There is nothing remarkable about those views and there are now plenty of others on the centre-Left who share them — Jon Cruddas gave my book a favourable review in the New Statesman — though official Labour remains somewhat uncertain of its position on this territory.

But how did I come to write a book about these issues? I had barely given immigration a thought until well into my forties — though as a journalist of leftish sympathies I was reflexively in favour of as much of it as possible and vaguely aware of having two immigrant grandfathers (both American). Like many metropolitan liberals I had very little direct experience of immigration yet I came to see it as beyond the normal trade-offs and interest calculations of political life. It was simple: good people were in favour of it, and bad, bigoted people were against it.  

Alongside this belief was a twitchy ambivalence about my own country, no doubt reflecting a twitchy ambivalence about myself. Left-wing and liberal intellectual scepticism about the national was particularly strong in England because of its dominant imperial past. And in the 1970s and 1980s the country was often said to be going through an identity crisis — end of empire, conflict in Northern Ireland, immigration, industrial conflict and decline — some of which perhaps rubbed off on my younger self. 

Britain did not in the 1970s develop a post-imperial language of national citizenship and identity. Many on the Right felt ambivalent about fully extending citizenship to non-natives (who were just starting to arrive in significant numbers), and too many young lefties like me thought that welcoming the newcomers meant discarding the nation and its traditions. A more coherent "middle way" between universalism and a tribal nationalism is what we have been reaching for ever since (and perhaps finally found in Danny Boyle's seminal Olympic opening ceremony).

But back then Left intellectual sophistication was haughtily lined up against the "false consciousness" of the ordinary and the national. Even those who did not completely reject the idea of a national interest on class grounds believed the nation state was too big for most of the local things that matter and too small for most of the big international things that matter, like climate change. 

This was campus common sense in the 1970s and 1980s, especially if you were English. I certainly considered any expression of attachment to my country — with the exception of the England cricket and football teams — as vulgar and dumb. We laughed along with the Monty Python mockery of Edwardian stoicism and at the embattled campus Tories who still believed in the flag. Boundaries and borders were for the small-minded and the provincial and, of course, for the working-class people who cleared up behind us (though we leftists preferred not to dwell on that).