What, after all, can any government do once it realises that its policies have effects such as these? The German answer, as with the answers of governments across the continent for years, was to get on top of a specific part of the problem. Just as French governments had introduced the ban on headscarves, burkas or burkinis, the German authorities focused on the narrow issue of counter-terrorism. During the period before and after the migrant crisis their intelligence agencies maintained an impressive surveillance capability against people believed to be involved in the most radical movements. Compared to the French or the Belgians the ability of the Germans in this area was admired throughout Europe. But such success also kept the debate necessarily narrow. German politicians, as with counter-terrorism practitioners, focused on exceptionally limited questions, such as the so-called ‘paths to radicalisation’ that every country had discussed, but which became central to the German discussion. A bogus science grew up, while all the time policy makers missed the bigger questions beneath – questions that the general public had long been asking themselves. For the public seemed to know what the officials could not admit, which was that ‘radicalisation’ originated with a particular community and that as long as that community grew the ‘radicalisation’ would grow. There was after all a reason why the European country with the highest per-capita Muslim community – France – had suffered the largest number of attacks by ‘radicals’, whereas a country like Slovakia, for example, had suffered no such problems.

At such times, the gap between what the public can see and what the politicians can conceivably say, let alone do about it, became dangerously large. An Ipsos poll published in July 2016 surveyed public attitudes towards immigration. It revealed just how few people think that immigration has had a good impact on their societies. To the question, ‘Would you say that immigration has generally had a positive or negative impact on your country’, extraordinarily low percentages of people in each country thought that immigration had a positive effect on their country. Britain had a comparatively positive attitude, with 36 per cent of people saying they thought immigration had a very or fairly positive impact on their country. Meanwhile only 24 per cent of Swedes felt the same way and just 18 per cent of Germans. In Italy, France and Belgium only 10–11 per cent of the population thought that immigration had made even a fairly positive impact on their countries.7