Such numbers are bound to cause difficulties. White Britons are now in a minority in London, Luton, Leicester and Slough. Morden is one of those areas where the majority are leaving, although not on the scale of Barking and Dagenham, where the white British population fell by a third in the last decade, or Newham, where they now account for just 16 per cent of residents.

There have also been some terrible mistakes in the way that migration has been handled. Soon after the Jews arrived in east London a number of prostitutes were murdered by a still unknown male to whom an enterprising journalist (most probably) gave the name Jack the Ripper. Rumour spread around Spitalfields that the killer was a Jew, and the Jews prepared for the worst. Such accusations were nothing new in Russia, and they would inevitably be followed by the authorities unleashing a massacre. But in the morning the city went on as before, and though rumours persisted the newcomers realised that here was a country where the rule of law trumped prejudice and hatred, and minorities could prosper as equal citizens.

It was also a culture with a framework into which immigrants could integrate. Britain's long-established Sephardic Jewish community, embarrassed by their newly-arrived co-religionists and nervous about the prejudice they might trigger, created the Jews Free School, a quite phenomenonally successful institution which had as its remit that it would take little Poles and Russians and turn them into English gentlemen. And so it did.

A century later, when immigrants from the Commonwealth were arriving in much larger numbers, British culture had changed. It was not that Pakistani immigrants did not want their children to become English gentlemen, but that Englishmen no longer knew of or believed in such an idea. From the 1970s the education system introduced what would become known as multiculturalism, an anti-intergrationist philosophy that encouraged the children of migrants to cling to their own identities. It was a disastrous policy.