And while Christianity witnessed this collapse in its followers, mass migration assisted a near-doubling in size of the Muslim population. Over the last decade the number of Muslims rose from 1.5 million to 2.7 million. These are the official figures. Illegal immigrants make the real numbers far higher.

Despite being hard to digest in a year, the census story passed over in a couple of days. But this is not an ephemeral story. It is an account of our recent past, our immediate present and a glimpse into a troubling future. Perhaps we passed over it so quickly because few people can bear this much reality.

To study the results of the latest census is to stare at one unalterable conclusion: mass immigration has altered our country completely. It has become a radically different place, and London has become a foreign country. In 23 of London's 33 boroughs "white Britons" are now in a minority. A spokesman for the Office for National Statistics (ONS) hailed this as "diversity".

Of course there are numerous claims as to how it all occurred. One — made in 2009 by the former Labour adviser Andrew Neather — is that Tony Blair's government wilfully aimed to "rub the Right's nose in diversity" and create what it unwisely took to be a new client class. Another theory, not running entirely counter to this, is that the whole thing was a bureaucratic cock-up which ran out of control under successive governments, only doing so spectacularly under New Labour.

Whatever the cause, the public response has been surprisingly uniform. There have been no significant or sustained outbreaks of racism or violence. Most of us feel absolutely no personal animosity towards immigrants. But — as poll after poll has shown — a majority do worry very much about what all this means for our country and its future. And they are right to worry. For nobody has any idea of where are we heading next.

Successive governments of all parties have spent decades putting off any real discussion of this because they realised what most of the rest of us have also realised — that it is a matter on which control has slipped away from them. When the current government came to power it promised to cut immigration from hundreds of thousands a year to tens of thousands. It has not got anywhere near that target. All our governments intermittently talk about limiting immigration. But this is merely an electoral trick. None does anything, because none believes it can.

We also have a media class which has largely supported this state of defeatism. Instead of addressing concerns, politicians and press rarely bother, preferring to throw expressions of rage back at the public as surely as Gordon Brown did to Mrs Gillian Duffy of Rochdale. This is done — as reaction to the census confirmed — not only in accusations of "racism" and "bigotry" against ordinary people, but in a series of deflecting tactics which have become the replacement mechanism for action. These — all identifiable in the wake of the recent census — start with perhaps the most galling of all: "Get over it!"