Whenever that key issue of Muslim demographics does bubble up in our country it is always shut down with the same fervour and pique. Whenever it is reported that Mohammed was the most popular name for new-born British boys each year the story is dismissed on some technicality. Too many variants of the name were included or not enough variants was usually the mask for the real response which was, “Shut up.” When, in 2015, Mohammed became unarguably the most popular boy’s name in Britain the only acceptable response suddenly turned into: “So what. That’s cool.” But underneath this the public, like the present generation of politicians, knows that it is not entirely cool. Or at least not something without significant ramifications.

Predictions are a dangerous thing. But allow me to make one. Ten years ago nobody but a few of us crazy right-wing nut-jobs wanted to mention anything critical about Saudi Arabia or Iran, Wahhabism or Khomeinism. And nobody but nobody wanted to say anything about Islam other than that it was an obviously and demonstrably peaceful religion.

All this, I notice, has recently begun to change somewhat. Today you can turn on the television any day and see people talking about all these things who ten years ago were busily calling everyone who did so a racist. Those who were here first shall get no apology and should expect none. It was all too predictable.

But perhaps it gives me the right to make another prediction. Which is that at some point in the next ten years it will be possible to say, while not being regarded as a right-wing maniac, that the beliefs of the people in a country and the number of people with those beliefs will influence the make-up, behaviour and actions of that country.

Currently we are in one of our interim periods of denial. The care being taken to change the name by which we call IS is just one demonstration of this. Such attempts to decouple the activities of IS from the beliefs of Islam as a whole are principally being done for a domestic audience, not to woo away the hordes of IS fighters already in Syria and Iraq. But why might we think the domestic audience needs such placating?

One reason is the facts. In a poll carried out by the BBC after the Charlie Hebdo attack last January, 27 per cent of British Muslims polled said they had “some sympathy” for the motives behind the Paris attacks. In the wake of the November attacks in Paris, the Sun carried out a poll whose findings claimed that one in five British Muslims has “sympathy for ISIS”. This poll was subjected to justified scrutiny, for not least among the poll’s flaws was that the questions related to attitudes towards those who go out to fight in Syria. A proportion of those who expressed support for these may well have been thinking of those who go out to fight with other factions in Syria and even those who go out to fight against IS with Kurdish groups among others.

But the response to the Sun poll was in fact the same response that now comes after any and all such negative stories. Far more energy is expended refuting the story than in addressing a legitimate problem. Because, although one in five British Muslims don’t sympathise with IS, quite a number clearly do. But this is a pattern. After last January’s terror attacks the attention of European publics and governments turned for a week by a claim about “no-go zones” made by a Fox News guest expert. So much time was spent ridiculing Fox News that nobody had much time to consider whether Europe did have no-go zones. We learned again in November that it did — in France, Belgium, Sweden and elsewhere across Europe. But these are not the stories we want to hear. And so we find new ones.