I cannot claim that I was shunned by the Islington dinner party circuit. I was, however, widely attacked in print and routinely accused of racism, mainly by people who didn't know me. This quite often led to personal confrontations at meetings or seminars, sometimes with people of ethnic minority background. That was obviously uncomfortable but I was confident enough in the irrationality of the racism allegation to hold my ground.

Like anyone who is white and privileged, I was vulnerable to the claim that I could not know, could not experience, the negative consequence of any attempt to weigh the costs as well as benefits of large-scale immigration and rapid increases in ethnic diversity. My response was that people should not take it so personally and that surely we should be able to talk about big social changes relating to ethnicity in the way that we do about social class.

This often provoked further anger. I'm sure I could have handled it better and it took me a while to find the right tone and language. The blast I received was in part an expression of the deep scars of race and racism but also of a quasi-religious faith in diversity.

Being a spiky controversialist had not been part of my self-image before the "Too Diverse?" storm and I certainly did not feel "brave" as some sympathisers, including some on the Left, declared me to be. But it was certainly no disadvantage to the editor of a small political magazine to have the reputation as a liberal contrarian and I soon found myself warming to the idea. 

Having experienced the tribal irrationality of part of leftist Britain on the issue of diversity I found myself extending my critique to other aspects of the argument: the nature of community, the role of national identities in liberal societies and more. 

I found that the space I came to occupy surprisingly empty. What was that space? It was still a kind of liberalism (or post-liberalism as I would now call it), social democratic in economics but somewhat conservative in culture; reformist towards the continuing wounds of race and class but sympathetic to the rooted communitarianism of middle Britain, and regarding a special attachment to fellow citizens not as a prejudice but as an asset in a more mobile and individualistic society.