The effects are remarkable: though there is no obvious linkage between any of these matters, if I knew your opinions on wokeness or gender issues, or on Net Zero or Covid restrictions, then I could ascertain, with 99% accuracy, your opinions on a distant ethnic conflict in the Middle East. Such is the power of tribalism, though there is no essential reason why the dividing lines should have been drawn in this particular way. The poles could just as easily be reversed, and indeed once they were.

In his memoir, Experience, Martin Amis quotes a letter he wrote home from Oxford in the late Sixties marvelling that “I met an incredible reactionary yesterday who supports the Arabs vs. Israel”, a striking vignette of the lost period when sympathy for the Palestinians was an almost parodically Right-wing opinion, and support for the Israeli socialist experiment was the righteous Left-wing cause. After all, Britain was forced to relinquish the Palestine mandate following a wave of Irgun terror attacks that established the Israeli state and which incidentally precipitated the UK’s last pogrom, in then solidly conservative Liverpool.

During the 1948 war that established both the Israeli state and the Palestinians as a stateless collection of refugees, it was the British-armed, trained and officered Arab Legion that fought the most effective campaign against Israeli forces. Back then, The Spectator, which today can publish a dispassionate consideration of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, could as a matter of course publish a glowing profile of the Arab Legion’s Bedouin chivalry and élan. In an inversion of Northern Ireland’s modern attitudes to the conflict, the Arab Legion’s Assistant Chief of Staff, Brigadier Ronald Broadhurst — described by the new Israeli state as “a soldier of fortune of British nationality” — would later become Ulster Unionist MPA for South Down at Stormont.

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The current dividing lines, then, are largely arbitrary, in a manner that highlights the paradoxes and absurdities of both factions’ Western supporters. Just like Palestinian and latterly Kurdish nationalism for the Left, a bellicose pro-Israel stance is a Western conservative affectation hard to read as anything other than a proxy outlet for muscular nationalist emotions they shrink from feeling at home. The millennial Left, meanwhile, generally hostile to the very notion of borders and welcoming to demographic change through mass immigration, strongly support the Palestinians’ claim to clearly defined, inviolable borders and their right to remain the demographic majority in their own homeland.

Indeed, framed in such terms, Palestine could just as easily be a Right-wing cause, a cautionary tale about the perils of mass immigration. The root of the Palestinian tragedy was, after all, the influx of Jewish migrants, many of them desperate refugees, which altered the country’s demographic balance irrevocably, and of which the establishment of the Jewish state was the natural historical result. Such a reading would easily lend itself to conservative fears over unchecked immigration, and as demographic anxieties become the central driver of European political discontent, younger Rightists could well, like the Nouvelle Droite of the Seventies, find themselves making sympathetic analogies with the Palestinian predicament. In Germany, AfD voters are the only voter bloc not to favour Israel over the Palestinians (though Germany’s dark history of course makes the country a special case). Indeed, the same demographic concerns are the precise reason the One-State solution, along with mass non-Jewish immigration, is unpalatable to the vast majority of Israelis, as it would erode the hard-won Jewishness of the Jewish state.

Instead, British migration anxieties seem to have transferred themselves, in centrist discourse, to socially acceptable discomfort at pro-Palestine demonstrations in London and other British cities. Perhaps, along with Europe’s bloody decade of Islamist terrorism, this is the cause of eroding sympathy for Palestinians and growing self-identification with Israel among the commentary class. Centre-right commentators who a few weeks ago howled at the Home Secretary’s remarks on the failures of multiculturalism, expressing their satisfaction at Britain’s successful experiment with demographic change, now express horror at the results. Multiculturalism, they have suddenly realised, does not mean the creation of a rainbow coalition of disparate peoples who have all suddenly adopted the worldview of an ageing Times columnist. Instead, it means the cohabitation of social groups with passionate, often diametrically opposed, convictions about identity questions of the greatest significance, including ethnic conflicts in far-off lands.

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Many liberals who spent the past three decades assuming that such deep emotions would immediately be shed on arrival in Britain, have, perhaps, been misled by their unexamined beliefs in the innate superiority of 21st-century British progressive norms over inherited identities, at a time when the very same liberals raised ethnic and cultural difference to greater political salience than ever before. The social-scientific literature, which British liberal commentators are proud not to have read or understood, is far clearer-eyed. As anthropologists noted back in the Nineties (before New Labour radically increased Britain’s levels of immigration), the British state’s policy of “multiculturalism” was the direct descendant of the colonial practice of indirect rule, maintaining the fragile harmony between rival ethnic groups through the co-option of ideally tame “community leaders” — a form of governance attempted in Mandate Palestine as elsewhere. We see this legacy perhaps most clearly in the aftermath of terrorist attacks or riots, where carefully-chosen “community leaders” flank police officers and the families of the victims to assert the state’s tranquil harmony and quell rumblings of discontent amongst the natives.

Of course, the British state failed entirely to extinguish Palestine’s ethnic conflict in the land itself, retreating in humiliation, and triggering a decades-long war that may now be reaching its bloody culmination. But we must hope its modern-day incarnation will be more successful in Britain itself. The centrist dads who a few weeks ago sang the praises of multiculturalism should count their blessings that they have successfully achieved what they claimed to desire: there is only more of its political results to come.

While it seems almost absurd, given the scale of the approaching catastrophe, to attend too closely to domestic political considerations, current Western discourse is worthy of note. For no apparent reason, the Gaza conflict has become the occasion for the centrist coup against the radical liberal-identitarianism it so long nurtured. Yet for the first time in my life, it seems, American commentary is more sympathetic to the Palestinian predicament than British media. Perhaps the root cause is changing demographics: just as British immigration anxieties manifest themselves through the mirror of the Middle East conflict, the growing confidence and cultural power of America’s Muslim minority is altering the domestic politics of the hegemon. Increasingly tired of foreign entanglements in which America’s record of victory is thin, both the American Left, including younger American Jews, and, to a lesser degree, its radical Right are less disposed to share the unshakeable attachment to Israel that marked their grandparents’ generation.

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In Britain, however, it is hard not to read much of the present discourse as a hangover from the Corbyn years. While the elderly communist’s sixth-form anti-imperialism provided cover for genuine antisemites within the British Left and its electorally allied Muslim population, the antisemitism scandal which brought Corbyn down was just as useful a political tool for both the Starmer faction, keen to eradicate vote-losing Left-wing radicalism, as for the Conservative Party. The reciprocal accusations of Labour antisemitism and Tory Islamophobia which ensued possess the unfortunate appearance of mobilising British ethnic minorities against each other for narrow party-political ends. While that is a natural political development in any multi-ethnic democracy, it is a dangerous outcome for national cohesion. But within the context of the current war, the brief Corbyn interlude has had the effect of both parties competing to demonstrate their unswerving loyalty to Israel, and to dampen expressions of empathy for the Palestinian cause.

Yet it is wrongheaded to equate support for the existence of an independent Palestinian state, the claimed policy of Britain as well as of the United States and European Union, with support for the terrorist outrages of Hamas. Waving the Palestinian flag is not glorification of terrorism in itself, even if many of the attendees at the protests — which will surely only grow in scale and anger as Gaza is levelled to the ground — openly or privately support Hamas. The increasingly fervid support for Israel’s Right to do whatever it wishes to eradicate Hamas, and the equating of expressions of support for the Palestinian civilians with terrorism, as in France and Germany, risks punishing the Palestinians — once again — for European political neuroses and anxieties of which they are entirely innocent.

As for the war itself, the omens are not encouraging for anyone. The tragedy of the situation, for both Israelis and Palestinians, is that the logic of their unhappy intertwining led them both to this precipice: just as the Israelis cannot accept the risk of occasional murderous rampages from Palestinian territory, nor will the Palestinians accept that they must be driven from what remains of their land. Neither can act other than as they are: both the weak and feckless internationally recognised Palestinian leadership in the West Bank, and the dovish secular liberal Israeli peace wing that bore the brunt of Hamas’s recent terrorist atrocities, are powerless to prevent the conflict culminating in extreme solutions.

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In just a fortnight, the scale of Israel’s preparatory bombing has already vastly outpaced the number of bombs dropped by the international coalition against Isis in Iraq and Syria over five years — bombing that ground Raqqa and Mosul into dust. The looming ground assault within Gaza’s densely packed urban fabric will not be easy for Israel, and many casualties on both sides are certain to ensue. As Israel assembles its largest armed force since the disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982, placing the Gaza strip under siege, as many Palestinians have already fled their homes as in the 1948 Nakba, which drove their grandparents and great-grandparents to Gaza as refugees from what is now southern Israel in the first place.

Where they will go, and whether they will ever return is now a major geopolitical crisis: both neighbouring Egypt and Jordan have announced that they will not facilitate the ethnic cleansing of Gaza in their directions. Yet when Israel eventually conquers the ruins of Gaza, it has no exit plan for how to extract itself. It cannot rule the Palestinians, even if it desired to, and yet it cannot allow Hamas, or an even worse successor, to establish itself in the wake of withdrawal. The logic of the war leads towards the final expulsion of the Palestinians from Gaza, an outcome which, having previously expressed its unswerving support for Israel, the United States now appears anxious to prevent.

While Israeli troops and armour amass on Gaza’s borders, in the north Israeli forces and Hezbollah trade artillery fire and rocket attacks. The scale of the fighting, which a fortnight ago would have been a major crisis in itself, is at present the very least that Hezbollah can afford without committing itself to a full-scale war. Iran’s statements that the coming hours will determine whether or not the Gaza operation becomes a regional war, and Israeli uncertainty at the nature of Iran’s response, have led us to the current uneasy pause at the edge of the abyss.

The deployment of two US carrier groups to the Eastern Mediterranean, along with a Marine expeditionary force, give Biden the means to intervene should Israel find itself embroiled in a war it cannot by itself handle. Yet American intervention in a war that could spread across the Middle East will not be an easy decision for Biden, nor long a popular one. A regional war will weaken the already ailing and overextended American empire further, while the civilian suffering that will ensue will shred what remains of its international legitimacy. Like Britain in the dying days of its own empire, the United States has found itself entangled in an ethnic conflict for which it bears great responsibility, and yet which has no obvious or palatable solution.

For Britain, the correct course of action is easy to divine, which does not mean that our government will follow it. The Israel-Palestine conflict ceased to be a matter for British involvement at midnight precisely on May 14, 1948. Britain has already committed itself to a European war in which the Americans are rapidly losing interest, and in which Israel has remained firmly neutral. Calls to sanction Qatar, the source of the gas on which British homes rely following our divestment from Russian supplies, for its hosting of the Hamas political leadership are merely an example of the worst sort of geopolitical virtue-signalling which characterises our political class.

The Israelis will be able to crush Hamas, slowly and bloodily, but inevitably: if they find themselves overstretched, they have the muscle of the global superpower to call on. There is nothing, beyond vague expressions of encouragement for both sides to respect human rights, that Britain can or should offer. It is doubtful, given the attitude of British centrists so far, that they will be as vocal to host Gaza’s shell-shocked and vengeful coming refugee wave as they have those of previous foreign conflicts: this era of European politics seems to have passed. Instead, the priority for the British government ought to be to ensure the safety of the British population as a whole. In the meantime, antisemitic provocations should be firmly clamped down on, and demonstrations robustly policed to ensure empathy for those suffering in the Middle East does not go beyond legal or moral bounds.

The entire Middle East is poised, steeling itself, at the edge of a war greater in scope and human suffering than almost anyone living has ever seen. With terror attacks shaking Belgium and France this week, and a synagogue firebomb horrifying Germany, the tragedy in the Middle East threatens Europe’s security. Hemmed in by past political failures, all that Britain can do is ensure that the coming bloodshed will not reach our streets.

Around 650 refugees are being taken off the ship; only 220 will remain. It has already outstayed its agreed welcome — until March 1 — in the North Holland village of Velsen-Noord. The local council has agreed that children currently attending a local school and people with an economic “bond” can stay until the end of May, but after that? Nobody knows.

This is the reality of temporarily housing asylum seekers and migrants on disused cruise ships or barges — a policy the UK is also pursuing. The Government plans to house hundreds of asylum seekers in Dorset, on the ship that was criticised for poor conditions when it was used as a detention centre in the Netherlands in 2006.

Cruise ships and other vessels have been employed at scale in the Netherlands since a refugee shelter crisis hit a year ago, as asylum seeker numbers headed to a five-year peak. There were devastating scenes at the Dutch registration centre of Ter Apel, where people were sleeping outside for days. One baby died in a “cold, draughty and dirty sports hall” overspill centre. The Netherlands’s Doctors Without Borders was deployed for the first time within the country itself.

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Since then, national and local Dutch politicians have been tied up in a debate about who should house asylum seekers and where. The COA refugee settlement agency reports that the total number of asylum seekers being sheltered has more than doubled since 2017, to almost 52,500 this month. A new wave of refugees is expected this year.

Two cruise ships are currently being used to shelter refugees: the Silja Europa, and the MS Galaxy, housing 1,500 people at an industrial harbour in Amsterdam. In Nijmegen, there are two other ships with 250 Ukrainian refugees; in Arnhem, Ukrainian refugees have been sheltered on two small cruise ships — although they are permitted to work straight away. There are five boats housing refugees and asylum seekers in Rotterdam.

On board the Silja Europa, Abdul Aziz, a 40-year-old lawyer from Syria, is sitting in the middle of a deserted lounge area. He has been here for seven months and hopes to find work, a house, and then to bring over his wife and two sons. “The ship is good,” he says. “It is a good life, but there are problems because of many languages, many countries. I transfer to Nijmegen on April 24 — it’s difficult to leave the ship to a new place with four, maybe five people in the same room.”

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With an eye to avoiding an appearance of luxury, the ship’s swimming pool, gym, casino and shops are closed, although one facility provides second-hand clothing and sanitary products three times a week. The disco, looking out onto the North Sea channel, is now a “silent space” for private prayer and weekly female-only fitness classes. There’s a children’s play area run by refugee volunteers and a restaurant offering three meals a day, beginning at 3.15am during Ramadan, when I visited. A medical area has a dedicated doctor and nurse, so as not to detract from local facilities, and there are offices for the IND immigration service and a refugee charity aid VluchtelingenWerk help area.

“We really don’t want to give the impression that we are living a sort of a luxurious life here,” says location manager Hanneke Niele, describing how the 32 nationalities and eight languages rub along. “People get three meals a day and a cabin. And if you compare it with some shelters, then it is luxurious. But we use it as an emergency shelter. Boredom is one of the biggest challenges. No matter how beautiful it is, no matter how much privacy people have, if they are not allowed to work and do not go to school, that is just a disaster.”

In other ways, too, the ship falls short. Taqwa, 24 and from Jordan, is grateful for the help but says it is tough not to be able to cook herself. “I think in the average prison you have more space,” says councillor and head of the liberal democratic D66 party Bas van Ruig about the cabins. “It is ultimately an emergency solution.” The other problem with temporary shelters is that they make an unsettled situation even more febrile, constantly breaking people’s connections and shifting them between schools and potential work.

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“Look, we were faced with a difficult choice,” says Rutger Groot Wassink, who is deputy mayor of Amsterdam and in charge of asylum policy. “Do you think people should lie on the grass of Ter Apel or do you give them shelter on a boat? I’d rather they have shelter on a boat. But you can’t do this for long.”

For Wassink, the situation is highly political. “During the war in Syria, we sheltered about 60,000 people. But we have since cut back and also sent a message to the rest of the world: ‘Don’t come to the Netherlands.’ As a result, many reception locations have disappeared.”

Meanwhile, refugee organisations such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) advocate a return to well spread, small and permanent reception locations, which are far cheaper for the public purse. “Even in the mess last year in the Netherlands when people were sleeping outside the now infamous Ter Apel, it didn’t deter people,” says Andrea Vonkeman, office head. “People were still coming. I don’t think a causal relationship has ever been established with a good system as a pull factor and bad conditions as a deterrent.”

As the debacle at Ter Apel brewed last summer, the policy to house refugees on ships was announced and sparked huge opposition — particularly to the initial idea (quickly scrapped) that the vessels might be moored at sea. However, despite these concerns, there have been no notable incidents so far on board. Children go to school, the ships have been opened to journalists and locals, and there are bus services so refugees aren’t stuck at remote locations.

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Standing at the harbourside in Velsen-Noord, even local politicians who vociferously opposed the ship thought twice about the hard departure date. “If we knew then that we would have so little nuisance, it would not have been a problem,” said Joost Bleekman, head of Velsen Lokaal. Still, agreements were made, and he doesn’t want the boat to stay.

Where will the refugees go next? While some municipalities have stepped up, perhaps motivated by compensation — Velsen-Noord was given more than €3 million — other regions have done nothing to help. A controversial bill to forcibly “spread” asylum seekers evenly throughout the country has been repeatedly postponed, and the protest party BoerBurgerBeweging — which is critical of the plan — has just won regional elections, potentially throwing a spanner in the works.

Without an adequate, permanent system in place, refugees are doomed to keep on moving. As Niele walks around the Silja Europa in her smart pink jacket, one man after another approaches her politely, anxious about where he is going to be shipped next, asking for her help. One thing’s for sure: this is no pleasure cruise.

I am talking to members of the ballooning Hong Kong community in sleepy Bradley Stoke — over the din of badminton shuttlecocks being batted back and forth and ceremonial swords whooshing through the air as older residents practise tai chi.

No one dares give their real name. Some even hesitate to give their age, in case it might somehow lead to their identification.

Are they scared of endangering their family back home? “No,” says one man. “It is because of the place you’re interviewing in. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there is actually one spy from the Chinese government behind us,” he adds with a nervous laugh. “So we have to be careful what kind of information we’re sharing.” I ask if we should continue outside, to sidestep the amateur agent, but he insists we stay put. “I think 70% of them actually can’t understand English. But they want to show they’re listening.”

In 2020, following a wave of pro-democracy protests, China imposed a draconian new security law on Hong Kong. It made crimes of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces punishable by a maximum sentence of life in prison, with the possibility of cases being heard behind closed doors and defendants being spirited away for trials in mainland China. Hundreds of activists and former opposition lawmakers have since been arrested.

Britain said the clampdown broke a guarantee of freedoms it agreed with China in the 1997 handover deal, and ministers responded in February 2021 by providing an escape hatch — a “bespoke visa route” for anyone registered with British National (Overseas), or BNO, status before 1997, along with their partners and dependent relatives. In all, 5.2 million people, or two thirds of the population, are eligible to live, work and study in the UK for up to five years, after which they can settle permanently (and can apply for citizenship 12 months after that).

And so, over the past year, roughly 1,000 Hong Kongers have moved to South Gloucestershire. At the Aerospace Bristol museum in October, local agencies came together with the Chinese Community Wellbeing Society for a welcome event attended by 250 people. And at the Konbini Asian supermarket in nearby Patchway, managers have been buying exotic fruits and vegetables — from shark fin melon to choy sum greens — to cater to them.

The new arrivals say they chose the area around Bristol for its moderate climate, good schools, low crime rates and relatively affordable housing (new-builds are much favoured over what one calls “second-hand properties”). Many have also been attracted by a YouTube influencer, Canaan K, who has amassed 60,000 followers in two years by producing Cantonese videos on everything from UK income tax to Primark sales, while gushing about the wonders of BS32. “They think this is the place to be — according to her,” explains one of Bradley Stoke’s newcomers.

Daniel*, who is in his thirties, says he escaped so he can speak freely and “go everywhere without worries”. The last straw was the smartphone app the Hong Kong government instituted ostensibly because of Covid, but which he says is a “monitoring system so they know everywhere you go”. He had to abandon “my family, my friends, my dogs”. Yet he does not consider himself a refugee. “I think we are liberated,” is how he prefers to put it.

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Liberation, however, has its limits. Everyone here knows about the incident in October when a man believed to be Beijing’s consul general in Manchester ripped down pro-democracy posters, and looked on as one protester was dragged into consulate grounds and beaten so badly he was hospitalised.

“I was shocked,” says Daniel, “but not surprised. From what we’re gathering from the news, the Chinese government even set up police stations in foreign countries. It is effective. If you look at Xinjiang [where more than a million Uyghur Muslims are thought to be detained in “re-education camps”], you know what’s happening.” What are his worst fears? “Just that Hong Kong will become another China.”

The territory is also suffering economically, in part thanks to strict Covid lockdowns. In September, it lost its crown as Asia’s leading financial centre to Singapore in a respected global index. And its population fell by a record 1.6% in the past year, with 113,200 residents emigrating. Only this week, protests flared up again, echoing the anti-lockdown demonstrations that have swept across the mainland.

Candy Choy is the only person I can find who will agree to be named (she also approached more than 30 families on my behalf, but all declined to talk). “I love Hong Kong,” she says. “But unfortunately, Hong Kong didn’t love me.” A pastor and mother of two, who lives in neighbouring Stoke Gifford, she was recruited by the West of England Baptist Network to channel BNOs to the local churches and help them adapt to British life. She says she did not want her children to continue being “brainwashed” and had had enough of “self-checking” every time she ministered. “I was very stressed. But I’m not stressed now.”

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Still, she says many arrivals take precautions — including declining to give their new contact details to loved ones back home. “Sometimes we want to disconnect from them. So we didn’t tell anyone when we left. The police can find some excuse to arrest you. We don’t give our addresses — to protect us, and our families in Hong Kong.”

Choy says she has been savouring her liberty in Britain — googling anything she likes without hesitation and marvelling at the right to lampoon those in the highest offices in the land (her daughter asked in astonishment how the British were allowed to make jokes about the Queen). And she enthuses about the warm welcome she has received. “My neighbours mainly are local people and they invited me to many jubilees, bonfires and Christmas parties.”

No one here has a single racist incident to report. The only complaints anyone can muster are confusion about the council’s recycling system and the strict British penalties for parking and speeding. Oh, and the food. “Honestly?” says one, “it’s just chips and chicken.” Another regrets that she has not been able to find a steak in the area that actually has “a meat taste”. A third looks at me in horror as he describes what sounds like an almost mythical dish he is yet to encounter: “The London eel.”

I meet Helen*, a wary mother of three, at a pub in Bradley Stoke. “I think I escaped from a monster’s claw — because of the kindness of the English government,” she says. The 44-year-old accepts that the Hong Kong she knew and loved is no more. “It was very beautiful,” she recalls wistfully. “It was wonderful, it was energetic. It was full of freedom and mass media. Now they only take dictation.” In June last year, Apple Daily, Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy paper, announced its closure after 26 years following police raids. Its founder, Jimmy Lai, is in jail.

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Does she not find the small-town life of Bradley Stoke humdrum compared with the bustle of Hong Kong’s metropolis? In fact, she insists, she loves all the trees and the wide, open space. Plus, she says: “I’m too busy to be bored.” Helen is renting, in an area with rising prices, in part thanks to this wave of immigration. It means she works one full-time job, plus one or two part-time jobs each day, and is still not making ends meet — using her dwindling savings to make up the shortfall. “If the news reporters always focus on the majority, of the wealthy who have left Hong Kong, they will ignore the minority — people who are poor, who are struggling.”

Even those with capital from selling their expensive properties have had to adjust their career expectations in Bradley Stoke. Professors have found themselves working in Tesco warehouses. One woman from mainland China tells me how impressed she was with the Hong Kongers who arrived to work with her at a food factory — doing 12-hour shifts cooking up English soups and sauces. “They don’t want any benefits. They say: ‘We appreciate that the UK, during a difficult time, invites us to come. We want to do something for the society.’ I like their spirit.” But she is also aware of the suspicion they have for mainlanders like her. Some recoil even at the sight of Simplified Chinese characters, which they associate with the Beijing regime.

Helen joined the “Umbrella Revolution” protests in 2014 and demonstrations against a proposed extradition treaty to the mainland in 2019 — when dissent was still legal — dressing in black and singing the movement’s two protest songs, “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from Les Misérables and the Cantonese anthem “Glory to Hong Kong”. She is wary of other Hong Kongers in Bradley Stoke unless she is sure they were fellow protesters like her. “I keep a very, very careful eye on them,” she says, explaining she will look out to see if they have a yellow umbrella symbol “on their cup or on their keyring”. She is terrified someone will report her to the Chinese authorities, who would ban her from ever returning home to see her parents.

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Rachel*, another Bradley Stoke BNO, says she is “very blessed” compared with those who failed to make it out. They were stopped at the airport, she says, “and then they disappeared. My friends — key persons who organised all protests — their mobile phones always are switched off. After 2019, some teenagers disappeared and their parents also found them disconnected. These are the facts.”

According to the older émigrés, there is still a strong bond with Britain, which first occupied the region in 1841. Helen says they “love Pang Ding-hong”, the Cantonese name for Chris Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong. But Daniel says the sentiment is disappearing fast from the territory itself. “Those who have affection for Britain, underneath, they still love it. But now you just don’t say anything because the majority of those who feel the same have already moved to the UK.”

Many Brits feel our government has done precious little over the years to safeguard democracy in Hong Kong. Even Lord Patten says: “We should have delivered more explicitly on what was promised.” But the exiles in Bradley Stoke are pragmatic — and sanguine. “It is not just that China is too powerful,” says Daniel. “They’re brutal and barbaric.” Helen adds: “We just think no one can help us. But the UK government is one of the solutions. She will not very strongly make conflict with China, but now she gives us a gate to escape. And, for me, that’s enough.”

* Names and other details have been changed to protect identities.

***

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