***

The research and writing of this book have taken me across a continent I have travelled well for years, but often to parts I might otherwise not have visited. Over the course of several years I travelled from the most south-easterly islands of Greece and the southernmost outposts of Italy to the heart of northern Sweden and countless suburbs of France, Holland, Germany and more. During the writing I have had the opportunity to speak with many members of the public as well as politicians and policy-makers from across the political spectrum, border guards, intelligence agencies, NGO workers and many others on the front line. In many ways the most instructive part of my research has been speaking to Europe’s newest arrivals – people who sometimes literally arrived yesterday. On the reception islands of southern Europe and across the places they stay or settle on their way north all have their own stories and many have their own tragedies. All see Europe as the place where they can best live their lives.

Those willing to talk and share their stories were necessarily a self-selecting group. There were times, lingering outside a camp in the evening, when people emerged or returned who seemed – to say the least – not to be approaching our continent in a spirit of generosity or gratitude. But many others were exceptionally friendly and grateful for an opportunity to get their stories out. Whatever my own views on the situations that had brought them here and our continent’s response, our conversations always concluded with me saying the only thing to them that I honestly could say without caveat: ‘Good luck.’

1

The beginning

To understand the scale and speed of the change that is happening in Europe it is worth going back just a few years, to before the latest migration crisis and to a period of what had become ‘normal’ immigration. And it is worth considering a country that was comparatively cut off from the latest turmoil.

In 2002 the latest census for England and Wales was published. Compiled the previous year, it showed the extent to which the country had changed in the decade since the last census was taken. Imagine somebody then, in 2002, deciding to extrapolate on the findings in that census and speculating on what the next ten years might bring. Imagine that they said: ‘White Britons will become a minority in their own capital city by the end of this decade and the Muslim population will double in the next ten years.’

How would such statements have been greeted? The terms ‘alarmist’ and ‘scaremongering’ would certainly have been used, as most likely would ‘racist’ and (although the coinage was then in its infancy) the word ‘Islamophobe’. Safe to say such extrapolations of the data would not have been greeted warmly. Anybody inclined to doubt this might recall just one representative incident, when in 2002 a Times journalist made far less startling comments about likely future immigration, which were denounced by the then Home Secretary David Blunkett – using parliamentary privilege – as ‘bordering on fascism’.¹