Within the space of four months, between October 2010 and February 2011, the heads of government of Germany, Britain and France each declared, in terms that would have been unsayable a decade earlier, that multiculturalism had failed.[1] The declarations were political, and politics forgets its confessions quickly; but they gave official voice to something ordinary citizens across Western Europe had been saying among themselves for a generation. The difficulty is that the word failed is too blunt to be useful, and its bluntness has invited an equally blunt reply: that Britain, France and Germany are full of people of foreign origin who are entirely at home, and that those who speak of failure are therefore either mistaken or malicious.