So here’s an interesting thing. Footage so striking that even the BBC has run with it. This is the film of a migrant boat landing on a beach in the south of Spain. In recent years for a whole variety of reasons, Spain has avoided the worst of the migrant crisis. Perhaps that’s why these images have broken through where the daily images from Italy this summer have not.

Anyway, it’s hard to think of a more vivid encapsulation of the ongoing suicide of our continent than this one. If you believe Angela Merkel, the European Commission and most of our political class, the people storming that Spanish beach are doctors, engineers and physicists fleeing the terrible civil war in Morocco, and just desperate to lend their skills to our continent.

The reality (as I recently described at book length) is somewhat different from that dream. These young men from a range of sub-Saharan African countries have come to Europe for a hundred different reasons and they will stay in Europe. Most will try to move northwards. And along the way the only employment most of them will find will be working with illegal gangs made up of people from their countries of origin.

Meanwhile, those people on the beach in Spain can happily stand for all the rest of Europe. They want to have a nice time, the sun is still shining and it’s all just a bit of a bummer that another boatload of people would illegally break into your continent while you’re working on your tan. But someone else will deal with them, won’t they? Except they won’t. It’s a myth, like the idea that it doesn’t matter because it’s just one more boat and the continent can easily take in this boat. Like the ones before it. And the endless boats to come.

Elsewhere the Italian authorities have been making more discoveries about the collusion between the smuggler’s networks and some of the NGOs operating in the Mediterranean. All just another story in the strange suicide of our continent.

My own view is that the effects of a borderless continent (borderless at its external borders - where anyone can just get on a boat and arrive - as well as borderless within) are already being felt. A lot of the public know this, but there just aren’t enough people in power who want to admit to it, let alone tackle it. And so for a while to come our politicians will continue to try to find a way around the consequences of their evasions, half-truths and untruths. They will continue to witter on about ‘diversity’, for instance as though we just need more and more of the stuff and that it is just an endless good in itself.

On which note, whatever else you may say about the latest gang of child-rapists to have been sentenced in the UK (this time in Newcastle) nobody could claim that it was boringly mono-cultural. The Newcastle rape-gang included men not just from Pakistan and Bangladesh but also from Iraq, India, Iran and Turkey. Which is a fine demonstration of the diversity which our continent has welcomed in and a model of the integration which our society is trying to make possible.