A Free Left Blog

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. ...

Despite the title ‘cynic’s guide’ I am not really a cynic – indeed I rather like being led astray by great rhetoric and romantic dreams in my politics. There is a place for emotion, passion, and being inspired – an important place too.   Alas, the elections for Labour’s governing body the NEC (National Executive Committee) is not that place. It is a place where cynicism is more at play, almost necessarily, and the candidate statements offer plenty of insight into how Labour reproduces itself. So a bit of cynicism in looking at them is more than merited. Whether the setting of eleven that was recorded recently on my cynic-o-meter is merited I am not so sure, but there it is. I am no Labour insider so what you are going to get is not an insider’s view, but rather how these elections and these candidates appear to me in my rather wary, grumpy, half-ignorant and sometimes rather angry state of being when it comes to internal Labour processes. Probably like most memb...

This article was first published by Labour Uncut on 13th March 2012 as the second of a two-part series on identity politics - under an awful alternative title that I made up to follow on from the principal theme of the first part: All Women Shortlists in the Labour Party. This second part is more general, exploring the nature of identity and challenging dominant narratives on the Left about it. In Life and Fate , his epic novel of family, Stalingrad and totalitarianism, the Soviet-era journalist Vasily Grossman wrote: “Human groupings have one main purpose: to assert everyone’s right to be different, to be special, to think, feel and live in his or her own way. People join together in order to win or defend this right. But this is where a terrible, fateful error is born: the belief that these groupings in the name of a race, a God, a party or a State are the very purpose of life and not simply a means to an end. No! The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for l...