The 2011 census could have provided a wonderful opportunity to address this, and it was, like every other opportunity since the Second World War in the discussion around immigration, wretchedly missed. It was not just the fact that no answers were given, but that so few pertinent questions were asked. For example, amid all the complacency surrounding these developments, nobody asked this question: If the fact that ‘white Britons’ now comprised a minority in their capital city was indeed a demonstration of ‘diversity’ (as the spokesman from the ONS had said), when might it cease to be so? The census had shown that some London boroughs were already lacking in ‘diversity’. Not because there weren’t enough people of immigrant origin but because there weren’t enough white British people still around to make those boroughs diverse.

In the years since the 2011 census the number of migrants into Britain has continued to soar. And the gap between the official figures and actual figures continues to vary hugely. One indication of the fact is that although the net migration figures for each year since the 2011 census has been far in excess of 300,000, the number of new National Insurance numbers issued each year (because they are required for work) has been more than double that. The rising population of the United Kingdom is now almost entirely due to immigration and to higher birth rates among immigrants. In 2014 women who were born overseas accounted for 27 per cent of all live births in England and Wales, and 33 per cent of newborn babies had at least one immigrant parent, a figure that had doubled since the 1990s.

On current population trends, and without any further rise in the number of immigrants, the most modest estimate by the ONS of the future British population is that it will rise from its current level of 65 million to 70 million within a decade, 77 million by 2050 and to more than 80 million by 2060.¹⁰ But this estimate assumes immigration to be beneath current levels. Whereas if the post-2011 levels were to continue, the UK population would go above 80 million as early as 2040 and as high as 90 million (that is an increase of 50 per cent on 2011) by 2060.

Demographic predictions are a notoriously tricky area, with enough variables to make fools of many. But among serious academic demographers there is a consensus that even without migration at the rate it has occurred in recent years the demographic make-up of the country will change even more significantly within the lifespan of most people reading this book. For instance, David Coleman, a professor of demography at Oxford University, has shown that on current trends the people who identified themselves as ‘white British’ in the 2011 census will cease to be a majority in the United Kingdom in the 2060s. However, he stresses, if current levels of immigration to Britain continue, let alone rise, that number ‘will move closer to the present’. It would be a time when, as Professor Coleman says, Britain would become ‘unrecognisable to its present inhabitants’.¹¹