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...

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...

Margaret Thatcher’s comment that ‘ there is no such thing as society ’ has a totemic significance on the left. It serves as the trademark of an uncaring, right-wing ideologue who believed in selfishness as opposed to solidarity and community, to the extent that she didn’t even recognise the ties that bind us in society. The thing is – and this is coming from a lefty – she was actually right. The infamous phrase was uttered in an interview for Woman’s Own in 1987, in which she said : “ Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first .” She said it in full a little later: “ There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us...