A Free Left Blog

I am continuing to see a lot of wailing and moaning about Brexit from the classical music and wider arts Establishments and thought it was worth a further word or two following my previous blogpost on Brexit and the arts , which seemed to go down well with a few people. Barely a month seems to go by without another letter signed by the great and the good of the arts world railing against everything to do with Brexit and demanding that the government either cancel or dilute it so that the status quo is maintained. Moreover, we find major arts figures seemingly using every opportunity presented by their privileged public access to attack Brexit, implicitly or explicitly, as nasty, bigoted and nationalist. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand I reject the idea that artists shouldn’t get involved in politics. The arts are part of the public world and therefore part of politics. To artificially separate them off from politics is itself a political act, an act of cont...

This article was originally published on LabourList on 15th March 2011. Freedom and democracy are not things that the Labour Party does altogether well. The party leadership election and Tower Hamlets mayoral contest represent the tip of an iceberg of dissatisfaction and anger for many members concerning internal democratic processes. As for freedom, the word barely gets a look-in in Labour circles except when talking of foreign countries. In the Labour Party, we are not alone in this. Britain as a whole is in something of a rut when it comes to democracy. Participation in elections and in political parties is way down over time, and faith in democratic politics badly damaged. When it comes to freedom, many of us take for granted basic freedoms of thought, speech, conscience and movement. On the liberal-left, the political wind has blown in some mysterious ways, to the extent that some self-styled liberals have developed an alarming tendency to aggressively shout do...