The other idea that broke through my inchoate left-liberal instincts was even simpler than the progressive dilemma. It is this: embracing the idea of human equality does not mean we owe the same allegiance to everyone. 

The benchmark of modern political decency is contained in the "universalist shift" of the mid-20th century (encapsulated in the UN Declaration of Human Rights) — the belief in human equality, in the moral equality of all human beings, the assumption that all lives are of equal value regardless of race or gender or wealth. This simple and beautiful idea is, of course, accepted across the political spectrum, but it is embraced with special enthusiasm on the Left which rightly monitors the extent to which governments, organisations or individuals fall short of applying the idea. (That is what the protests of the 1960s were partly about, young people angrily contrasting the official promise of equality with the reality of hierarchy.)   

But some on the Left, especially what one might call the "global villageist" Left, apply this universalist idea of equality without reference to real people and communities. They conflate the idea of human equality with the daft idea that we have the same obligations to all human beings. In fact, as Burkean conservatives, and now modern scientists, recognise, for most people commitments and allegiances ripple out from friends and family to neighbourhoods, towns and nations. This does not mean we should not care about the global poor. But we have a hierarchy of obligations that means we spend 30 times more every year on the NHS than we do on development aid. Is that wrong?

There are a few "global villageists" in academia and the NGOs who are pure universalists, at least in theory, and there is a rather larger de-territorialised elite of business people, highly paid professionals and celebrities who feel little connection to any particular country — what the Americans call the "Wall Street and Woodstock" class. They are exceptions and have little direct influence on policy-making, though there is a "universalism lite" that is often a default position of highly educated people, including many economists. 

In the years after "Too Diverse?" I delved deeper into the debate and had much more exposure to what I considered the weakness of left-liberal arguments. They were both internally inconsistent-wanting as much "sameness" as possible on class and as much difference as possible on race-and also too dismissive of public opinion and the progress made in reducing racism and to turning nationalism into something more benign, that is about specialness but not superiority. 

I more or less consciously began to develop a counter-litany of my own. Liberals, I argued, place too much stress on only what is chosen by individuals. This creates an ambivalence about community, which is something to be celebrated but also escaped from through geographical or social mobility. And when thinking about immigration they too often assume a society without any pre-existing attachments or sense of community. But immigration, at least on a significant scale, is hard for both incomer and receiver, especially when multi-generational poverty is being imported. People are not blank sheets, societies are not random collections of individuals, and objection to the arrival of a large number of outsiders in a community is not necessarily racist.