A Free Left Blog

  An Open Letter to Tom W Green, a composer and musician based in Glasgow. Dear Tom, Thank you for alerting me to your blogpost entitled ‘The Farts Ascending: Classical Music and the Culture War’, albeit with a rather unfriendly tweet saying that it was “partly in response” to my “ nonsense article that tried to concoct a culture war from RVW's The Lark Ascending”. I read it with interest. In responding here, I would like to address a number of factual errors and omissions you make which should be corrected. You call me “a right wing author”. This is untrue. I am actually of the left. I was a Labour Party member from 2010 to 2016 and still count myself of the left. My blog on which this letter is published is called A Free Left Blog . At no point have I said that I am no longer of the left. This assertion is at the core of your argument and should be corrected. Understandably, you use the original title of my piece , ‘Why The Elites Hate Vaughan Williams’. However perhaps yo...

In the past month and a bit I have had two articles published by the website Unherd. The first is on the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, who I have written about here before. The article is entitled ' Vaughan Williams: not simply a nostalgic nationalist ' and looks at how he doesn't conform to many of the stereotypes given to him, particularly by progressives and anti-Brexit types. The second is ' In Praise of NIMBYs ', which was published today and seeks to redress some of the bile that these committed members of the community [Not-In-My-Back-Yard-ers] receive from our political elites. I hope they are worth a read. Feel free to put any comments up here or to me on Twitter since there is no comment facility on the Unherd site. Here's a bit more VW anyway: perhaps the greatest piece he ever wrote. Ralph Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis