An astute observer of the state of the United Kingdom, someone who works in a very senior capacity in business on both sides of the border, put it to me like this recently:

You have to understand that culturally Scotland has stayed largely the same in the last 20 years or so. The Scots like the idea that because they have a new parliament they are experiencing enormous change, when they aren't. Socially and ethnically Scotland is still more or less homogenous, with small pockets of immigration. In the same period England, or large parts of England particularly in the South, has been transformed in all sorts of confusing ways. There are new populations. Socially it is explosive, exciting and worrying for a lot of people. Scotland is the same while England has changed. 

The figures confirm his story. While Scotland has had immigration, and so has Wales, it is outstripped by the scale of what is going on in England and the sheer weight of numbers of arrivals settling in the already most populated areas. The population of Scotland was 5.3 million in the 2011 census, an increase of 5 per cent on 2001. Not all of that is attributable to migration. Scots are living longer and the number of over 65s has increased sharply. The population of Wales also rose by 5 per cent to 3.1 million. Yet the rise in England was higher: 7 per cent, taking the population to 53 million. In one decade that represents an increase in England's population of 3.4 million people, equivalent to England swallowing a new Wales, and some more. About half of it was due to immigration.

London had the biggest overall increase, with 850,000 new residents. When combined with a surge in round-the-year tourism, this has had a disorientating effect. Travel on a bus or train in the capital is now all but guaranteed to be undertaken to the accompaniment  of a cacophony of foreign voices babbling into mobile devices in various languages. Young Russians in particular seem to spend their time on the move engaged in perpetual, loud telephone conversation with other Russians.

According to a recent estimate by the Office for National Statistics, the UK's population will rise by another 10 million by 2037, with around half of that increase attributable to immigration. With London and its environs turning into a super-city, a city state floating off from the rest of the UK, it seems highly likely that the South will continue to attract a greater proportion of those coming here. This can only intensify the strain on infrastructure and the pressure on land as there will be a need for millions of new homes.

The country's politicians do not much like talking about any of this, beyond making periodic Theresa May-style noises about crackdowns on welfare tourism and controlling borders. There is about to be another wave of immigration when restrictions are lifted on arrivals from Romania and Bulgaria next month, although it is difficult to estimate how many will come. Migration Watch, the think tank run by former diplomat Sir Andrew Green, estimates that it could in the end amount to as many as 250,000.

The government can do nothing about it, there can be no "crackdown", unless the Prime Minister decides before Christmas to take radical action and unilaterally declare that he will refuse to lift the restrictions. The reaction from the European Union would be off the scale in diplomatic terms. The EU knows that legally the UK and other countries are boxed in by the treaties they have signed. Unrestricted free movement of peoples is the first commandment of the EU, carved in tablets of stone and handed down from on high whether voters in individual countries approve or not.