内容摘要：Would US President Donald Trump or French President Emmanuel Macron, they ask, give up territories overseas?

Would US President Donald Trump or French President Emmanuel Macron, they ask, give up territories overseas?

A decade on from that Brexit vote, "attitudes to immigration are warming and softening", says Sunder Katwala, the director of the think tank British Future. "Concern about immigration was at a very high peak in 2016, and it crashed down in 2020. Brexit had the paradoxical softening impact on attitudes… people who voted for Brexit felt reassured because they made a point and 'got control'. And people who regretted voting to leave became more pro-migration."Attitudes to immigration are, says Katwala, "very closely correlated to the distribution of meaningful contact with ethnic diversity and migration - especially from a young age. So places of high migration, high diversity, are more confident about migration than areas of low migration and low diversity, because although they might be dealing with the real-world challenges and pressures of change, they've also got contact between people."

Why, then, did Sir Keir feel the need to say with such vehemence that unrestrained immigration had caused "incalculable damage" to the country, and that he wants to "close the book on a squalid chapter for our politics, our economy and our country"? Why did he say we risked becoming an "island of strangers" - leaving himself open to accusations from his own backbenchers that he was echoing the language of Powell in 1968?The answer lies in how attitudes are distributed through the population. Hostility to immigration is now much more concentrated in certain groups, and concentrated in a way that can sway elections."At the general election, a quarter of people thought immigration was the number one issue and they were very, very likely to vote for Nigel Farage," Katwala says.

The country as a whole may be becoming more liberal on immigration, but the sceptical base is also becoming firmer in its resolve and is turning that resolve into electoral success.And fuelling that hostility is a lingering sense among some that migrants put pressure on public services, with extra competition for GP appointments, hospital beds, and school places. Stephen Webb of Policy Exchange thinks it is a perfectly fair concern. Data in the UK is not strong enough to make a conclusion, he says, but he points to studies from the Netherlands and Denmark suggesting that many recent migrants to those countries are a "fiscal drain" - meaning they receive more money via public services than they contribute in taxes.

He adds: "If you assume that the position is probably the same in the UK, and it's hard to see why it will be different, and you look at the kind of migration we've been getting, it seems likely that we've been importing people who are indeed going to be a very, very major net cost."

So will Sir Keir's plan work? And how radical is it?Trump is urging the Senate to get on board.

"It's time for our friends in the United States Senate to get to work, and send this Bill to my desk AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!" the president wrote on social media on Thursday.Democrats, who have neither a majority in the House nor Senate, have criticised the bill, particularly on changes to Medicaid and Snap.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called it a "reckless, regressive and reprehensible GOP tax scam" and pledged to use the bill against Republicans in next year's midterm elections.New episodes of Gary Lineker's podcast The Rest is Football will no longer appear on the BBC's audio streaming service after the presenter leaves the corporation in the wake of an antisemitism row.