A Free Left Blog

Sometimes as a writer on social and political issues, I get this nagging feeling that it might be a good idea to suggest what should be done in government and wider public life rather than just moaning about it. This may seem like a somewhat obvious and absurd thing to say. Surely it is the job of someone writing about public life to put forward ideas about how to make it better? I agree with this to an extent. However there are real practical difficulties. Firstly, I think the primary task of a non-fiction writer is to describe and explain what is happening fairly and accurately. This takes a lot more time, effort – and space – than people might give credit for. We have limited time and space to play with as writers – and since we tend to be writing about something, that something necessarily takes up most of our time and attention. Secondly, and perhaps more interesting, is the necessary confrontation with the world of existing policy-making and law.   Policy-maki...

Music is an important part of my life and an important part of my politics too. Detaching from the political world is a political act after all. But good music also has magical qualities which can inspire and lead us into seeing connections and aspects of life that we may have been only dimly aware of before. In this way it feeds back into our political world. My own politics is an amalgam of all the different tendencies out there. I’m of the left for believing in our responsibilities to each other - especially those who find themselves on the wrong end of 'market forces'. I’m conservative for believing that we shouldn’t try to fix what ain’t broke, for respecting people as they are and life as it is. I’m liberal in believing that we should generally avoid interfering with what people are up to unless they are harming others. I’m Green for believing that we need to protect and conserve our environment and value the natural world. I’m UKIP for believing that Britain need...

Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote his 6th Symphony partly in reaction to the land mine that fell on the Café de Paris in London during the Second World War, a bomb which killed Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson and members of his West Indian Dance Band Orchestra who were performing there. Vaughan Williams' Symphony No. 6, played by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Roger Norrington Click here t o create a new window for the video. In a reference to the victims of that tragedy of war we hear in the symphony’s third movement the snaky, sinuous but ethereal sound of a saxophone backed up with a pulsing jazz beat. But it is framed by a piece which is tumultuous and angry, broken with a few moments of introspection and a short window of radiant beauty towards the end of the first movement. The fourth and final movement rounds the symphony off with a feeling of drifting and desolation, the strings evoking a gasping, uneven breath dying out to nothingness. ...

“ The arts are the means by which we can look through the magic casements and see what lies behind .”                                                                       ~ Ralph Vaughan Williams. Blue Labour is the Labour Party’s only hope if it is to win elections while remaining a party of the left. This is my view. This is still a far off vision though. Blue Labour is still quite an inchoate collection of ideas which many in the party don’t understand and others don't much like. Ed Miliband’s ‘One Nation Labour’ project sought to capture some of its narrative but failed to gain much traction and was quietly dropped. So what is it all about? One of Blue Labour’s originators Mauri...