After a summer festooned with Union Jacks for the Queen’s Jubilee and the Olympics, Ed Miliband’s catchphrase at the Labour Party conference was “One Nation”. Faced with the increasingly nasty face of the reigning Tories, Red- White- and- Blue Ed took on the mantle of Disraeli to proclaim that it’s the Tories with their vicious austerity policies who are waging class war, and it’s Labour who are the true patriots.

The massive street protests in Israel seem, for the moment at any rate, to have gone into retreat; the social question, which they raised so noisily around issues of housing, inflation, and unemployment, is once again being sidelined by the national question.