A Free Left Blog

Listening to BBC Radio 3’s Music Matters programme the other day, I was struck by a discussion they had about Brexit and the arts – and thought it was worth breaking off from my book-writing to reflect on it a little. The discussion illustrated once more the remarkable hold that ideas and myths associated with ‘the European project’ have taken over the great and the good in Britain. That includes the BBC of course. As we have come to expect from the Beeb since it was allowed to drop its impressive impartiality during the referendum campaign, the discussion here was remarkably one-sided. All three guests, Cathy Graham of the British Council, composer Gerard McBurney and Emmanuel Hondre of the Philharmonie de Paris, were resolutely anti-Brexit. The only questioning of their consensus came from a short segment of an enjoyable rant from the artist Grayson Perry, railing against the complacency of the arts Establishment for peddling its comfortable ideas and preaching to the conve...

Speech at the London School of Economics Forum for Philosophy debate , 27th April 2016. I was proposing the motion alongside Dr Gerard Lyons  (economic adviser to the Mayor of London), with journalist Hugo Dixon and Professor of Political Theory Katrin Flikschuh on the other side arguing against. Each panellist had seven minutes to speak, followed by questions from the other side and then questions from the audience. Dr Gerard Lyons making his case for leaving the EU. [This is an amalgam of what I had planned to say in my speech and what I did say – so I missed out some of this in actual delivery while adding some ‘umms’ and ‘errs’ and various other stuff] The whole debate is now available to listen via a podcast here . Hello everyone. I want to start off by emphasising that I’m actually a pro-European. I always have been. I even like an idea of the EU (as  an idea, albeit not the idea). But on the balance I think we should leave the EU. I’m proba...

Around 45% of people voting in Scotland’s independence referendum voted for a separation of Scotland from the United Kingdom, and therefore a severing of the Scottish from the British. As media interviews with Scots during the campaign seemed to show, this desire for severing and separation came largely from a resentment of, dislike and contempt for ‘the English’, who have been perceived to be doing all sorts of nasty things to the Scots from their remote base in London or specifically Westminster. This is quite an interesting phenomenon on a number of levels, not least for how it shows how similar feelings north and south of the border can be funnelled in different directions by the action of opinion – otherwise known as politics. The Scottish nationalists have shown how effective they are at this, though alas not effective enough to win the referendum. This distaste for ‘Westminster elites’ as spat out by angry Scots is actually largely shared, though not in such org...

Scotland is a great nation. It already is and always will be, within the union or out of it.  But the United Kingdom is a great entity of its own: an accident of history that gives space for different nations and different peoples to express themselves within a bigger whole: a union of nations and peoples. That is something special and almost unique within the world.  But it will be damaged, perhaps irrevocably, if Scotland departs. To me, the Scots Independence debate seems to have shown a yearning not so much for separation, but rather for a state and a country that means something - for a better democracy.  I think we can (and definitely should) all share that aspiration, but the idea that Scotland by cutting loose will be free from the denationalising forces of global wealth and power that bear down on us and our governments is fanciful – if anything it will be more vulnerable to them, as will the rest of us. There will be positive aspects in coming to term...