Whether

Powell had exposed a gap between elite opinion and a growing sense of alienation and resentment in large sections of the population. What was emerging was a sense, among some, that elites of both right and left, out of touch with ordinary voters' experience, were opening the borders of Britain and allowing large numbers of people into the country.It became part of a cultural fault line that went on to divide British politics. Many white working-class voters would, in time, abandon Labour and move to parties of the right. Labour would become aligned with the pursuit of progressive causes. In the 20th century it had drawn much of its support from workers in the factories, coal mines, steel works and shipyards of industrial Britain. By the 21st century, its support base was more middle class, university-educated, and younger than ever before.

It has been a slow tectonic shift in which class-based party allegiances gradually gave way to what we now recognise as identity politics and the rise of populist anti-elite sentiment.And at the heart of this shift lay attitudes to immigration and race. Prime ministers have repeatedly tried to soothe public concern; to draw a line under the issue. But worries have remained. After that pivotal year 1968, for the rest of the 20th Century the number of people who thought there were "too many immigrants" in the country remained well above 50%, according to data analysed by the University of Oxford's Migration Observatory.Sir Keir Starmer's government, elected last year on a manifesto promising to reduce migration, is the latest to have a go, with an overhaul of visa rules announced earlier this month. On Thursday, the net migration figures showed that the number of people moving to the UK fell by almost 50% in 2024 - down to 431,000 from 860,000 the previous year. It's something Sir Keir will likely hail as an early success for his attempts to reduce migration numbers (although the Conservatives say their own policies should be credited).

Can Sir Keir succeed where other prime ministers have arguably failed? And is it possible to reach something resembling a settlement with voters on an issue as fraught as migration?Dig into the nuances of public opinion, and you find a complicated picture.

The number of Britons naming immigration as one of the most important issues - what political scientists call "salience" - shot up from about 2000 onwards, as the number of fresh arrivals to Britain ticked up and up. In the 1990s, annual net migration was normally in the tens of thousands; after the Millennium, it was reliably in the hundreds of thousands.

Stephen Webb, a former Home Office civil servant who is now head of home affairs at the centre-right Policy Exchange think tank, thinks concern over migration has been driven by the real, tangible impact it has had on communities."And like you see now, that's not an easy task in this country, because so many very good teams are competing for that," he said.

"But the moment I started working with the players... and that was only two weeks before the start of the season, I felt like, 'oh, this is definitely quality'."Winning the title, he said, was "an achievement that we hoped for".

"We worked really hard, but to say we expected it, I expected it, would be a bit too much," he added.Nevertheless, the season will end with Monday's bus parade to mark Liverpool's record-equalling 20th title.