Do they come for you at dawn or dusk? In the dead of night, or at family dinnertime? Will they come with masks and shields, or will they be kindly and sheepishly apologetic? Will they accept a cup of tea and a biscuit if offered? Will there be bags already packed by the door, protocols prepped and drilled, a list of numbers to call? Will you go quietly and with dignity, or in a mess of curse words and screaming limbs?

Perhaps right now this all feels a little fantastical and far-fetched. Perhaps it feels hard to imagine the great wave of remigration lapping up on the pristine middle-class doorsteps of Stroud or Stoke Newington. We can still have a chuckle about it. Maybe there’ll be a nice fat relocation cheque. A free one-way holiday on the British government. Always wanted to visit China at this time of year, and so on.

But of course if the recent history of British politics has taught us anything, it is that nightmarish visions do not stay nightmarish visions for long. There is a heft and momentum behind them, a spirited and concerted effort to make the nightmare flesh. And so in our darkest daydreams, many of the non-white citizens of this country occasionally entertain an idle thought exercise: who wants to get rid of us? Is it you, grumbling old lady on the bus? Is it you, the smartly dressed businessman tutting quietly as two beaming mixed-race children whiz by on mini-scooters? Was that an innocent jostle in the pub queue, or the unmistakable microaggression of a seething racist who wants me gone for good?

Two decades after the Conservative party asked “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?”, it turns out that quite a lot of people were. Through the long years of Windrush scandals and asylum panic, Brexit and beyond, from the British National party in local government to white nationalists proudly parading through our streets, from the Rwanda scheme to “great replacement” theory, a menacing anti-migrant movement has been growling into gear. And we should probably be clear at this point that hotels and small boats were never the endgame.

Of course we knew right from the start that “legitimate concerns over immigration” always had a kernel of racial........

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