THERE is no public debate more shot through with hypocrisy and cant than that on the subject of migration.

Our island nations — constituted originally through Paolithic people who made it here on foot while the North Sea was silted up — have been enriched with Romans (including at least one Legion and a military commander of black African heritage) when the Roman Empire contracted people from what is now Germany made their homes here and gradually evolved into an Anglo-Saxon nation.

Vikings then made an appearance and an uneasy truce with the Anglo-Saxons morphed into a more fully integrated society. In 1066 the Normans invaded England, found an uneasy accommodation with the locals but found the Gaels in remoter parts of these islands too much of a handful.

An extensive exchange of people between Britain and Ireland passed with periodic outbreaks of hostility while various persecuted minorities arrived from the Continent.

Flemish refugees and French Protestant Huguenots were followed by Eastern European Jews, while earlier communities of Sephardic Jews were expelled in a prototypical anti-Semitic pogrom.

Since England, including Wales and later joined by Scotland, became firstly a piratical sea power and then a colonial slave-holding one, there has been a very extensive exchange of populations with the British nations distinguished by their extensive emigration to colonial possessions.

Naturally, and following the circulation of capital and commodities over the last few centuries, many inhabitants of those colonies pitched up here. Those who bear quintessentially English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish names are evidence that Brits, too, have long been migrants.

We can find all manner of internet idiots claiming a mythical pure Anglo-Saxon ancestry but the miracle of DNA testing exposes these fantasies as the moronic mouthings of the daft and deluded.

But ever since the Black Lives Matter movement found a powerful body of support in British society the long-existing and largely subterranean current of racialist thinking has found a new voice.

Expressed initially as straight hostility to these manifestations of solidarity with the victims of racism and less obviously as a fearful recognition that their imperial mindset was increasingly redundant, these elements have revived their poisonous racist narrative around the ridiculous notion that the handfuls of refugees seeking asylum and safety here are an invasion.

The discovery that on a Calais beach there lies the body of a traveller drowned in the English Channel and washed back by the tides has exposed the hypocrisy of all who imagined that the slogan All Lives Matter was a clever subversion.

The governments of each of the European states tailor their migration policies to reconcile political imperatives with the pressing needs of their universally deregulated and exploitative labour markets.

If German Chancellor Merkel was happy to accommodate any number of Middle Eastern professionals and skilled workers, France’s President Macron is happy that more than 300,000 French people work in Britain, largely in the finance or hospitality sectors.

Britain has many thousands of foreign medical professionals staffing our under-resourced NHS. A good many of these are poached from countries that need their services more than do we.

Hypocrisy is not confined to the racist right.

Five million Brits live abroad and a good many starry-eyed supporters of EU membership for whom “free” movement signifies their privilege to market professional skills throughout the continent are blind to the truth that for many migrant workers in Britain their labour is more “forced” than free.

Britain needs a non-racist migration policy that satisfies our treaty-bound human-rights duties and reconciles labour-market needs with an ethical foreign policy that takes account of our imperial past and predatory present.