Everywhere tribalism fuels politics - Them and Us. There is only one genuine great divide - between liberals and conservatives, left and right. Only the brief interruption of socialism split British liberalism apart. It left the Liberal Party stranded on an electoral desert island, where surviving as they could on scraps and berries, this long-lost branch of the family developed a language and some strange habits of its own. Just as Israel welcomed home the black Falashas of Ethiopia as their lost tribe, so it's time for Labour and Lib Dems to recognise their true kinship.
Socialism is dead, long live liberalism.
At an Anglo-Spanish conference last weekend, I observed that universal chasm that divides the right from the left wherever they meet. This was aided by the presence of those such as Telegraph editor Charles Moore from the far outposts of British high conservatism, and by sitting next to a Spanish culture minister who spent the evening extolling Hayekian economics, the privatisation of everything and the total abolition of taxation. By the pricking of the thumbs, by the twitching of every political fibre, an urge to reach for a clove of garlic and a stake, the good liberal's blood boils in the presence of the old enemy. Labour ministers and MPs sometimes looked as if they were sucking lemons, instinctively queasy at mingling among deceptively urbane patricians and the more wild-eyed denizens of the right. This is the true tribal divide.