The British Dream is a serious examination of this. Maybe too serious. David Goodhart is the director of the think tank Demos, and even if you didn't know that you could probably guess it since there is such an academic striving for balance, detail and accuracy that it makes the book footnotey and a little turgid. I think it would have worked better as a straight, svelte polemic, written with the panache of a Norman Stone or a Victor Lewis-Smith.

Immigration is the most combustible of subjects because more than any other social question it's linked to race, and racism is the most radioactive subject of all. Fear of racism lurks everywhere; racism is such a super-virulent Ebola virus that even the slightest suspicion of it can spring out to destroy you instantly. You have some hope of redemption if you murder someone but not if you drop the word nigger (and you don't happen to be a black rapper).

Politicians aren't interested in solving problems, let alone preventing them. Politicians are only interested, grudgingly, in solving crises. So 30 years on, just as Cross-rail has drifted in decades too late, we're now having the discussion about gate-keeping we should have had in 1980. It took a number of Britons of Pakistani and Somali background blowing themselves up, or trying to, on the Underground, to kick-start debate about immigration and asylum and Britishness. The mere mention of any of these revealed you as a hardened gas-chamber operator, until the 7/7 bombings.

I have to say it's fun to see a liberal like a Goodhart coughing up phrases which would have been unthinkable anywhere but in a Daily Express editorial ten years ago. Somalis are dole-fiends, the Human Rights Act is a mess, and "young black males do simply commit more crime [Goodhart's italics]", although, obviously, it's not really their fault: he can only go so far.