Ultra-politicised artists make tame and frightened art

No one can doubt that there is a pro-left bias in the arts and that artists can find themselves in deep trouble if they refuse to conform to it.

To see how grim life can become in what should be centres of intellectual freedom, read Afraid to Speak Freely. It tells the stories of women in the arts who were blacklisted in a left-wing version of McCarthyism for believing in the material reality of biological sex.

Or try The New Boycott Crisis, which describes how Jews in the arts experience “cancellation, deplatforming, institutional exclusion, professional ostracism, workplace bullying, funding compromises, compelled political declarations, harassment and reputational destruction” simply because they are Jews.

In the cultures they control, right-wingers are just as bad.

To take the most recent example, all the tributes from conservatives after the death of the columnist Rod Liddle praised his willingness to slaughter the left’s sacred cows. Not one mentioned that he never found the inclination or the courage to challenge his editors and audience by taking on their prejudices.

The right’s sacred cows could safely graze under his loving eye.

Everyone knows the rules. You cannot express pro-trans and pro-European views in the Telegraph, just as you cannot be pro-Brexit and anti-trans at the National Theatre.

But hardly anyone has noticed that our over-politicised culture is visibly failing on its own terms.

The old media with their party lines and taboos are dying in front of our eyes. Meanwhile, in one of the best pieces of intellectual journalism I have seen in a while, Index on Censorship makes a devastating observation about the leftish arts.

The more politicised the lives of arts workers have become, the fewer political dramas the public actually sees. Politicised artists are producing tame, uncontroversial art.

We have Trump in the White House. We have war in Gaza, the Gulf and Ukraine. You only need look out of the window to see the climate catastrophe man has inflicted on the planet.

Why aren’t artists seizing the chance to dramatize and satirize?

They aren’t, because political policing is killing art, and the law of unintended consequences is biting with a vengeance.