Some years ago, in the living room of his Nottingham terraced house, with pictures of Jesus Christ and Cliff Richard on the wall, a dark-haired man called Rudi gave me a frank view of his life in Britain.

As we talked – with a TV blaring out a Romanian-language TV channel and surrounded by his many children, sisters, and cousins – I explored why half a million Roma people like him had headed here when we threw open our borders to Europe Union citizens.

‘I love England. I feel I passed to heaven,’ said Rudi, who came here from Romania’s capital Bucharest. ‘It’s like finding a bag of money on the road, picking it up, and no one saying anything at all.

‘In my country, even when you offer to work in a piggery, racist farmers say no to a gipsy like me. We are treated like dogs.

‘We come in our cars, by plane, by bus. If we sell a television for £100 it pays for the fare. Why would we not be in Britain when we are paid by your benefits to be here?’

I had first met Rudi Ion, 45, by chance, as he queued to renew his family’s passports for a trip back to Bucharest where he had a home, at his country’s embassy in Kensington, London.

It was at the height of a political row in January 2014, when the UK first gave all Romanians the right to live here.

‘There will be virtually no conditions attached to those who arrive,’ warned the think-tank Migration Watch UK, predicting an explosion in the number of newcomers arriving on these shores.

And so it proved. When the Roma were first introduced as an ethnic group to the UK national census in 2021, the official total topped 100,000. But UK charities say this is a wild underestimate (due to a fear of both form-filling and racism) and put the true figure at nearer 500,000 in England and Wales alone.

While the Left is keen to paint the Roma as a well-integrated community in multicultural Britain, we were presented with a reality check that hot night in the Leeds suburb of Harehills last month.

A frenzied mob hit back at social services when a family from the community had their children (one, apparently, in handcuffs) taken into care by police officers after a baby was said to have been hurt.

Buses were torched, police cars attacked (until officers hastily withdrew), and blazes started in the small grid of local streets, which is plagued with rubbish-tipping, drug-taking, prostitution and pavement-drinking.

The children’s father, who cannot be identified due to family court secrecy rules, stood wailing in the street, begging for his children’s return, in a shocking scene recorded on social media during two days of rioting.

The Harehills disturbances were the beginning of the shocking tinderbox riots in recent weeks, which were inflamed by the appalling slaughter of three little girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dancing event in Southport, and spread to 30 or more towns and cities.

Muslim leaders in the area (often landlords of Roma-rented property), playing the part of peacemakers, pleaded for an end to the carnage.

As one particular house looked in danger of catching fire, Mothin Ali – the pro-Gaza Green Party councillor who gained notoriety on election night by celebrating his victory with a cry of ‘Allahu Akbar’ – implored rioters to calm down with the words: ‘There are children in there.’

Tory and Reform MPs who blamed the Harehills riot on a failure to tackle an out of control migrant crisis were rapped by the Left-wing Guardian for parroting the inflammatory 1960s rhetoric of the Conservative MP Enoch Powell.

Yet after years of talking (and listening) to Roma people in Britain and Europe, I was not surprised at what happened. The first time I met a gipsy – a term I used advisedly, for that is what they proudly call themselves – I was driving through the Berkshire town of Slough, near Windsor Castle, on a May afternoon in 2007 when Tony Blair was prime minister.

My eye was caught by a group of brightly dressed people, the women in headscarves, sitting on white faux-leather sofas on the pavement of a cul-de-sac.

Intrigued, I approached them for a chat but had trouble with the language barrier until an 18-year-old called Romeo, who had a faltering grasp of English, turned up to translate.

A few weeks before, he and his Roman Catholic family from a gipsy village 100 miles from Romania’s capital had decamped to Slough by bus in search of a new life after Romania’s accession to the EU allowed anyone from the former Communist nation to settle here.

‘All the family are with us, very few were left behind,’ said Romeo. Later, the head of the clan, 45-year-old Ion Demitrie added: ‘On our television, they said most of Romania could live in Britain. So, we thought we would too.’

The Mail lined up 21 of the Demitries in the local park for a photo: cousins, children, a granny, parents. ‘There are another 80 of our family here in the Slough area,’ explained Ion, proudly. ‘No one counts the Romas in the UK.’

Like Derby, Peterborough, Nottingham, Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield, and Cardiff, Slough was feeling the strain. During the first half of 2007, nearly 90 unaccompanied young Roma from Romania, all under 18, turned up at the town hall asking for a home, food and clothing. One was just ten, seven were pregnant and six had babies.

In Slough’s high street, Roma women with babies in buggies were begging on Saturday afternoons. The GP surgeries said they were overwhelmed. Schools dutifully expanded class sizes, though Roma pupil truancy was rife. Social housing waiting lists began to grow.

The council predicted – accurately – that the cost of providing for the child newcomers alone would hit £500,000 a year. The hard-Left Socialist Worker newspaper described them as ‘victims’. Civitas, a respected think-tank, warned that the Tony Blair government had ‘virtually abandoned’ border controls from the EU.

A Slough policeman was reprimanded under diversity rules for saying the Roma had come to Britain to steal. Meanwhile, the Muslim community – predominantly of Pakistani and Somali origin – complained that their youth were being attacked by drunken Roma gangs displaying a visceral hatred of Islamic ways.

The week after I met the Demitrie family, I travelled to Romania to visit their home village of Tandarei. There I found some of the very same people who I had met earlier in Slough. Giddying about on horse-drawn buggies and drinking beer in the dusty pot-holed streets, they told me they were using budget airlines (then offering flights for under £20) to commute back and forth.

Over the next few years, I saw Roma mansions being built in their faraway village paid for, the residents openly admitted, through British benefits.

I was shown round one impressively pillared edifice by a genial Roma gentleman who said he had copied the design from a toy balsa wood model of an English palace he had bought at a Piccadilly tourist gift shop.

My view that some, but not all, Roma migrants were throwing British generosity back in our faces was supported by many Slough councillors and voters of all political and ethnic persuasions. But worse was to follow.

The British Roma hit the headlines again in 2013 when trouble broke out on the streets of Page Hall, a Sheffield suburb, after a brouhaha with the Muslim community, African migrants, and the few indigenous English people left there.

Page Hall was in the constituency of David Blunkett, the former Home Secretary and then still an MP, who had recently visited to hear disgruntled residents’ views.

‘We have got to change the culture of the incoming Roma community because there is going to be an explosion otherwise,’ said Blunkett, presciently. ‘We have to be tough in saying to people: “You are not living in a downtrodden village or woodland… where there are no toilets or refuse facilities”.’

Echoing this, Mohammed Rashid, a 67-year-old Page Hall market trader and housing landlord, said: ‘This is our area and we feel we are being pushed out by the new Roma. They learn nothing about our way of life. I fear this place will blow up like an inferno.’

By now David Cameron’s coalition government had taken power. ‘Nothing seems to change,’ one English man in his fifties told me, wearily. He said Neighbourhood Watch meetings were reporting tales of Roma gangs stealing from supermarket delivery vans, urinating in alley ways and stealing clothes from washing lines.

The minutes of one meeting revealed that girls were charging as little as £3 for a sex act on Page Hall’s main street.

By now, there were 900 Roma-Slovak families settled in the area and a curfew was introduced to stop children roaming streets after dark and skipping school in the mornings.

Some of the more horrifying reports were impossible to prove and the Roma who invited me into their homes claimed that many of the accusations were dreamed up by the Muslim community and had racist undertones.

But the official minutes of a Neighbourhood Watch report claimed a Roma youth had offered to sell a three-week-old baby wrapped in a blanket to a man called Colin Barton and his Sri-Lankan wife Nichola, who owned a halal fish and chip shop in Page Hall. The price? Just £250.

I went to see the Bartons, who soon afterwards packed up and left the area, to verify the lurid account. Colin said: ‘A Roma boy of 16 or 17 walked in and said: “Do you want to buy this?” I said to my wife that I couldn’t believe it was happening in England. The boy left and disappeared into the streets with an older woman in a headscarf.’

When I spoke to a weeping Nichola, she confirmed the story. Too fantastic? My inquiries in Page Hall led me to a 57-year-old former teacher who ran a shop there. Unaware of the fish and chip shop incident, she told me she had been approached by a young Roma woman in the local park, Peace Garden, who offered to sell her a child too.

Since that first meeting with the Demitrie clan in Slough, I have travelled through both Western and Eastern Europe in a bid to learn more of the Roma’s plight and their tragic history.

Hounded out of northern India 700 years ago, there are an estimated 12 million in the EU, a population that makes them the bloc’s largest ethnic minority,

Now a nomadic community, they have no homeland and – perhaps uniquely – make no demand for one. For where could they go?

Over the years, the Roma have suffered dreadful persecution. Germany, in particular, has a shameful history in this regard. Before and during World War II, Hitler tried to wipe them out. One chilling protocol by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels in I942 declared: ‘Gipsies are to be exterminated… hard labour works best.’

Nearly a million were gassed or died in the death camps during the Holocaust. To this day, there is widespread prejudice against them in Germany. A recent poll showed 68 per cent would not want a gipsy family living next door to them.

In Italy, it was no better. Fascist dictator Mussolini declared them ‘sub-human’. And the Nazi-leaning Vichy regime in France put Roma on cattle trucks to be exterminated in eastern Europe.

Under Communism, the Eastern European Roma fared well in a societies where everyone from university professors to street cleaners was guaranteed a job, a home and equal pay.

But following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, they experienced rising levels of racism in the former Communist bloc countries. Many allege the Roma were victims of unofficial ethnic cleansing, with large numbers pushed westwards to try their luck in Germany, Italy and France.

Since then, in a horrifying echo of the past, I have seen Roma children fingerprinted in a census of Rome’s gipsy shanty camp numbers ordered by the authorities ‘to find out who is really living in Italy’.

In Naples, I was horrified to see the bodies of two Roma cousins – Cristina, 12, and Viola, 11 – who had been sent by their parents to beg and sell trinkets on a beach, left under a blanket after they had ventured into the sea and drowned, as holidaymakers carried on sunbathing and playing football nearby.

‘Would this have happened to an Italian child?’ asked the UN’s refugee agency. The answer is no.

Given the level of prejudice against them in mainland Europe, it is no wonder that the Romas’ eyes turned towards Britain.

In 2007, Romanians, in another EU enlargement wave, were granted access to Britain’s welfare state if they had work visas.

But the truth is many were already here. They had seized on a legal loophole that gave self-employed people (one ploy involved becoming a Big Issue seller or a metal merchant with a van) the right to welfare benefits and free NHS care.

Then came 2014 and another wave of migrants. Under a pact Cameron’s coalition government negotiated with the EU, the obligation on Romanians of any ethnicity needing to seek work in order to get British benefits was scrapped.

Dan Cristescu, one of the experts on Europe’s troubled Roma people, would be unsurprised by the troubles in Harehills. He is Romanian and was a trade union president under the draconian communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu, who was executed on Christmas Day, 1989, after a popular uprising.

The regime sent Dan to study at Ruskin College, Oxford, an institution designed to offer educational opportunities to working class people with few or no qualifications.

On his return to Romania, he ran a committee to help Roma families go to school, train for work and stop begging. It’s no exaggeration to say he is one of their greatest supporters.

‘But it is only fair to say they have been a problem for us, and now it is your problem,’ he told me as Britain threw open its doors. ‘I think it is naïve to believe that the gipsies, for that is what they call themselves as it means free man in their language, will change their ways overnight.

‘They are aware of your generous benefits system. Since the early 19th century when they came to Europe from India, they have lived by asking others for money. They are talented musicians, metal workers but, mostly, they live by begging. It is their tradition and some are very rich people.’

‘Fathers in their early forties have ten children. These offspring have dozens more. An extended family with outstretched hands, just count that up.’

If that this sounds harsh, listen to Rudi’s own words to as we said goodbye on that wintry day in Nottingham.

He hugged me in the doorway as he said: ‘Your benefits system is crazy. It is sick to let so many people in. No one is counting the Roma here. When your country begins to sink with the numbers, I will run away myself.’