Joanna Bullivant, writing in "Music and Letters", maintains that in his music Bush subordinated all ideas of personal expression to the ideology of Marxism. The critic Hugo Cole thought that, as a composer, Bush came close to Paul Hindemith's ideal: "one for whom music is felt as a moral and social force, and only incidentally as a means of personal expression". The composer Wilfrid Mellers credits Bush with more than ideological correctness; while remaining faithful to his creed even when it was entirely out of fashion, he "attempt to re-establish an English tradition meaningful to his country's past, present and future". Hall describes Bush as "a key figure in the democratisation of art in Britain, achieving far more in this regard than his pedagogic, utopian patrons and peers, the labour romantics."