Yet however abused, anybody offering such analysis in 2002 would have been proved wholly and utterly right. The next census, compiled in 2011 and published at the end of 2012, revealed not just the facts mentioned above, but far more. It proved that the number of people living in England and Wales who had been born overseas had risen by nearly three million in the previous decade alone. It showed that only 44.9 per cent of London residents now identified themselves as ‘white British’. And it revealed that nearly three million people in England and Wales were living in households where not one adult spoke English as their main language.

These were very major ethnic changes to a country at any point in time. But there were equally striking findings about the changing religious make-up of Britain. For instance they revealed that almost every belief was on the rise apart from Christianity. Only Britain’s historic national religion was in free fall. Since the previous census, the number of people identifying themselves as Christian had dropped from 72 to 59 per cent. The number of Christians in England and Wales dropped by more than four million, and the number of Christians overall fell from 37 million to 33 million.

But while Christianity witnessed this collapse in its followers – a collapse that was only expected to continue precipitately – mass migration assisted a near-doubling in the size of the Muslim population. Between 2001 and 2011 the number of Muslims in England and Wales rose from 1.5 million to 2.7 million. While these were the official figures there was a widespread acceptance that illegal immigrations made all these numbers far higher. At least a million people were recognised to be in the country illegally, and thus unlikely to have filled in census forms, and the two local authorities which had already grown the fastest (over 20 per cent in ten years) were those that already had the highest Muslim populations in the UK (Tower Hamlets and Newham). These were also among the areas of the country with the largest non-response to the census, with around one in five households failing to return the census at all. All of which suggested that the census results, startling as they were, drastically under-represented the actual numbers. Nevertheless, the findings were striking.

Yet, despite being hard to digest in a year, the story of the census passed by within a couple of days – like any other ephemeral news story. But this was not an ephemeral story. It was an account of the country’s recent past, its immediate present and a glimpse into its inevitable future. To study the results of that census was to stare at one particularly unalterable conclusion, which was that mass immigration was in the process of altering – indeed had already altered – the country completely. By 2011 Britain had already become a radically different place from the place it had been for centuries. But the response to facts such as that in 23 of London’s 33 boroughs ‘white Britons’ were now in a minority was greeted with a response almost as telling as the results themselves.² A spokesman for the Office for National Statistics (ONS) hailed the results as a tremendous demonstration of ‘diversity’.³