Vote Labour…If You Hate London

Art and culture of the kind we associate with New York and London are present because of banking and finance. Every schoolchild knows that bankers like the Medicis helped kickstart the Italian Renaissance by patronising the great artists of that age.

Today, much of the extraordinary sums of money flowing through cities like London – that cauldron of capitalism – ends up in the arts. After all, a city with vast amounts of wealth needs to be entertained. It is no coincidence that ultra-capitalist metropolises New York, London and Los Angeles produce so much of the culture, music and cinema that we consume. In India it is the banking hub of Mumbai which is the locus of the Bollywood film industry.

These things are connected. They are symbiotic. Take the case of Germany. Through ideology the Nazis destroyed German classical music and art, a period from which the country is still recovering. In its imperial heyday Austria produced the perhaps greatest musicians that have ever walked the earth. Japan’s rapid industrialisation bequeathed cinema of breathtaking genius.

What great music did socialist Russia and China give us? Tarkovsky the great filmmaker made his cinematic masterpieces in spite of the Soviet government, not thanks to it. Most of Russia’s great novelists and musicians did not emerge from its communist phase, but during the period of the Russian Empire. Even Igor Stravinsky, who lived most of his life during age of the Soviet Union, composed his most famous work The Rite of Spring in 1913, four years before the Russian Revolution. Russia and China had always been cultural titans, but nobody can disagree that socialism created in both countries relative cultural drought. In China’s case the communists actively destroyed art and culture. Philistinism was a feature, not a bug.

Anyone who wants to cripple finance or sees it as an enemy might not know it, but they are enemies of culture. Many Labour supporters would probably consider themselves “lovers of the arts” – but the fact is Jeremy Corbyn and his ilk hate banks and big business, and his policies would inadvertently destroy London as a cultural capital.