Just for opposing the wholesale replacement of native British people by economic migrants from every corner of the globe, we critics of mass immigration have for decades been castigated as 'racists' and 'xenophobes'.

Left-wing media gaslighting has been so effective as to convince many that a desire to live amongst your own people, in a familiar culture giving shared identity and cross-generational continuity, is fundamentally wrong, even evil.

Whereas in fact, as Janet Daley elegantly argues in today's Sunday Telegraph, it's the most natural thing in the world:

The desire to live in socially homogeneous communities in not inherently wicked.

It is an inclination that has been quite natural to the human condition. In fact, virtually every society that has persisted long enough to be recorded has had some sense of historical or cultural identity in which common beliefs, assumptions and values made it possible to live together in a rational way. The development of what we call civilisation would have been inconceivable without such bonds and the effort to retain them over generations is a function of all successful cultures.

Of course, you will say, communities and nations need contact with others to remain alive. Accepting and incorporating outsiders is an important part of this. The history of human progress is a story, to a considerable extent, of the migration of peoples even when these movements involve invasion or conquest. But that does not de-legitimise the basic human need to live - and raise one's children - among people whose behaviour and attitudes are similar enough to one's own to provide cohesion and stability.

To demonise this need in favour of a relentless cosmopolitanism is stupid and unjust. That 'citizenship of the world' so beloved by utopian European fantasists might be appealing to a tiny proportion of the world's population - the specially qualified, socially confident, domestically unattached and rich.

But to most of the world's people, rootlessness is not even attractive. Indeed, it would be a scarcely bearable, endless existential insecurity. (Does it ever occur to all those sophisticated cosmopolitan Remainers why the 'unspoilt' provincial backwaters of Europe are such delightful places to visit?)