A Free Left Blog

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

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...

This article was originally published on Shifting Grounds on 19th February 2013. Since then I have been interested to see in Sir George Cox's review of short-termism in business, commissioned by the Labour Party, the proposal that infrastructure be removed from democratic political control (see page 11). That is precisely the sort of thing I mean by "A Stealthy Form of Authoritarianism":  perhaps not so stealthy though... “I think we really are the victims of a discursive shift, since the late 1970′s, toward economics”, the late historian Tony Judt said in a recent book. “Intellectuals don’t ask if something is right or wrong, but whether a policy is efficient or inefficient. They don’t ask if a measure is good or bad, but whether or not it improves productivity…Until you’ve generated resources, goes the refrain, there’s no point in having a conversation about distributing them. This, it seems to me, comes close to a sort of soft blackmail.” Judt talked ...