However, behind the insistence on ‘diversity’ as a good in itself lies another idea, albeit one that is perhaps less presentable to the general public. Although New Labour’s 2000 document was meant to be an economic analysis, it was the social aspect of migration that most interested one of its authors. In a book she had edited in 1994 called Strangers and Citizens: A Positive Approach to Migrants and Refugees, Sarah Spencer, of the Centre on Migration Policy and Society at Oxford argued that ‘The days when holding British nationality rested on a notion of allegiance are over.’13 Elsewhere she and her co-authors had argued that the nation state had changed and that the modern state had become ‘an open and formal association capable of accommodating diverse ways of life’ and that in that state ‘immigration policy must be seen … also as a means of enriching the cultural diversity of the country’.14 A year later Sarah Spencer was quoting approvingly in another publication the idea that ‘the traditional concept of nationality may be downgraded to the level of pure symbolism’ and arguing herself that ‘We are a diverse society of overlapping identities and are not bound, nor can we be bound, by universal values or single loyalties. If we are to be bound together it must be through the mutual enjoyment of rights and responsibilities.’15

This was a radically different understanding of what constituted a people or a country, and one with profound and – for most of the public – unpalatable connotations. Sarah Spencer outlined these in 2003 when she wrote about the idea of ‘integration’, that it is not something the migrant does to adapt to the host society but rather ‘a two-way process of adaptation by migrant and host society’.16 If you tell people they will gain from migration, that is a positive thing. If you tell them that they will have to change because of migration, that is likely to go down less well. And so the positive part is the only part that is stressed.

But the argument for mass migration on the grounds of ‘diversity’ as being a good in itself ignores one huge and until recently unspeakable issue. Just as most cultures have good and interesting things to say for themselves, all have some bad and disagreeable things about them too. And while the positives can be stressed and exaggerated from the outset, any negatives take years to admit, if they are admitted at all.