Europeans are Britain's new minority

If you ran the marketing department of a progressive organisation, which wanted to advertise its inclusiveness, how would you do it? My guess is that you would run down the checklist of identity politics and first make sure your advertising had a perfect gender balance. Showing men and women equally would not be enough, however. There would need to be racial balance: black and brown faces among the white. You would want to tick confessional boxes and feature a Muslim and a Sikh. Perhaps you would want to show a transgender man or woman, just to be on the safe side.

At the end of it all, you would sit back and think, ‘there I have covered every base, no one can object now’. The advert is aired and you are a hit by a complaint you never expected. ‘Where is the European minority?’

Until the Brexit referendum, there was no such thing. There were fellow EU citizens from the continent, who lived in Britain, just as there were Britons who lived in the rest of the EU. They were not separate from the rest of British society. The stereotype of the Romanian fruit picker, who comes for the summer and returns home when the harvest is in, hides more than it reveals. Countless EU citizens have made Britain their home. They have lived, worked and loved here. They never saw their status as a problem until Brexit. Nor did anyone else apart from a few thugs who look for any excuse to racially abuse a target. They knew who they were. And now their certainties have gone.