Last week on the No 9 bus, a middle-aged white woman shouted “bloody Paki” and spat at me. The sputum landed on the back of my seat, grey and revolting as she was.

No one said a thing, not even the black and Asian people around me. They all lowered or averted their eyes. I was spat at in 1972, too, after exiled Ugandan Asians with British passports arrived here. That time I was sitting quietly in a park in Oxford, reading Middlemarch. So you think it’s much better than the really bad old days? The truth is that, since 2001, in-your-face racism has returned. But those who suffer it just have to swallow the insults and degradation.

The difference is that, back then, we had politicians of all parties, including Tories, who felt keenly that racial prejudice and discrimination were unjust and reprehensible. They passed laws, used government purchasing power to get companies to operate fairly and, bit by bit, made racism unacceptable in the public space. Now those at the top – with the exception of Diane Abbott – say nothing and do even less about this stain on our society. Ethnic-minority politicians are the biggest cowards of the lot.

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Even Margaret Thatcher, a little Englander, funded major projects to test the levels of race discrimination in Britain. I know because my husband, Colin Brown, was commissioned to carry out an expensive social survey paid for by her ministers. He devised empirical tests and proved that people were being denied jobs and housing because of their race or ethnicity.

10 things immigration has done for Britain Show all 10 1 /10 10 things immigration has done for Britain 10 things immigration has done for Britain The Mini The 1959 classic, that is, perhaps our greatest piece of industrial design, a miracle of packaging and revolution in motoring. Its genius designer was Sir Alec Issigonis, who was an asylum seeker. His family, Greek, fled Smyrna when Turks invaded this borderland in around 1920, and he wound up studying engineering at Battersea Polytechnic. He went on to create that most English of motor cars, the Morris Minor, as well as the Austin-Morris 1100, all much loved products of his fertile imagination. Getty Images 10 things immigration has done for Britain Marks and Spencer Once upon a time there was no M&S in Britain, difficult as that may be to believe. We have one Michael Marks to thank for our most famous retailer, and he was a refugee from Belarus, arriving in England in about 1882, and soon after set off to flog stuff around Yorkshire. He eventually teamed with Thomas Spencer to create the vast business we know today. Getty Images 10 things immigration has done for Britain Thunderbirds And many other TV shows created, funded and otherwise produced by that largest of larger-than-life characters, Lew Grade (also a world class tap dancer). The man who dominated commercial television gave us memorable entertainment such as The Prisoner, the Saint and brought the Muppets to Britain (a sort of fuzzy felt wave of immigration), as well as puppet shows where you could see the strings. All this from a penniless Jew from Ukraine, born Lev Winogradsky, who escaped the pogroms in Ukraine with his family in the 1890s. His nephew Michael Grade has also done his bit for British television. Rex Features 10 things immigration has done for Britain The House of Windsor Or the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha until George V prudently rebranded the family during the First World War. Well, our royals are a pretty German bunch, as well as having various types of French and other alien blue blood coursing around their veins. ‘Twas ever thus. There was William the Conqueror, Norman French, who certainly broke the immigration rules; William of Orange, a direct import from Holland; the Hanoverian King Georges, the first barely able to speak English; Queen Victoria, who married a German, Edward VII, who couldn’t stay faithful to his wife, a Danish princess; George V wed another German princess; Edward VIII married an American (though she hardly visited England and prompted his emigration and exile); and the Queen is married to man born in Corfu. The embodiment of the British nation, to many, but one thinks of them as quite multicultural really. Getty Images 10 things immigration has done for Britain I Vow To Thee My Country Our most patriotic hymn was the product of a man named Gustav Holst (pictured), born in Cheltenham, but of varied Swedish, Latvian and German ancestry, who adapted part of his suite The Planets to put a particularly stirring and beautiful poem to music, just after the Great War. As the second verse has it, “there's another country/I've heard of long ago/Most dear to them that love her/most great to them that know”. Imagine if the Holst family had been kept out because the quota on musical European types had been reached. Creative Commons 10 things immigration has done for Britain Curry and Cobra Chicken Tikka Masala is, so they say, a dish which not only the most popular in Britain but specifically designed to cater for European tastes. For that we probably have to thank an Indian migrant, Sake Dean Mahomed, who came from Bengal to open the first recognisable Indian restaurant, the magnificently named “Hindoostanee Coffee House”. History does not record if a plate of poppadoms and accompanying selection of pickles and yoghurts were routinely placed on the table for new diners, but we do know that we had to wait until 1989 to taste the ideal lager for a curry - Cobra. That brew was brought to us by Karan (now Lord) Bilimoria, a Cambridge law graduate who hailed from Hyderabad. Getty Images 10 things immigration has done for Britain That big red swirly sculpture at the Olympic Park Or Orbit, to give it its proper name, the work of Anish Kapoor, who arrived in 1973 from India and had the artistic imagination to fill a power station. Getty Images 10 things immigration has done for Britain The Sun Love it or hate it, and many do both, this has been a symbol of much that is successful and a lot that is awful in British journalism since its inception in 1969. In its turn it spawned the Page 3 Girl and some nastily xenophobic headlines. All the stranger when you consider its creator was, of course, Rupert Murdoch, born 11 March 1931 in Melbourne, Australia. Getty Images 10 things immigration has done for Britain Marxism OK, Karl Marx’s philosophy was not much of a gift to the world, but for a while it seemed like a good idea. Though we might not dare admit it, Marxism still has a few insights to offer to anyone wanting to understand the workings of capitalism, though too few to excuse everything that was done in its name. Born in Germany spent much time in the British museum and the British pub, buried Highgate Cemetery. Oddly, his ideas never really caught on in his adopted homeland. Getty Images 10 things immigration has done for Britain The NHS They came from many, many backgrounds, including Ireland, the Philippines, east Europe, the Indian subcontinent, and Africa, as they still do, but the contribution of the black nurses who came to the UK from the Caribbean to heal and care for is a debt of honour that must be recognised. It so sometimes forgotten that it was Enoch Powell, then Minister of Health (1960-62), who campaigned to recruit their skilled nurses to come and work over here. One abiding legacy we can thank Enoch for. Getty Images

Such work is not carried out any more because it is deemed unnecessary or a sop to political correctness. But we know, through analyses of various data, that while 20 per cent of young white people are unemployed, the figure for black youths is 50 per cent, and that landlords and estate agents now keep out non-white tenants. A survey in May found that more people admit they are racially biased than people did in the 1990s.

I was at the British Library last week discussing the resurgent racism with, among others, Penny Young, chief executive of NatCen, which produces the annual social attitudes surveys. There is now more tolerance of gay people and liberal lifestyles, but hostility to multiracialism is growing.

This is truly disturbing. Always remember Germany in the 1930s. When life gets tough, people instinctively turn on those they define as the other, the outsider. Jews, black and mixed-race people, Travellers and the disabled, were murdered en masse because they were felt to be a threat to national greatness.

Extreme right-wing parties are getting popular here and no one takes them on. The Olympics now seem like a great British hypocrisy. Good party, shiny medals won by athletes of colour, including the refugee Mo Farah, but racial hatreds keep rising. Why? The first reason is the frenzied public discourse on immigration. Oh, don’t you tell me the debates have nothing to do with race. That is the spin. Malign migrants, and asylum-seekers and the rest of us become fair game, too.

Then there is the phoney complaint that no one is allowed to debate immigration. As Matthew d’Ancona, erstwhile editor of The Spectator points out:“We have been reminded relentlessly and remorselessly that not all who question immigration are racist (it’s in Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech if you care to look). Indeed the cliché is so familiar that one has to avoid the syllogistic trap and remind oneself that plenty of people who hate immigration are indeed bigots and xenophobes.”

I blame the minorities, too, for the vulnerable state we are in. Islamicist separatism and now Isis terrorism have turned good people off diversity. The anti-white prejudices within some Asian families are mortifying. Grooming gangs have destroyed young girls and also cohesion and mutual trust between the brown and white Britons.

We are also frighteningly vulnerable because anti-racists have given up on the struggle, unlike feminists or those fighting for gay rights. The Equalities and Human Rights Commission is, frankly, moribund and we could, but don’t, use the web to campaign against racial prejudices. Where is our Peter Tatchell? Where, indeed, is the next generation Anthony Lester, the human rights supremo who pushed through race relations legislation?