In these same polls 55 per cent of Dutch voters said they didn’t want any more Muslims in their country, 56 per cent of Germans said they associated Islam with a striving for political influence and 67 per cent of French people said that they believed Islamic values to be ‘incompatible’ with the values of French society.10 By 2015 one poll showed that only 30 per cent of the general public in Britain agreed that the values of Islam are ‘compatible’ with the values of British society.11 Another poll carried out around the same time found that only a fifth (22 per cent) of the British public agreed with the statement that Islamic values and British values were ‘generally compatible’.12

It is the same everywhere. A poll carried out in Germany in 2012 showed that 64 per cent of respondents associated Islam with violence while 70 per cent associated it with fanaticism and radicalism. Only 7 per cent of Germans associated the religion with openness, tolerance or respect for human rights.13 As the American scholar of contemporary Islam, Daniel Pipes, has noted, opinion polls on these issues show a constant upward trajectory. Polling of the European public never reveals their concerns about these subjects diminishing. It is a one way street. So in 2010 not yet a half (47 per cent) of Germans said that they agreed with the statement that ‘Islam does not belong in Germany’. By May 2016 the number of Germans who agreed with this statement had risen to 60 per cent.14

All of this has gone on despite the entire Western European governing class telling the people that they are wrong. In fact, to date the most common response of Western Europe’s governing leaders has been that people who think in such a way have clearly not experienced enough diversity, in particular they haven’t experienced enough Islam, and that if they did they would think differently. The polls in fact show the opposite. The more Islam there is in a society the more dislike and distrust there is in that society towards Islam. But the response of the political classes has had something else in common, which has been their insistence that in order to deal with this problem they must deal with this expression of public opinion. Their priority has been not to clamp down on the thing to which the public are objecting but, rather, to the objecting public. If anybody wanted a textbook case on how politics goes wrong, here is one.