I was in Milan last week, giving a talk on Brexit, when news broke that Italy’s biggest bank had lost its chief executive.

UniCredit is close to crisis, its share price having plunged 40pc during 2016. The entire Italian banking sector is looking extremely fragile, in fact, with bank share prices down, on average, by a third since the start of the year. You don’t think that matters to the UK? Well, think again.

We’ve heard a lot of blood-curdling statements about “the dangers of Brexit” over recent weeks from the Treasury and the Bank of England, vital institutions which, regrettably, now seem to be entirely politicized. But we hear much less from officialdom about the considerable dangers of staying in the European Union.

One concern looming large in the British public’s consciousness, of course, is immigration, which rose to a net 333,000 last year, including a record 184,000 from the EU. I’m not anti-immigration – not for one moment – but I do believe vast wage differentials across the EU, combined with the more general mass movement of people from Africa and the Middle East to Europe, mean “freedom of movement” is not only naive but increasingly dangerous.

Intra-EU migration is now tearing badly at the social fabric, radicalising European politics at an alarming pace. Anyone who fails to acknowledge this and think through the implications is showing an astonishing lack of awareness.