Such statements are so selective as to be wholly disingenuous. Until the latter half of the last century, Britain had almost negligible levels of immigration. Unlike America, we were never in fact "a nation of immigrants". And although there was often a trickle of people moving here, including Jews and Huguenots who overwhelmingly integrated into the culture, the simple scale was in a wholly separate league to the mass immigration we have seen in recent years. Roughly 50,000 Huguenots came to Britain after 1681. This was equal to a couple of months of immigration by the turn of the 21st century. The entire Ugandan Asian immigration into Britain in the early 1970s (caused by Idi Amin's expulsion of Asians from Uganda) numbered around 30,000. This constituted six weeks' worth of immigration by the late 1990s.

Yet despite these facts, one popular way to ignore the change in recent years has been to pretend that the history is different. Taxpayer-funded institutions, including schools, excel at this argument. It is a way to diminish the problem — most noticeably the problem of integration — by claiming that there is no problem, or at least no unique problem. It pretends that whatever our challenges, and whatever we are experiencing, it is just normal.

Other attempts to dissemble around the facts have been even more outrageous. Most disturbing are those implicit and explicit claims which respond to mass immigration by pretending either that the British do not have a culture, or that what culture and identity we have is so uniquely bad that it should not be mourned when it is destroyed.

Here is Bonnie Greer again on Newsnight: "There's always this failsafe, spoken or unspoken, that there is a British identity. That's always interesting to me. I think one of the geniuses of the British — of being British — is that there isn't this sort of rock-solid definition of identity that an American has."

It is hard to think of another country where this would be acceptable: your culture has always been like this — it never really existed.

In 2006 Channel 4 took enormous delight in taking a group of white British people whom it clearly believed were racists — including Norman Tebbit — and doing DNA tests on them for a documentary, 100% English?  These were used to prove that all were in fact "foreigners". Nobody would be so rude as to do this to any other group of people. But with British people, different rules of engagement were deemed to apply. There existed an apparent desire to deny the British — alone of all people — an identity. In the absence of any ability to manage immigration, this is how our public figures have dealt with the issue.