Perhaps instead of simply celebrating such levels of immigration it would make matters easier if the proponents of mass immigration revealed what levels of ‘diversity’ they would like to get to and what they see as their optimal target figure? Is a ceiling of 25 per cent white Britons in London — or the country at large — a target? Or should it be 10 per cent? Or none at all? A final, and perhaps harder, question to ask would be when, if at all, given the range of claims against them, these ‘white Britons’ might ever be able to acceptably argue, let alone complain, about their odds?

Barring any drastic plan by a British government intent on averting such a trend, it is hard to see how this process could fail to continue. Not only because consecutive governments have shown themselves so incapable of predicting or anticipating anything in the arena of migration for the last 70 years, but because the objection to any such plan would continue to be so considerable. Consider Will Self again, speaking to wild studio applause on the BBC after the 2011 census findings were released: ‘The people who line up on the opposition to the immigration line of the argument are usually racists [audience applause] … [with an] antipathy to people, particularly with black and brown skins.’ Having long ago reached the point where the only thing white Britons could do was to remain silent about the change in their country, at some point in recent years it began to appear as though they were expected simply to get on, silently but contentedly, with abolishing themselves, accepting the knocks and accepting the loss of their country: ‘Get over it. It’s nothing new. You were terrible. Now you are nothing.’

In all this it is impossible not to notice the striking level of vindictiveness around the manner in which the concerns of British people – and the white working and middle classes in particular – have been met by politicians and pundits alike. Perhaps at some point the ‘just lying-down and taking it’ period will stop, with repercussions quite as unforeseeable as all those to date. But in the meantime, if any politician wanted to try to pre-empt that eventuality and felt like indulging in an act of humility, he or she could do worse than go back to the point at which we started. Compare the statements derided as clichés that have come from so many working- and middle-class white voters in recent years and set them alongside the statements of the leaders of each of the mainstream political parties. All these years on, despite the name-calling and the insults and the ignoring of their concerns, were your derided average white voters not correct when they said that they were losing their country? Irrespective of whether you think that they should have thought this, let alone whether they should have said this, said it differently or accepted the change more readily, it should at some stage cause people to pause and reflect that the voices almost everybody wanted to demonise and dismiss were in the final analysis the voices whose predictions were nearest to being right.