Is Ed Miliband A Jew?

It is a Yes-No question. We all know the answer to it. And we all know for whom he is campaigning in the London mayoral election. Ken Livingstone has undeniable faults. But so much for his alleged anti-Semitism.

In making himself the line of defence of mainstream culture on regional incomes, on Sunday trading, on Post Office privatisation, on the price of postage even before that, on road privatisation, on rural planning, and in the probable form of a free vote on the redefinition of marriage, Ed Miliband might lose upper-middle-class metropolitan liberals, many of whom, it is true, are secular Jewish or occasionally observant. But how much electoral difference is that going to make? And anyway, where would they go now?

The consistently overall majority-delivering poll lead speaks for itself. The people who do not want the supermarkets open all day on Sundays, or family and local community business thus devastated, or the Royal Mail flogged off and thousands of Post Offices closed, or stamps priced out of their reach even under public ownership, or to be charged by oil-rich states to drive on British roads, or the countryside concreted over, or their own marriages redefined over their heads while MPs were whipped to vote for it, or their incomes slashed because they live too far from London to be deemed to deserve to be paid properly, also do not care much for the whining of upper-middle-class, metropolitan liberals who yearn to do as their New York counterparts have done and ban Christmas trees from shopping centres the length and breadth of the country every December.

What is more, that mainstream majority has a Leader who is himself an upper-middle-class atheist Jew from London, and who is equally indifferent towards the whiners. Get out of that one. I bet you can't.