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...

Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has helped ignite another of those increasingly regular cyclones of protest from our liberal-left publications about virtually any talk about immigration. Cooper’s speech on ‘Labour’s approach to immigration’ addressed this sort of attitude head-on in her introductory passage, in which she said: “ On the one hand we now have an arms race of rhetoric involving the Tories and UKIP over immigration. UKIP are exploiting peoples’ fears, fuelling anxiety and division, and David Cameron is racing to catch up. Between them they promote the idea that immigration is all and always bad, and should always be stopped. On the other hand some liberal commentators seem to think talking about immigration at all is reactionary, and concern about immigration is irrational. They give the impression that immigration is all and always good, and should all be encouraged. Both sides shout at each other. Neither are right. And most people don’t agree...