THE other day it was my great pleasure to have a half-hour conversation with two volunteers from The Harbour Project.

If you’ve never heard of this heartwarming organisation, all you really need to know about them is they hold out a hand of friendship to newcomers to Swindon who are facing some mighty challenges.

It just so happens that the people they are specifically helping are refugees and asylum seekers, including those from wars so terrible that we cannot even imagine it, who have left their homes in the hope (but not the expectation) of finding the safety we take for granted.

I know other people have their own views about these things, but half an hour in the company of somebody from The Harbour Project should be enough to convince anyone that they are good people, trying to do good things for fellow human beings.

If you are lucky, some of their positive attitude will rub off on you and make your life better for it.

There is no denying that people’s attitudes have hardened - not just to immigration, but to life in general. All of a sudden we seem to live in world that is a lot less tolerant than before.

It is undoubtedly true that people are less self-conscious about making statements such as “We should look after our own first,” which I have seen often on social media in the last few weeks.

The fact that the people who use this particular term are often the last people who would think to look after anyone but themselves (and that includes “our own”) says a lot about their real attitude to caring for other people in general.

I also wonder who they are referring to when they talk about “our own”.

This often excludes people who were actually born here, although nobody with extreme views on the subject has explained how you actually qualify to be one of “our own”.

Two generations? Three? Or more?

They never define who qualifies because, if they did, they would quickly find themselves in an auction they might lose.

They would almost certainly be outbid by me.

My family go back at least eight generations in this area and almost certainly a few more, so way beyond the coming of the railways that heralded New Swindon, 175 years ago.

So if we chose to, our family could claim that at least 200,000 people currently living in Swindon are not “our own” and therefore not welcome, but of course it would be madness to think like that.

Give me two minutes to explain about Swindon’s history, which I have studied at length, and you’ll understand why anything as divisive as trying to separate “our own” from the rest is the quickest route to self-destruction.

You might think the Swindon story is all about railways, followed by other industries that arrived in the meantime.

But you would be wrong.

History is about people, and the relentless immigration of new people in this town has shaped it far more than anything else.

So if you feel the need to blame somebody for this, blame Brunel.

He started it by importing skilled labour from all over the British Isles to his railway works, starting in 1841, and this set the pattern for every single decade since.

It is the reason most of the population of Swindon is here, but also the secret of its success and long-term prosperity.

Those who are intent on adding up how long they have been here and comparing it with their neighbours first have to understand that those who came before them have never been counting.

Are you?