Here is Bonnie Greer again on Newsnight: ‘There’s always this failsafe, spoken or unspoken, that there is a British identity. That’s always interesting to me. I think one of the geniuses of the British — of being British — is that there isn’t this sort of rock-solid definition of identity that an American has.’ It is hard to think of another part of the world where such a claim would be acceptable, let alone from the mouth of an immigrant: your culture has always been like this — it never really existed. If one even said anything similar in Greer’s native Chicago – let alone on the main television network – it would be unlikely to receive such a polite reception as it was accorded on Newsnight.

Harsher examples of this argument have abounded during the era of mass migration. In 2006 Channel 4 screened a documentary called ‘100% English’. This programme took a group of white British people whom it clearly believed were racists — including Margaret Thatcher’s loyal cabinet colleague Norman Tebbit — and performed DNA tests on them. The test results were then used to prove that all of the people in question were in fact ‘foreigners’. The results were produced triumphantly to each of the subjects in order to point to the same conclusion: ‘You see – we’re all foreigners really. So there’s no need to feel any concern about immigration or national identity.’ Again, of course nobody would conceivably be so rude as to do this to any other group of people. But with British and other European peoples, different rules of engagement had begun to apply. All appeared to be methods of coping with a change that if it cannot be stopped must be solved by alterations in the minds of the host countries.

Down the line there is another, starker, rebuttal. That says that this form of destruction is exactly what our societies deserve. ‘Do you know what white people did?’ they ask. ‘And you Europeans in particular? You travelled around the world and lived in countries and pillaged them, and tried to erase their local cultures. This is payback. Or karma.’ The novelist Will Self (currently Professor of Contemporary Thought at Brunel University) played precisely this line of attack on the BBC in the same week that the 2011 census was published. On the network’s main discussion show, Question Time, he declared, ‘Up to the Suez crisis … most people’s conception of what being British involved was basically going overseas and subjugating black and brown people and taking their stuff and the fruits of their labours. That was a core part of British identity, was the British Empire. Now various members of the political class have tried to revive that idea quite recently without much success.’⁹

Leaving aside the claim that any member of the political class has tried to revive the British Empire in recent years, in these comments one can hear the authentic and undisguised voice of revenge. Demonstrating that such an instinct transcends racial or religious boundaries, and can as easily be self-induced as aimed at others, it suggests that on this occasion Britain must be uniquely punished for the deeds of history. The repercussions of the argument are striking to consider. For if this is even partially a spur for the recent transformation of our country, then what we are going through is not an accident, or a mere laxness at the borders, but a cool and deliberate act of national sabotage. Motivations aside, this also throws up the ultimate questions that our politicians remain so unwilling to address: How much longer must all this go on? Are we approaching the end of this transformation? Or is this only the beginning?