Europe didn’t once come up in conversation, which is surprising because Aker is not only a councillor but also an MEP. Indeed, the cynic might ask how he manages to find time to run for so many things at once and do any one job well (although, again, the response on the doorstep suggests that he pulls it off). Moreover, immigration hardly featured at all. Of course the subject is there beneath the surface. It was suggested by some of the activists that in some parts of the constituency “you can’t hear an English accent”. But does this, as a Kipper insisted, really go hand-in-hand with a rise in crime and leafy England becoming a “no go area” (he added, for emphasis, “and that’s a fact”)? The distance between perception and reality on the immigration issue can be vast. Even when I visited rural Sheffield Hallam this week I was informed by a local that the village was being swamped. And apart from one French student leafleting for the Lib Dems, I never met a single foreigner.