Friends Like These

"Historically, the Labour Movement has been a friend of Israel," Diane Abbott told the Question Time audience from this week's Three Tories Panel. (There were only the usual two on Any Questions, facing two members - yes, members - of the Labour Party, and with Fraser Nelson billed as "Editor of The Spectator", rather than, as on the television version, "News of the World columnist".) Well, historically, Israel has been a friend of the Labour Movement. But that was a long time ago. Before John Howard, before the Reagan Democrats, before Thatcherism, before anything else of that kind, there was the rise of Likud.

We are now being told by the usual suspects that there may have been people living in what is now Israel in 1948 (they have not always acknowledged that in the past, and some of them still don't), but they had no sense of themselves as a Palestinian people. Well, what if they didn't? There was no sense of an Israeli people, either; arguably, there still isn't, at least to anything like the same extent that the Palestinians, a very diverse lot, are now conscious of sharing an identity. Such a sense of commonality is not always evident, to say the least, among the various categories of Israeli. The Palestinians have no doubt who they are today.

Ten years ago, no one in Britain ever talked about "the white working class". Ten years before that, no one had ever heard of "Middle England". The definition of either remains far from determined, since half of all children with an Afro-Caribbean parent now have a white parent, since Middle English jobs and services are about to be slashed to the bone by a decidedly non-middling Cabinet, and so on. Who knows what a couple of generations will make the Tea Party people in America, or the Hispanics? There were once no English, as such, either. A generation ago, extremely few people would have given it as their primary identity.

Abbott, meanwhile, has now been nominated by Jon Cruddas...