We risk becoming an island of strangers,' said Sir Keir Starmer yesterday, 'not a nation that walks forward together.' It was the one powerful line in an otherwise pedestrian speech – powerful because we can see the process is already under way. Sadly, the Prime Minister did not reveal any serious plan to deal with the problem, instead announcing a series of gimmicks: fewer care worker visas, a reduction in the time that foreign students can work here and more guff about speeding up asylum claims. Starmer is furrowing his brow and complaining about high immigration numbers while putting forward no credible proposals to undo them. It is precisely that combination that has led to so much public anger against the system. An island of strangers? Tell us about it, Sir Keir. Over the next ten years, our population is set to rise by five million. That isn't something you're going to tackle with English tests. Five million. Is that vast increase happening because of a baby boom? Of course not. Indeed, our death rate is about to overtake our birth rate for the first time since the Black Death. Left to itself, our population should be falling. But according to the Office for National Statistics, we will be admitting 493,000 new people a year. Some of those 493,000 will come from cultures very different to our own, some with high crime rates or backward traditions. So, yes. A nation of strangers. Since we have elevated a bizarre and selective form of anti-racism as our supreme moral value, it seems almost transgressive to point out that there is a difference between making more babies here and importing people from distant lands. It seems downright improper to suggest that there might be important cultural differences even among the babies born here, especially if some parents are recent arrivals with no desire to assimilate. Still, it is worth delving into the data. In 2023, Muhammad became the most popular boy's name in England and Wales – a ranking that is all the more remarkable when we consider that the Prophet's name can be transliterated in at least half a dozen ways. If all the spellings are included, it has held the top spot for more than a decade. Now I happen to have a deep respect for Islam. Perhaps half a million Muslims donned the King's uniform in the First World War, and nearly a million in the Second, volunteering (there was no conscription in British India) to defend this country and what it stood for. Still, the sheer pace of change is unprecedented. Look at the 2021 census figures. Although 93.6 per cent of people over the age of 65 are white, among primary school children, the proportion is just 65.5 per cent. Even if, in some imaginary world, Starmer was able to screw the immigration tap shut, demography would take its natural course. How did so vast a change – more significant, in the long run, than our tax rate, our inflation figures or our departure from the EU – take place? Did the public clamour for it? Of course not. The one solid fact of British public opinion from the 1950s to the present day has been hostility to mass immigration. So what happened? Three things. First, after the horrors of the Second World War, anti-racism became a sacred value, absolute and non-negotiable. As a result, when it came to immigration, our intellectual and cultural elites saw a multi-racial country as desirable in itself. To ask for a cost-benefit analysis, or to suggest that some groups of immigrants did better than others, was to be howled down as a racist. Second, our birth rate fell, creating vacancies in the workforce. 'Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three,' wrote Philip Larkin. Which may not have been strictly true, but there was evidently a lot of about it in that year, because our fertility peaked in 1964 at 2.9 births per woman. The timing of that peak should alarm us. It means that the bulge in our population is about to retire, putting a strain on our finances. Successive governments have plugged the gap by importing workers. But that is, at best, a cop-out, a way to avoid making harder choices, such as allowing the state pension age to rise in line with life expectancy, or getting some of the nine million economically inactive adults back into work. At worst, it jeopardises the social contract. Until now, we have recognised an obligation to older people. Not only did we force lockdown on a younger generation who were at next to no risk; we maintained the triple lock on pensions even as salaries were plummeting. But, as society grows increasingly disparate, how long can that sense of obligation now last? The third reason that immigration keeps rising is that our judiciary has been taken over by a cohort of politicised lawyers who see it as their role wherever possible to block deportations. The last government battled in vain against this tendency. Incredibly, even when Parliament expressly legislated for illegal immigrants to be sent to Rwanda, the courts said no. Something the PM did not say yesterday, and assuredly never will, is that Parliament should take back control from Left-wing judges. On the contrary, the one belief that Starmer has held throughout his life, whether as a student Trotskyist, a Corbyn yes-man or, now, a legal bureaucrat in politician's clothes (clothes paid for by someone else), is that human rights codes count for more than votes in Parliament. Consider some of the absurd grounds on which deportation orders have been blocked in our courts. Your child does not like the chicken nuggets in Albania. Your partner would find it too hot in the Caribbean. Your business in importing sex toys would make you a target in your home country. One judge went so far as to rule that the special scheme set up to accept Ukrainian refugees should be open to asylum-seekers from Gaza. That is what happens when, as I say, we raise anti-racism into a substitute religion. None of these problems will be tackled by tinkering around with earnings thresholds or English language requirements. Our demographic transition is baked in. Now controlled and legal immigration can bring benefits; but uncontrolled mass immigration is a different story. It creates cultural and linguistic ghettos. It undermines the consensus upon which open societies rests. One of the remaining taboos around immigration has to do with crime rates. Although Britain is reluctant to compile ethnic crime data, Denmark does so, and the results are striking. Consider one case study (I cite it prompted by that Gaza ruling). In 1992, Denmark took in 321 Palestinian refugees. By 2019, 64 per cent of them had been convicted of a crime, and 34 per cent of their children had also been convicted. The idea that the children of immigrants might also be more likely to be in trouble with the law, or end up on welfare, draws us even more deeply into taboo territory. Hence the almost hysterical reminders, in the aftermath of the Southport abomination, that Axel Rudakubana had been born in Cardiff. But should we assume that someone coming from Rwanda, a country that had suffered an appalling genocide in the 1990s, a boy who was obsessed with genocide growing up, will be transformed by the geography of his birth into a rugby-obsessed Welshman who sings in a male-voice choir? Rudakubana was an outlier, an exceptionally evil individual, but what was said about his background was a polite, and dangerous, fiction. A nation of strangers. Strangers to each other, and strangers, unless we sharply alter our ways, to the traditions of their new home. 'Do we no longer exist then? Have we had our time?' wrote Victor Hugo in one of the most wistful of all French poems, in which a man remembers the lover of his youth. Yes, we can still regulate the flow, making the transition easier. We can make more of an effort to inculcate our values in our schools. But the values that elevated us as a nation risk being lost as our demography changes. Nothing is permanent, of course. The earliest inhabitants of these islands, as far as we can tell, had dark skin and blue eyes. Perhaps our great-grandchildren will look like them. But what of our long-held beliefs and culture? Should we not allow ourselves a moment of wistfulness as we watch the passing of the nation we knew? A nation of strangers, then. I find myself coming back to Victor Hugo's verses: 'Others will possess our fields, our paths, our hideaways; Your woods, my beloved, will belong to strangers.' Lord Hannan of Kingsclere is president of the Institute for Free Trade