"Do musicians tend to be socialists?", asked pianist Stephen Hough in the Torygraph a week or so ago.
A fair question, and one you might ask about artists more generally. Hough's answer - broadly yes, because it's only a few generations ago that musicians were treated like servants - doesn't seem to me to hold water. Few people allow their great-grandfather's vocation or politics to influence their views. Anyway, many professional musicians won't have an ancestor who trod the same path.
But if artists do tend to be left wing, why might that be? The immediately obvious answer - that they tend to depend on state subsidy and are therefore more likely to support the parties that provide most of it - strikes me as only part of the story.
Speaking as an artist who is not left wing but is nevertheless significantly to the left of Genghis Khan, I would say it is because artists are interested in the human condition; what it is like to be human; how humans interact with each other; how humans relate to the broader physical world. At the heart of that interest is compassion for humanity. It's a compassion that artists are often surprisingly bad at extending to their friends and family, but nevertheless there's a striking congruity between the focus of art and the sort of institutionalised compassion that is at the heart of left wing politics.
To reverse Hough's question, how could any artist not be left wing? My personal answer would be that parties which promise institutionalised compassion sometimes fail dismally to apply it in practice; that such compassion alters the way which whole populations behave, and not necessarily for the good; and that the version of it which the left wants to see enacted is not affordable anyway.
Amongst artists, views like these confine one to leper status, which is a shame. Artists are meant to think, and there is more than one road to the Good Society.
