One need only consider the decades it has taken to admit that some immigrant groups hold less liberal views than the majority of people in the countries they have come into. A Gallup survey conducted in 2009 in Britain found that precisely zero per cent of British Muslims interviewed (out of a pool of 500) thought that homosexuality was morally acceptable.17 Another survey carried out in 2016 found that 52 per cent of British Muslims thought homosexuality should be made illegal.18 The common response to such findings is that these were the attitudes of many British people a generation or two ago. The unspoken follow-on is that homosexuals in Britain should be patient and wait another generation or two for the newcomers to catch up. All the while what is ignored is the possibility that this might not happen and that the views of the incomers may in time, through population growth or other means, change the national picture as a whole. So in 2015 when YouGov carried out a survey of British attitudes towards homosexuality, one of the questions asked was whether in general respondents thought homosexuality to be ‘morally acceptable’ or ‘morally wrong’. Some people might have assumed that such a survey would smoke out latent homophobia in certain rural areas whereas the hip, diverse urban areas would show that they were relaxed about the whole matter.

In fact, the findings showed precisely the opposite. Whereas in the whole of the rest of the country around 16 per cent of people said that they thought homosexuality was ‘morally wrong’, in London the figure was almost double that (29 per cent).19 Why should people in London have been almost twice as homophobic as the rest of the country? Solely for the reason that the ethnic diversity of the capital meant that it had imported a disproportionate number of people with attitudes which the rest of the country would now regard as being morally backwards. But if the views of some migrant communities on homosexuality were only a couple of generations out of date, the views of portions of those communities on the subject of women were shown to be out of date by many centuries, at least.