For instance, in Britain it might have been thought that since the 1980s at least, racial divisions have significantly diminished. Yet thanks to the internationalising of societies, nobody can predict the consequences of events happening anywhere in the world and their effect on domestic politics. For example, the Black Lives Matter movement that started in the United States in 2012, as a result of a number of killings by police of unarmed black men, eventually spread to Britain and other European countries. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the BLM movement in America, almost none of the circumstances for such a movement exist in Britain. In 2016 I watched a BLM protest of several thousand people marching through the centre of London giving black-power salutes and chanting, among other BLM themes, ‘Hands up, don’t shoot’. All the while they were escorted along the route of their march by British police officers, who of course do not carry guns. Whatever was comedic about this evaporated weeks later when on one of the hottest nights of the year a large crowd chanting BLM slogans met in Hyde Park. By the end of the evening one police officer had been stabbed and four other officers injured. Elsewhere the protest spilled over into one of London’s busiest streets where a man was set upon by three men armed with a machete. It was the most serious violence in the capital for years.

Nobody can have any idea where future movements of such a kind will come from. But if you have many people from various parts of the whole world living in close proximity, who come to entertain various degrees of resentment, it is probable that various of the world’s problems will descend on those communities at some time. And the world will always have problems. In the meantime it is not certain that the European publics will forever cease to resist the issue of race. If every other group and movement in society is able to identify race and talk explicitly about it, why not the Europeans? In the same way that it is not inevitable that Europeans will forever be persuaded of our historical and hereditary iniquity, so it is possible that we might eventually say that racial politics cannot be for everyone else but not for us.