What is more, it had all been done on the laughable presumption that while all cultures are equal, European cultures are less equal than others. And that a person who favoured the culture of Germany over that of Eritrea had, in the most gracious interpretation, an out-of-date or ill-informed opinion, and in the more common view was simply an out-and-out racist. That all this was done in the name of a diversity that became less and less diverse by the year should have been the clearest possible warning sign.

For if there was any chance at all of this working it would be that the new Europeans from Africa or anywhere else in the world would swiftly learn to be as European as any Europeans in the past. Perhaps there has been some official nervousness about this. For some years in Britain the annual list of most popular babies’ names cited in the Office for National Statistics was a subject of contention. Again and again variants of the name ‘Mohammed’ climbed higher and higher up the lists. Officials defended their practice of listing the ‘Mohammeds’ separately from the ‘Muhammads’ and other variant spellings of the same name. Only in 2016 did it become clear that this was immaterial because the name in all its variants had indeed become the most popular boy’s name in England and Wales. At which point the official line changed to ‘And so what?’ It was implied that the Mohammeds of tomorrow will be as English or as Welsh as the Harrys or Dafydds of the generations before. In other words, Britain will remain British even when most of the men are called Mohammed, in the same way that Austria will remain Austria even when most of the men are called Mohammed. That this is unlikely hardly needs saying.

Indeed, nearly all the evidence appears to be pointing the opposite way. Anyone in doubt about this might simply consider the minorities within the minorities. Who, for instance, are the Muslims in Europe who are most under threat. Are they the radicals? Do the Salafists and Khomeinists and Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas leaders in Europe live under any threat or ever have to worry even about their reputations? There is no evidence to suggest they do. Even groups whose graduates go on to behead Europeans are taken on their own estimation inside Europe to be ‘human rights’ groups, intent merely on tackling the injustices endemic in our racist and patriarchal society. This is why by 2015 more British Muslims were fighting for Isis than for the British armed forces.