A cultural movement is happening within liberal opinion. It no longer greets immigrants with open arms. They are welcome – but with tighter conditions, aimed at encouraging, even mandating, integration. The old, cross-party order that strove to see immigration “not as a flattening process of assimilation but as equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance” – in the words of the late Roy Jenkins, a Labour home secretary in the mid-1960s – has been diluted. All these orotund concepts – assimilation, cultural diversity and mutual tolerance – are now in contest. The growing opposition, especially among Labour’s key working and lower middle class supporters, to the huge surge that saw some 1m people given legal residence in the UK in the past decade, according to endlessly contested government figures, is too great to ignore.

This political shift has now spilled into Britain’s most important cultural institution, the BBC. There have been straws in a rising wind: a BBC conference on impartiality organised for senior executives in October 2006 included an auto-criticism of its own liberal elitism; the following month Peter Horrocks, head of BBC News, gave a speech in Oxford calling for a more “radical impartiality” than a balancing of centre-left and centre-right views, an impartiality which would include more interviews with leaders of the British National Party; and last May an edition of Panorama on racial tensions in Blackburn showed that whites, too, could be victims of racial discrimination.