The right is now more colourblind than the left

As a tot growing up in a provincial proletarian Communist household in the 1960s, I’d been led to believe that socialism was colour-blind. But when I moved to That London in the 1970s, I quickly became aware that the non-working-class Left operated what was best described as Paint-Chart Politics – the further from white, the more likely you were to be right. This began in a small way, with reggae bands who believed stuff about women that would have had them condemned as fascist Neanderthals had they been white playing under the Rock Against Racism flag; in recent years, it has seen the Left support similar Islamist stone-agers just because they’re the right (Left) side of beige.

Thus democratic Israel, which gives full civil rights to women and gays, is worse than the countries which surround it, which don’t but are darker – it’s always particularly funny to see pasty-faced Western Pals Of Palestine being bundled into vans by dark-skinned mizrahi or Ethiopian IDF, their simple Paint-Chart Politics brains trying to take in the fact that Israelis can be brown and black-skinned too.