the better. Nor does it mean – however many upsides there are – that there are not downsides which should be equally easy to state without accusations of malice. For mass immigration does not continue bringing the same level of benefits to a society the more people who come in. If it is possible to praise mass immigration for making us richer as a whole, it should also be possible to explain that the process has made us poorer in some ways, not least in introducing or re-introducing cultural problems that we might have hoped never to see.

The January before the release of the 2011 census results a gang of nine Muslim men — seven of Pakistani origin, two from North Africa — were convicted and sentenced at the Old Bailey in London for the sex trafficking of children between the ages of 11 and 15. On that occasion one of the victims sold into a form of modern-day slavery was a girl of 11 who was branded with the initial of her ‘owner’ abuser: ‘M’ for Mohammed. The court heard that Mohammed ‘branded her to make her his property and to ensure others knew about it’. This did not happen in a Saudi or Pakistani backwater, nor even in one of the northern towns that so much of the country had forgotten about and which had seen many similar cases over the same period. This happened in Oxfordshire between 2004 and 2012.