Faced with such realities, even the clearest humanitarian justifications for this began to wither. Among the new arrivals in 2015 there was a particularly large number of undocumented, unaccompanied minors. Although there were children among them, social workers said that perhaps three out of five of these ‘children’ claimed that their birthdays were on 1 January. And of course the vast majority of these (92 per cent) were male. It was the policy of Swedish officials to ignore these facts even when they were staring them in the face. But in August 2015 an asylum seeker whose application had been turned down murdered two Swedes with a knife in an Ikea store in Västerås. As the months passed, the patience of some Swedish people began to snap.

In October 2015, asylum centres in Munkedal, Lund and a dozen other places across the country were set alight by locals. The government moved to have all such locations kept secret in future. But the following January when a young female social worker was stabbed to death in an asylum shelter by a child migrant who turned out to be an adult, public opinion further soured. The issue of so-called ‘no-go zones’ became a major issue within the country, with officials furiously denying that there were areas of Sweden where the authorities could not enter even though local residents and emergency services who regularly came under assault in such areas knew this to be the case.

That August an eight-year-old boy from Birmingham, England, whose family were from Somalia, was killed in a gang-related grenade attack whilst visiting relatives in Gothenburg. As with a Gothenburg car bomb a year earlier, which had killed a three-year-old girl, ethnic gang violence of this kind had become routine. In 2016 it transpired that as much as 80 per cent of the Swedish police force were considering quitting because of the dangers that their jobs now entailed in dealing with the increasingly lawless, migrant-dominated areas of their country.

As with every other country, these migrants had been portrayed by the Swedish government and media as consisting almost entirely of doctors and academics. In reality a huge number of low-skilled people who did not speak the language had been imported into a country with very little need for low-skilled workers. And while the government reluctantly tightened up its border procedures, political and community leaders continued to insist that there should be no borders and that immigration could be limitless. Archbishop Jackelén insisted that Jesus would not approve of government restrictions on immigration.