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With them went the culture of Labourism: the bolshy union stewards, the self-organised societies, most of the local newspapers.

Some time in the 1970s postmodernists and other wreckers took over, junked the notions of universality and the totality of social relations that powered labourism, and replaced them with a weak, defeatist politics of difference and contingency.

But for people who are supposed to be materialists this is a strangely idealist position, a kind of culture war–style battle in the free market of ideas, where Marxism and labourism were simply gazumped by the flashy reformism of identity politics.

To the extent that it has an ideology it is a vague blend of nationalism and labourism, expressed in the PJ’s founding “three banners” of political sovereignty, economic independence and social justice.

So there was this funny convergence: we were writing about that, and the way that British Labourism produced a politics dedicated to inequalities, at the same time as Hobsbawm delivered The Forward March of Labour Halted?