You could not create a more toxic recipe for nativist populism if you tried. The wonder of Europe’s present condition is not that populist parties are powerful but that they are not dominant, the more so when so many of their opponents do not understand their own countries, and are stuck with a version of multiculturalism that no longer makes sense.

I cannot think of a book I have admired more recently than Ben Judah’s This is London (reviewed on page 53). He treats London as a foreign city and instead of pontificating about immigration goes out and meets immigrants. Although it is a work of reportage, Judah’s statistics give a shorthand account of how Britain is changing.

Every week 2,000 migrants arrive at Victoria Coach Station. There are more people in London who can barely speak English or cannot speak it at all than live in Newcastle. There is a whole African city in London of 550,000 people, which has grown by 45 per cent since 2001. There are vast numbers of illegal immigrants living beyond the law — 600,000 according to Judah. Between 1971 and 2011, the white British population of London slumped from 86 per cent to 45 per cent.

Our multiculturalism is not so multitudinous. It encompasses a handful of groups alongside the established whites: Afro-Caribbeans, Indians, Sikhs, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and at a pinch the Irish and the Jews. The new Britain is diverse in a way the proponents of “diversity” have barely begun to comprehend. Modern London is filled with Lithuanian tramps, Filipino maids, Arab playboys, Russian oligarchs, Vietnamese skunk dealers, Hungarian au pairs, French bankers, Congolese cleaners, Brazilian hotel workers, Korean grocers and Polish builders.
The old world of ethnic politics, where sensibilities were smoothed with Black History Months and Holocaust Memorial Days, and “diversity” meant only dealing with the often self-appointed spokesmen of a handful of groups, has gone. You cannot “celebrate” half the cultures on the planet or emit fake or real pieties on how each is special in their own way.

We should stop playing shabby games of ethnic favouritism with the victims of crime, which should never have been played in the first place. Whether a child is abused by a white celebrity or Pakistani thug, or a migrant taking advantage of unknown freedoms, says nothing about whites or Pakistanis or asylum seekers, and everything about them. We should do what we should always have done and insist that equality before the law is the best way of integrating newcomers as well as being a blessing in itself.

Fiat justitia ruat caelum runs the Roman law motto engraved at the Old Bailey — “Let justice be done though the heavens fall.” It is a grandiloquent sentiment. No one but criminals hopes that justice won’t be done. Many migrants have come from countries without basic rights, and admire rather than damn Britain for possessing them. The heavens would stay where they are if Europe did justice and told the truth.

The argument for equality before the law is so obviously right, I would not need to make it had not alleged progressives turned themselves into Chicken Lickens, and convinced themselves the sky would fall down if they did not hide and lie. They do not understand that the best way to bring the disaster they fear is to carry on behaving as they are now.