Though wokeness is a vile thing, it has contributed to our culture in one fortunate way – by inspiring brilliant books which refute it. The woeful lack of anything passing for analysis (probably a colonial tool of oppression, like brunch) on the SJW side has thrown into gloriously sharp relief the difference in the intellectual firepower between those who believe in free speech and those who resemble Veruca Salt after joining the Stasi. We have Andrew Doyle’s The New Puritans and Remi Adekoya’s Biracial Britain; they have Laurie Penny’s Sexual Revolution and Jolyon Maugham’s Bringing Down Goliath – the latter category comprising unintentionally hilarious scribblings which will soon be up there with The Diary of a Nobody as proof that pomposity is one of the most enjoyable forms of humour.

We can now add this excellent book to the first list. Sunder Katwala was born in Yorkshire to an Indian father and an Irish mother, both of whom came to England to work for the NHS, recalling Trevor Phillips’s beautiful line about us being ‘the only country where a significant mixed-race population has come about through romance rather than rape’. Katwala married a woman whose parents are so keen on Brexit that they boycott the Daily Mail for not being rigorous enough. Though voting to stay in Europe, he is merciless in analysing the whiteness of Remain:

Britain’s pro-European movement was a case of cosmopolitanism without diversity, which is rather too common a phenomenon in progressive civic society. I doubt I would need the fingers of both hands to count the number of black and Asian Britons I have met over the years who express a strong sense of European identity. That is still often explicitly or implicitly coded as white, to a much greater extent than modern British identity is now.

Katwala is an elegant and exuberant writer, recalling of his childhood:

If you were to call me a ‘Paki’ in the local park or the school playground, you might have got a sarcastic lecture about geography and identity. For some reason, when I was about 13 I thought that ‘If my dad’s Indian, isn’t that like me calling you French, dickhead?’ was an absolute zinger of a riposte.

He is wise, cutting through the knotweed of received liberal opinion:

John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ is probably the best-known public statement in the last century of the argument against patriotism in favour of a utopian cosmopolitanism. ‘Imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.’ Taken seriously, Lennon’s vision is a rather arid one.

And he is honest, in an arena which has more than its share of virtue-signalling liars:

Imagine that there was an enormous, imaginary red button. If you pushed it, the British Empire would never have existed. Would you, should you, push it? How could you not? Yet I have to confess that I could not do it. However ignoble and selfish it may seem, I would feel disinclined to write myself out of existence, no matter how much hypothetical suffering I might save. But maybe others would be tempted to press that button. Being willing to sacrifice me could allow the white liberal conscience to emerge with cleaner historical hands.

Reading this book, it struck me that, regardless of where our respective parents were born, Katwala is more traditionally ‘British’ than I am, being both temperate and modest. ‘My biggest problem with the Tebbit Test is that I passed it,’ he writes of his instinctive support for British sporting teams, whereas I backed Italy in the World Cup, given the ick by the sanctimoniousness of the England squad. He uses the delightful phrase ‘our friends across the Channel’, which Boris Johnson was fond of – a very English barbed courtesy.

So much has happened since the 2017 election campaign when Jeremy Corbyn thought it was perfectly fine to promise that ‘only Labour can be trusted to unlock the talent of black, Asian and minority ethnic people’ – an attitude which now seems as antiquated as apartheid. With our Hindu prime minister and Buddhist home secretary, the success story of Indians in the UK mirrors that of British Jews in the 20th century – ‘from Bethnal Green to Golders Green took two generations’, as one wag put it. Both peoples demonstrate an extraordinary work ethic, also seen in our Chinese compatriots. Chinese girls from working-class homes are consistently among the highest achieving groups of schoolchildren in Britain. But it would be silly and sentimental to claim there have been no downsides to immigration.

I liked to think of the sad faces at the Guardian on reading the results of the recent survey by the Policy Institute at King’s College, London for the World Values Survey – ‘one of the largest and most widely used academic social surveys’ – which found that the UK has the third most positive attitude to immigration in the world. (Not bad for such a ‘misery-laden grey old island’, eh, Emma Thompson?) There seems a real possibility that the migration conversation in this country can be freed from the polarised pessimism of both right (‘Don’t let any more in or the country will be done’) and left (‘The country’s done – let them all in’) and this lovely book is both polemic and user’s manual. If I have one criticism, it’s that Katwala bangs on about football too much – but that’s an Englishman for you.