‘Corbyn would be a disaster for this country’
Composer and defender of classical music Sir James MacMillan takes Simon Heffer on a tour of his faith and shifting political beliefs
With artists usually competing with each other to embrace Leftism, it is refreshing to talk to Sir James MacMillan, possibly Britain’s greatest living composer of classical music.
“I joined the Young Communist League in 1974,” he tells me in the radically plutocratic surroundings of the Promenade Bar at London’s Dorchester Hotel. “It was part of a rebellion against my devoutly Catholic family. Looking back on it, it was a way of finding out about the world and of finding out about politics, although a very biased one.
“I think it was important, as part of my intellectual growth. But I look back on it with utter shame. It is certainly the worst thing I have ever done. If I gave any succour to people who supported one of the great evils of the 20th century then I am doubly ashamed.” Sir James was only 15, but refuses to offer that as an excuse.
He was visiting from his home in Scotland to lecture at the Grosvenor Chapel on faith and the arts, before heading to Berlin for a concert. “One of my big interests is where theology interacts with the arts, especially music. Despite the 20th century having seen the retreat of faith, in music that hasn’t happened. Some of the most major composers in modernism were profoundly religious men, from Schoenberg and Stravinsky through to Jonathan Harvey and Arvo Pärt.
A devout Roman Catholic who lives “a secular life”, Sir James’s faith deeply affects his art; next month, his Stabat Mater will be the first work to be live-streamed from the Sistine Chapel. But perhaps nearly as influential, and much more remarkable, has been his political journey.
Born in 1959, Sir James grew up in a mining community in Ayrshire – as he stresses, the home of Keir Hardie – where “everyone was Labour. My grandfather was a miner, very much involved in the National Union of Mineworkers”.
Did his parents react badly to his communism? “My mum didn’t mind, she thought it quite funny. My grandfather, though, was deeply hurt. And he was right. I should never have done it. I tried to make it up with him before he died, but it’s something that rankles still with me. He fought hard in the NUM to stop it being taken over by Stalinists and supporters of the Soviet Union.”
He remained communist until the Falklands War. “I couldn’t understand why all these socialists were supporting the fascist junta of Galtieri. That was the first crack in the edifice.”
He joined Labour and by the 1984 miners’ strike was a branch chairman. “I’d just got married, I was still very much on the Bennite Left, but even then things were gradually changing.”
What did he think of Mrs Thatcher? “At the time, I just took the Ayrshire miners’ socialist line that she was not a good thing. Her policies may have had an unusually negative effect on communities like East Ayrshire. I still think about these things, but I’ve lost that visceral hatred that the Left engenders against its hate figures.”
His move to the Right coincided with Labour’s under Tony Blair. “I was seduced by it,” he recalls. “Many were. By that stage, I thought getting rid of Clause IV was an eminently sensible thing for a centre-Left party to do.”
But there was another factor in his odyssey. “It was a moral question. There was something deeply unpleasant about the extremism of the hard Left, something anti-democratic. It was the way they aligned themselves with some of the most unpleasant and evil people in the world. Then there is their association with the IRA, with Hamas and Hizbollah, and groups dedicated to attacking western democracy and values.
“As a Catholic, I feel some western values have moved away from what I consider my core values. But I am a democrat, and I think my democratic views are also shaped by a deep humanistic Christianity.
“I’ve basically voted everything from the hard Left to the centre Right, and the only parties I would not vote for are nationalist parties like the BNP. If people ask if that includes the SNP, I say ‘yes’. Nationalism of both types is an affront. The referendum in Scotland has divided families. It has stopped friendships. It’s affected my family, and I certainly don’t want to go through that again.”
He speaks contemptuously of the present Labour Party. “I think Corbyn and the Corbynistas are a disaster for this country, and it would be a bigger disaster if they ever gained power. Their fanaticism and extremism are not things we have ever seen so close to power in the UK.
“In Scotland, the new Corbynista party is attracting back some of the headbangers who drifted off to the SNP. It’s why the SNP is being split, and it may even oust them from power. The Bolshevists of the Labour Party and the Bolshevists of the SNP are fighting for the same ground. It may persuade some people for the first time to vote for a different party.”
Sir James is a ferocious critic of the SNP’s education policy – “the so-called curriculum for excellence is really a curriculum for dumbing down across the board”, not least because of its effect on music teaching and cultural life. He fears it is a problem across Britain, however. “To democratise the subject, they’ve had to make it less difficult. They bring more students in, but they’re not learning a lot about music. Standards have dropped, and it has a knock-on effect on those who are genuinely musical and talented.
“There needs to be a bit of remedial musical activism done in society,” he says, and orchestras and ensembles with which he is associated are undertaking it with outreach work in schools. My feeling is that that is working; but it’s not our role to be involved in education. I’m not a pessimist. I believe we can build a strong musical culture for the future.”
To this end, Sir James supports some public funding of the arts, “because it’s part of our way of doing things. But we have to work on getting more American-style donors to be generous with their money, perhaps through tax breaks. That might take a generation or two.”
He accepts, though, that not all public money is spent wisely, and attacks Creative Scotland, its arts council, for its conduct. “There’s a trend for supporting the so-called popular arts. There is an ingrained and depressing hostility to classical music and other high art as elitist. This is an attack on the opportunities of young working-class Scots, Scots like myself. I’d have never drifted into classical music if there had been these societal pressures from school and government and NGOs, suggesting that classical music wasn’t for the likes of me. They see high art as the preserve not just of the bourgeoisie but of the past, and of the white, heterosexual male. They are damaging the culture of our country.”
He wants artists to see traditional culture “in a less revolutionary, Khmer Rouge sort of way. I take a life-giving affirmative view of tradition: art has a future as well as a past. Marxism has caused a damming up of the river that is culture, and when you dam up a river it leads to desiccation and death.”
Britain, he feels, harbours “a benign secularism”; but he cites malign secularisms elsewhere as “the enemies of faith, the enemies of democracy”. For him, the two are linked. “It’s no coincidence that Hitler’s experiment was a socialist experiment, and he always acknowledged the influence of Marx.”
He feels Christianity may be under threat, but that his grandchildren will be prevented from professing their faith as he does his, only
“if secularism changes here and becomes less benign. And there are signs that could change. Our polity is open to some very malign influences. There’s a new cultural Marxism asserting itself in universities. The people now trying to close down free speech are going to be our policymakers in a few years’ time. We have reason to be worried.”
‘There is a depressing hostility to high art [in Scotland]’