Immigration is a problem just now in England mainly because people think it is. Which is not to say that there aren’t genuinely problematic aspects to it – housing the refugees, for example; accommodating them safely in the meantime; adjudicating their claims to asylum quickly; rescuing them from drowning in la manche in some cases; rooting out the evil people exploiting them – but only that the major political problem surrounding immigration is the hostility shown by some settled Britons towards it, manifested in the riots that have been smashing up mainly northern English cities this past weekend, including my own.

How many of these anti-immigrant protesters there are is difficult to tell: clearly several thousands overall, probably millions; but in most cases their ‘demonstrations’ are reported to have been met with much larger ones defending the refugees, despite the antis’ claiming to represent the ‘British people’ in this regard. ‘Say it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here’ was the dominant chant heard in Hull’s Victoria Square on Saturday. The pride that local residents are taking in clearing up the messes that the rioters leave behind them – smashed windows, looted shops, burned-out cars – may also be testimony to this. But of course it’s hard to know. And the anti-immigrants are noisier, and more violent.

In fact, of course, immigrants of all kinds are and always have been a net bonus to British society, as several surveys of their medium-term economic impact have shown: paying taxes, providing much-needed labour, especially to the National Health Service, and – albeit not a directly economic benefit, this – enriching British culture greatly. They usually ‘integrate’ well, if not homogenously, although that might take a few years; and very often get on famously with ‘native’ Brits. (Especially in Scotland, apparently, where you don’t find the same degree of anti-alien feeling.) But they do need government or local government policies positively directed to settling and integrating them: educating them, teaching them English (or Welsh), housing them suitably; and avoiding, if possible, their living in ‘ghettoes’, divorced from the rest of English society.

Or ‘societies’, I should have written; because one of the truly distinctive things about Britain is how essentially ‘multi-cultural’ she has always been. This is why when asked to define or characterise ‘Englishness’ English people are usually lost for words, or else resort to vague generalities and trivialities, like respect for the law (difficult to recognise in the case of this weekend’s rioters), or the monarchy, cricket and queuing for buses. Britain is of course – and was even before the new immigrants arrived – a mix of several national and regional cultures, overlaid by other religious and class ones; which have always jostled for primacy without any one of them winning out. If there is an ‘alien’ culture threatening a broader English identity today, I could make out a case for its being the upper-class one encouraged in the ‘Public’ schools, and exemplified by Boris, Cameron and their ilk, living in their ghettoes, in the Cotswolds and elsewhere;  which most working and lower-middle class people in Britain wouldn’t recognise as part of their ‘national identity’ at all.  As one slogan put it recently: ‘It’s not the Estonians you need to fear; it’s the Etonians’. That’s where the main fault-line lies in British society, and always has; not the one between British-born, and foreign.

There’s much for a government to do here, but not by imprisoning them in disused military camps, or dumping them in the middle of Africa. Sweden, with a similar problem a few years ago, and a similar far-right movement born in reaction to it, has chosen more moderate and constructive ways, with some (although not complete) success. Governments could also meet the argument that refugees were ‘costing’ the country too much by providing adequate services – especially medical, educational and housing – for all their citizens. That should also tackle the wider popular frustrations that clearly fuel the far Right movement generally. The other thing that needs to be done is to bear down in some way on the propaganda, by politicians like Nigel Farage, and in the popular print press and on social media, and the lies that are pushed out to – for example – tar innocent asylum-seekers, especially Moslems, with being criminals, terrorists and paedophiles. That’s one of the most dangerous aspects of this whole affair. It’s almost as if the far Right wants to prolong these frustrations in order to provoke and justify an even further Right – genuinely Fascist – government in Britain.

Interestingly, Swedish TV News programmes have put Britain’s weekend riots at the top of their running order over the last two days. So Europe is noticing.