The most striking of all the ICM statistics concern homosexuality. Only 18 per cent of Muslims think it should be legal in Britain, while more than half (52 per cent) would ban it. Up to half of the latter group, it is fair to assume, also support sharia law, which prescribes the death penalty for homosexuality. If most British Muslims hold such hostile attitudes towards same-sex attraction, it is not surprising that — to take one example — a recent gay participant on the TV reality show First Dates explained how he had been beaten up by other Muslims so badly that he was in hospital for months. This brave young man explained that he no longer considered himself Muslim — making his public appearance doubly risky as he could now also be targeted as an apostate.

I have always had great admiration for those British Muslims who reject Salafist or Deobandi ideology and the bigotry that comes with them. I was deeply impressed by the late Zaki Badawi, the founder of Muslim College and for many years the leading spokesman for Islam in Britain. He had a vision of a tolerant, open community and wanted Muslims to become as integrated as Jews or Catholics. Like many other Londoners, I have Muslim friends and neighbours who have embraced Western values. Often, they have married non-Muslims. But that makes them untypical: fewer than 10 per cent of Muslims live in mixed relationships and just 3 per cent of Muslim children grow up in mixed households. While more than half of Muslims do mix with non-Muslims at work or in college, friendships do not always result: a fifth of them never enter a non-Muslim home. Many have hostile attitudes to non-Muslims. A Pew survey in 2006, for example, found that 47 per cent of British Muslims held unfavourable views of Jews; unfortunately, the ICM poll shows that up to 44 per cent are still anti-Semitic.

There are, of course, plenty of well-integrated Muslims who are repelled by anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry. In my own neighbourhood, my dry cleaner, who is an Afghan Muslim, wished me “Happy Easter” and there are countless others like him who reach out to their non-Muslim customers. We have, too, popular role models, such as the athlete Mo Farah and the headscarf-wearing TV cook Nadiya Hussain, who positively embrace their British identity. The ICM poll shows that eight out of 10 Muslims here do feel British. But with mass immigration from more illiberal Muslim cultures, higher birthrates in more segregated communities and a growing number of non-Muslims who are converted to Salafism, liberal Muslims are a shrinking minority.

Segregation and intolerance are by-products of the disastrous policy of multiculturalism (or cultural relativism), which for many years was championed by, among others, Trevor Phillips. When the then Anglican Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, criticised multiculturalism a decade ago, warning that we were creating “no-go areas” in our cities, he was denounced by Labour ministers and Muslim leaders. The effects of that policy are, as Bishop Nazir-Ali now says, “irreversible”. Phillips does at least admit that he got it wrong as chairman of the Equalities Commission in the l990s, when he saw Islamophobia as the biggest problem facing Muslims. A far greater danger is presented by the voluntary segregation of the Muslim community, which has facilitated its radicalisation.