I hadn’t planned to write anything about the Together Alliance march mainly because I didn’t see very much of it. Normally at a demonstration you can potter around while it’s assembling and can be certain to meet people you know. Yesterday, despite standing on the same spot for the best part of a couple of hours, I hadn’t moved a single step forward. Meanwhile, the head of the march was already entering Trafalgar Square. The organisers claim 500 000 people took part. It was certainly huge, definitely much larger than I had anticipated.

A very approximate way of characterising the event would be to say that it represented a large part of the Green Party’s electoral base, the Palestine solidarity movement, some union branches and people who identify as anti-racists and hate Reform. If there were any Labour Party banners there, I didn’t see them.

You would have been hard pushed to find anyone present who supports the Israeli state in its ongoing campaign to eradicate every vestige of Palestinian identity.

Unless you were in the vicinity of Paul Mason, a man for whom renegade is one of the kinder descriptions. In one of his rare breaks from tweeting about how hideously antisemitic the Green Party and all its members are, he commented that “I was on this demo and it was not “for Palestine” – it was for a Britain free of hate.”

Palestine is now the essential divide in left right politics. The entire right have made unconditional defence of the actions of the Israeli regime a central part of its politics. With just about one exception everyone taking part in the demonstration was implicitly criticising the racist Israeli state, a society where it is now commonplace for TV shows to have discussions about ethnic cleansing, which permits fascistic pogroms on the West Bank and politicians plan to legalise capital punishment for Palestinians while Israelis murder with absolute impunity and state protection. Mason appears perfectly comfortable with this but gets indignant about a one sentence description of a march. He was also more exercised by the fact that some Iranians were carrying their country’s flag while it being heavily bombed by two imperialist states.

Labourism simply does not have a clue how to react to the changes that are happening in British politics. Having demonstrated that it is unable to oppose Farage, it is completely misunderstanding the radicalisation that is taking place in front of its eyes. Mason’s petulant, slanderous commentary sums its dilemma up perfectly.