IMMIGRATION was the flavour of last week with a party political broadcast by Ed Milliband and speeches by both the Home Secretary and her shadow, Yvette Cooper.

One constituent emailed me to complain that people had been alarmed about immigration for years but had been reluctant to speak out about if for fear of being branded “racists”, but I fought both the 2001 and the 2005 general elections focussing almost exclusively on the issue of immigration and nobody called me a racist.

I acknowledge, however, the entirely understandable anxiety that people feel. In the decade before the general election of 2010 two-and-a-half million more people came to live in this relatively small and crowded island.

In the mid 1990s immigration was very low indeed, but immediately after the general election of 1997, the new government abolished the “white list” (those safe countries from which we would not entertain asylum claims). It removed restraints on bringing in brides from overseas and scrapped work place checks on illegal entrants.

Taken together, these measures sent a powerful signal to potential immigrants that our controls were being relaxed.

Then, with the accession of new eastern European states to the EU, the existing member states, with the exception of Britain, imposed a moratorium on free movement, with the consequence that emigrants from the new members only had Britain as a permitted destination.

Following the election of 2010 the coalition has imposed an annual cap on non-EU immigration and a points system to ensure that we get the sort of skilled immigrant we believe best suits our needs.

In addition, rigorous new controls have been implemented to eliminate the principal source of abuse: workers coming here under the pretence of being students. The results of these changes have been the sharpest fall in net migration to the UK since statistics were first collected.

It is important that this progress is not reversed when further new eastern European EU migration is permitted next year and the government is exploring the options available on this. But immigration has already profoundly changed the face of our nation as the recent census figures show.

This has prompted some of my most depressing correspondence: those who write saying they are glad that they have no grandchildren; glad that they are old; or glad that their parents have not lived to see the changes. I believe them to be profoundly wrong.

Of course it is important for a small island to control immigration, but that needs to be accompanied by a willingness to embrace the changes that have already occurred. It was precisely this changed, new and self-confident Britain that was on display at the Olympics last year.