It may not look it, but I come from a family of immigrants. Immigrants to the United States, that is. When I was a toddler my parents upped sticks and swept my baby sister Caroline and me across the Atlantic to Chicago, where my father worked at the University of Illinois. The intention was to stay there but a decade later, after much soul-searching, the family crossed the pond once more and came back to Blighty. And here we have stayed.

All of which is to say that I know exactly what it is like to move from one culture to another and while neither race nor language was an issue with us, we were expected to, and did, behave in accordance with American lifestyles and values.

I pledged allegiance to the flag, every day in school. We attended Independence Day parades every year on the fourth of July. I felt American and sounded it (somewhat to the bemusement of my British relatives) and so American did I feel that my mother was somewhat dumb-struck when she accompanied me to the home of a new chum and found out said chum’s parents hailed from Glasgow. It hadn’t even occurred to me to mention that technically we were the same nationality and it wasn’t that of the US of A.

When we moved to the States, my father had to sign a document confirming that he was not bringing his daughters to the country for purposes of prostitution, despite the fact that my sister was six months old and I was just three. He did not object to this; rather found it a source of amusement. As a professor at the University of Illinois he was technically a state employee and so his salary was a matter of public record, which it never was in the UK. He didn’t object to that either.

My mother was a deeply decent and liberal individual: we even found her reading copies of The Guardian now and again. But her opinion was very strongly that just as we were expected to behave like an American family in the States, so incomers to this country should adopt British values. End of.

It is not racist to say that (my mother was the least racist person who ever lived) and nor is it racist to impose some kind of border controls.

Keir Starmer is very, very foolish to deploy that kind of language towards decent people with perfectly understandable concerns and even worse, I have heard some people on the left all but call Nigel Farage a Nazi supporter, which is frankly grotesque. They should look to very recent history. Remember when Hillary Clinton called her opponents deplorable? It quite rightly blew up in her face.