In order to bring an end to the ongoing migration problem and turn around the challenge that already exists, it would also be necessary for Europe’s political leaders to acknowledge where they have gone wrong in the past. They might, for instance, acknowledge that if Europe is concerned about an ageing population there are more sensible policies than importing the next generation of Europeans from Africa. They might concede that while diversity may be advantageous in small numbers, in large numbers it would irrevocably end society as we know it. They might then stress that they do not actually want to fundamentally change our societies. This would be a painful concession for the political class, but it would have overwhelming support from the European publics.

In recent years those publics have been exceptionally accepting of immigrants while opposed to mass immigration. Long before their political leaders told them that it was acceptable to have concerns about immigration, they knew this. Before the sociologists proved it, they knew that immigration weakened all sense of societal ‘trust’. And before the politicians admitted it, the public were struggling to get their children into over-subscribed local schools. It was the public who were told that health-tourism was not a problem, even as they queued for appointments in waiting rooms filled with people from other countries.

The public also knew long before their political leaders that the benefits the migrants undoubtedly brought were not endless, and they sensed long before it became acceptable to say it that migration on such a scale would fundamentally change their countries. They noticed that some of the major battles of the twentieth century over rights were having to be refought again in the twenty-first century because of a growing number of opponents. They intimated that when it came to social liberalism Islam was simply the slowest child in the class. Just one result of which was that in the early twenty-first century, when Europe had hoped to have settled many of these issues – not least the separation of religion from politics and the law – the whole of society was having to go at the speed of this slowest child in the class. Thus, the increasing discussions about whether women should cover their faces in public, or be taken by their husband to their own special type of court if they happened to be of a particular faith.