Billy Bragg has been a significant presence on the left of British politics and culture for almost forty years. With his Australian tour on ice, we spoke and had an opportunity to talk primarily about politics, in which his music might come up, rather than an interview about music in which the politics could be mentioned.
For those on the left of British politics who feel bruised by everything that has happened his message is that “we need to recognise that the fight is right in front of us and it's and it's incredibly engaging”. In the movements of the 21st Century – such as Black Lives Matter and MeToo – he sees the power of what has become a central theme to his work, across his activism, writing and music: accountability.
Billy Bragg’s argument for accountability also includes a message for where Labour should be heading. He says that “at the moment Starmer hasn't really defined what his Labour Party stands for” and wants to see the Labour Party under Keir Starmer say that “our form of socialism is fundamentally about holding the power of capitalism to account to make sure that you as a citizen are protected from the vagaries of economic ups and downs, we want to help you through those things. And we want to give you more control over your lives.”
In 2019 Billy Bragg published a pamphlet-length book, The Three Dimensions Of Freedom (Faber & Faber) which sets out his concern for genuine freedom, and that liberty and equality must be connected to accountability. Its themes are reflected on his most recent record, The Million Things That Never Happened and he returns to them throughout our discussion. He begins the book by counterposing Trump’s declaration that stardom means “you can do anything”, with Tony Benn’s five questions: “If one meets a powerful person, ask them five questions: ‘What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?” In almost every instance he applies an argument around accountability, wanting to see it extended – to the economy, the workplace, the state and the constitution, on social media.
We spoke first about the scandals that have engulfed Boris Johnson’s administration, in a week that had seen more new twists of the party-gate affair. Billy Bragg has been campaigning and singing and writing about politics under governments from Thatcher onwards. What is his feeling about where the present crisis is going and how bad is it for the Tories?
“I think it's pretty bad for the Tories. But I think it's pretty bad for all of us, I think, the way that politics is drifting away from accountability. You know, a few years ago, I came to the realisation that so many of the things that I was writing about, so much of my political activism, was fundamentally about holding absolute power to account - whether that's within politics or within the economy. And, you know, the sort of socialism I've always been interested in has also been about accountability.
“So, you know, seeing what the Tories are trying to do, the way Johnson is trying to avoid being held responsible for what's happened under his watch at Number Ten, shouldn't be a surprise to anyone because when he says that - laughingly says - that he's pro-cake and pro-eating it, he's telling us that he wants to write the rules and break them whenever it suits him. And now, I find that really frightening because freedom is a fabulous idea, but not all kinds of freedom are necessarily positive. Impunity is a very dangerous kind of freedom, and we see it not only in Johnson, but obviously in Donald Trump as well. And in other authoritarian leaders around the world, you know, Xi Jinping, Putin. And it seems to me that this trend is rising, the trend towards authoritarianism is rising. I'm kind of sharpening my intuition towards reflecting that. It's one of those things like you when you get your eye in on one of those things, you kind of see it everywhere.”
From there, he summarises his argument about freedom. “It's a fundamental argument about whether or not we're free, because I believe that to be genuinely free, you need the presence of first liberty, the right to express your opinion; equality, your reciprocal responsibility to allow other people to express their opinion; but fundamentally the thing that holds it all together and the thing that allows the debate to be if not cordial, at least, reasonable and not abusive is accountability. And whether that's in terms of holding power to account or being ourselves accountable in our social media discourse. It works on a number of levels.”
But what are the prospects for any form of stronger accountability in a society governed by a Tory party that has held power for over ten years? I remind him of the time in the run-up to the 2015 general election when I was one of those who met with him in Ed Miliband’s office to talk about his proposals for reform of the House of Lords. But we didn't win the general election that followed, or the two after that. He still has a big programme of reform he wants to see, not limited to the House of Lords. What does he think are the prospects of delivering any of this in the present circumstances, or at least in the near future? “Well, I think actually, they're more positive than they were when Ed was leading the Labour Party because I think the pandemic has reminded us all about there is such a thing as a common good, and that we're not all just individuals, working in isolation, nobody taking care of anybody else. Actually, we are connected in not just social ways, but also in emotional ways as well - the kind of social solidarity involved in wearing a mask even though there isn't a mandate, the willingness to be vaccinated, even if you have some doubts about what it's going to do, all that's come to the fore in the last couple of years.
“So in contrast to that, you've got the Brexit situation. And I think that Brexit arose out of people feeling they no longer had control over their lives - a lack of agency in ordinary individual voters. The Westminster system is so centralised and a centralised system in Europe, that people don't feel that their votes have meaning.”
This lack of agency is one of Bragg’s reasons for his longstanding support for proportional representation, pointing to permanent Tory representation in West Dorset where he lives, and Labour dominance in Barking where he comes from: “in a place like West Dorset if you're not a Tory voter, your votes go straight in the bin. Likewise, the other way round for Tories in Barking.” He continues to argue for reform of the second chamber based on PR: “my proposal for Lords reform is to divide the seats in the reformed second chamber in direct proportion to the votes cast in the general election, that would mean you might not elect the MP, but you will get some representation in the in the second chamber - so it wouldn't be a complete waste of time. And I think that's how we sell that to the electorate, and particularly from a Labour Party position because we have a tradition of decentralisation that goes back to the devolution settlements from the Blair years, that we seem to have forgotten that.”
I put it to him that the last period has demonstrated that there are some grounds for optimism in the cause of devolution and representation – the elected mayors have really come into their own in the course of the pandemic, for example. “What if you don't live in a city? I mean, I do worry - the Labour Party has only ever reformed places where as a natural majority, it's never really reformed places where it might lose. And I worry about that, you know. Scotland used to have a natural majority, not anymore, but I do worry about that. Yeah, the city mayors is a good thing, but it could be so much better. It's a piecemeal reform. And really, if we're going to present to the electorate, a vision for the future, it needs to be much more universal, it needs to work for everybody. It needs to rebalance the rural-urban divide, you know, by giving people out in the sticks the opportunity to have some agency over their lives in a way they don't at the moment in those big rural areas where mostly the Tories have been in control for a century.”
But a non-piecemeal reform does require a change of government, I say. His response is that a proposal for devolution should be part of winning the argument for change. “Of course - the party needs to put forward a platform that's going to give people change to their lives. What are they going to build that around? What's an idea that's a new idea, a fresh idea that gives people agency? And devolution, I personally favour regional devolution in England, because I think I'd be concerned that an English Parliament as the model would give London and the southeast even greater power than it has at the moment. Whereas if we had regional assemblies, it will be possible for agrarian regions like the southwest and some parts of the North, to get together on issues like fisheries and farming and things like that in a way that could perhaps outweigh the demographic power that obviously the southeast and London has. But first, the party's got to recognise England, it's got to be able to see England, it's going to got to be comfortable talking about England and not just during the World Cup.”
I raise the party’s own process for discussing exactly this question. “Gordon Brown is overseeing a constitutional commission on behalf of the Labour Party. Do you see that process coming through with anything? Are you do you have any engagement with it? Would you like to?”
Billy Bragg: “I don't have any engagement, I'd be very happy to have some engagement with it. I think it is really important because obviously, Brexit has thrown up a number of constitutional anomalies that need to be dealt with. And in some ways, you know, the Scots have made all the running in this and England, the English, have just kind of sat on the sidelines thinking oh, well, shame we can't do anything like that. Well, we can, we just have to think of a way to do it. We have to come up with a way that makes people feel it's okay to have more politicians - because it's a contradiction to say, I hate politicians, but I have no power over my life. Well did you think we're gonna do that mate? If we don't have more local politicians who are closer to you, and parties that you can vote for that you feel properly represent you.”
In wanting a non-piecemeal, consistent approach to devolution Bragg wants a resolution of Labour’s problem that “it can't see England.” As he explains, “historically we've just allowed the idea that Britishness and Englishness are synonymous, they're not. And as people have seen, how national governments have done things differently from the way things are done in England [during the pandemic], it highlights the fact that if we had regional assemblies, we might be able to have even more difference, even more control over their lives, even better-tailored policies for where they live.”
The discussion about the lack of agency and connection makes me ask about what seems to be a disconnect between the crisis for the Tory party, over corruption and rule-breaking, and mass mobilisation against the government (although we are seeing mobilisations around the cost of living crisis and the TUC has called a demonstration to coincide with the Tories’ spring conference next month). “SF: There’s a crisis going on in Westminster. Obviously, that's reflecting itself in the polls. But there seems to be no great mobilisation or mass involvement or engagement in the way that there has been around previous Tory governments. It kind of it kind of worries me that there's a disconnect between the political crisis and people on the ground.” How does he view this?
Billy Bragg: “Well, I think there's a lot of cynicism about. As I get older, I have to find ever-greater ways to keep my cynicism curbed. I'm in a very fortunate position, when I get pissed off about something I write a song about it, go out in the dark with everyone, sing them my song, everyone claps, and I don't feel half so bad about it. I've found increasingly my aim a gig now is to send people home with their cynicism temporarily banished for a while…not from necessarily just what I've said from the stage and the songs I've sung, but from the way the audience has reacted to them - to get an audience of a thousand people singing There Is Power In A Union and putting their fists in the air at the end of the show, I don't know what it does to the audience, but really charges up my activism when I come off stage and I'm hoping that's the effect it's having to them. Music can't change the world, but it can help to express your solidarity and make you feel you're not alone, make you feel you're not the only person who gives a shit about this stuff.
“So I think the best antidote to cynicism is activism but you’ve got to give people an idea - the other side of this, to talk about the remedies, is at the moment Starmer hasn't really defined what his Labour Party stands for, and I know it's hard the way things are going at the moment, with the pandemic, and with the Tory majority and with Brexit still going down. But, you know, they need to stand back and say, look, this is what we believe in, our form of socialism is fundamentally about holding the power of capitalism to account to make sure that you as a citizen are protected from the vagaries of economic ups and downs, we want to help you through those things. And we want to give you more control over your lives.”
His case for the remedies Labour should stand for enables us to talk a little about the dividing lines that could or should exist between the parties. “In your book The Three Dimensions Of Freedom, you say that ‘citizens must be given the opportunity to vote for policies that hold the market to account’. And that is obviously an argument for clear political choices between the parties at election time, including on the economy-”
“-Yeah.”
“-Since you wrote that book, we've had a general election, the Tories won the election again. Do you think that argument contains a message for the Labour Party as it goes into policymaking process now in this phase of the electoral cycle going into the next election?”
“I think so because it's clear that, you can see it in the in the last few weeks in the Tory papers, certainly there is still a very strong thread in the Conservative Party that wants to move Britain towards a deregulated Singapore-style economy. Barely a day goes by I don't see someone talking about that. That's their big idea, deregulation is their big idea. Throwing off the chains, their 'global Britain' is all about deregulation. I think we have to get people to understand what deregulation means - you know, deregulation means Grenfell. Deregulation means you don't have a right to a forty-hour week. Deregulation means that you can't get someone on the phone to sort out your problems when you when you need them, if you've got a service that's not worked correctly, or something that's been delivered, it's the wrong thing. Accountability isn't just about the government. It's also when things start to break down and people realise that the things are becoming lax, people tend to act that way.
“You know, the thing about Johnson is - he never does anything without having wriggle room. And when you start giving people wriggle room, when you start allowing people to swerve their responsibilities, that drips down through society, so people think it's okay to do that, that becomes the MO for not just for politicians, but for businesses as well. So it's dangerous for all of us, really. And I think if the Labour Party wants to make a clear stand up for what it believes in, I don't think there's many votes in saying re-joining the European Union, but resisting the idea of a bonfire of regulations to make people understand that - as I say in the book - capitalism is like fire, if you tend it will give you heat and light but if you leave it to its own devices, it will consume everything in its path. And I think that's especially true the way the Brexiteers look at the economy. So, the Labour Party to me was always about making sure that the economy worked for the benefit of everybody and therefore, it needed to be tightly-regulated, so that everybody has the means by which to realise their true potential - not just the ability but they need the means to be provided as well. So that seems to me the way we should be looking at combatting what is clearly going to be the Tories' campaign slogans at the next election.”
So, is such change possible or likely?“You've just done a tour. One of the strange things about tours at present is it’s been quite hard to mix with the audience before and after but nonetheless you must be able to get a sense of the mood amongst people that come to your gigs. By definition there’s going to be a lot of Labour Party supporters. My feeling is that there is a bit of reticence and maybe not absolute demoralisation, but certainly pulling back of optimism about the possibility of change.”
Billy Bragg: “Yeah, I think everybody felt that, you know, that wanted a Labour party that was going to be radical were very disappointed in the way that the Corbyn leadership played out and didn't come to fruition. We felt in the 2017 election we were onto something there. But unfortunately, that didn't happen for a lot of lot of reasons. But there was still something there to build on and, you know, I don't think the leadership has done that, if anything, it's kind of tried to marginalise the policies, those positive policies, what seemed to a lot of us as positive policies. So, as I say, I have to fight my cynicism to remain engaged, I refuse to give into it. But sometimes I have to do it through gritted teeth. I really do.”
I joke that we’ve all been there. “Yeah, of course, yeah I mean, it's a very common experience, isn't it? And it'd be very easy for me to be like, you know, I've had enough, fuck it, I've done my time, I've done my stuff. But that will be a betrayal of all those songs I wrote. You know, how will I stand up there and sing those songs if I'm actually sitting at home saying, oh they're all the same? That's the thing that used to really annoy me during Red Wedge when I talked to other artists about performing, that's what they would say: they're all the same. I could've strangled them. And I don't want to be that guy. I don't want to become in my old age, that guy.
“I've never been a party-line person - even during Corbyn's time I got in trouble for suggesting that his politics were a bit too 20th century. I got a lot of stick for that. But I stand by it because he didn't he didn't seem to grasp the possibilities of devolution and ideas like progressive patriotism. He wasn't interested in that sort of stuff, he wasn't that kind of guy and I found that a bit frustrating, but I've never been a party-line person. So I'm able to engage where I can on in these issues and you know, criticise when I have to.”
In response to what he’s said about not being “that guy” I ask him about two songs, that come at that from different angles. “You've got that you've got that song, From Red to Blue in which the narrator is reflecting on someone who's lost touch with their politics. And on your new record, there's a song Mid-Century Modern, that I feel is like the flip side of that-
“-Yeah
“-that is, the narrator is challenged by the generation that's come along, that's pulling down the statues. And there's a gap between the person he is, and wants to be, and that's a very inspiring message: as you say, it’s not limited to the 20th century - it's a forward-looking one, not just BLM but climate change, trans rights, a younger generation of people leading the rest of society forward. So there are answers, aren't there, amongst that generation of people?”
“There are and for me, that song comes out of my own attempts to remain relevant to what's happening today and not become someone identified too much with the 1980s. You know, I could come out every night and beat up the Tories, play Between The Wars, sing New England, and take us all back to our comfort zone, and people would lap it up. I could make a living doing that. But I think it's more, for me it's more - you know, I feel more engaged if I'm challenging my audience. The idea that you preach to the converted - people who say that about me, you should have come and seen my audience when I was singing England, Half English and talking about progressive patriotism [whistles] - a lot of them didn't like it, lot of them didn't like it, but you do have to try and do that. And what I've been using that song Mid-Century Modern in the set, is to say to those people who went all through that stuff in the 1980s and who feel badly bruised by what happened with Corbyn, that we need to re-engage, we need to not go back to our comfort zone, our anti-Thatcher 1980s comfort zone, we need to recognise that the fight is right in front of us and it's and it's incredibly engaging; and again, with BLM and MeToo, and Extinction Rebellion, although they're three separate campaigns, what links them together of course is accountability. By saying to my audience that I'm forced to upgrade my perspective all the time I'm trying to inspire them to do that as well: so I am talking about trans rights, I am talking about issues of beyond just having a go at the Tories. The real line in Mid-Century Modern is ‘positions I took long ago feel comfy as an old armchair’. That's the problem I have. It's easy to go back into that position where you first learned your politics - that was a lifetime ago, and there's so much exciting stuff going out there.
“And I think my experience of listening and watching is that younger people are actually more interested in accountability than they are interested in, say, free speech. While they recognise that's really important, they want to hold people to account. Whether it's Marcus Rashford, and initiatives he's taken, or the seventeen-year old woman who filmed the murder of George Floyd. She realised - everyone else around was freaking out getting angry - she realised if she pointed her phone at this situation, someone somewhere would see what was going down and the possibility of accountability came into play when she did that. And that idea, I think, is prevalent because cancel culture is just another form of accountability. It's just beforehand, people in academia and high culture were only held to account by their peers in the editorial pages and review pages of highfalutin newspapers. Now everyone with a Twitter account can hold you to account - and it's not nice, it's happened to me, I deal with all the time but, you know, that's part of the process. If you're going to use your platform you're gonna have to expect to have some criticisms - if they put a statue up of you, pigeons will shit on your head. That's the way it is.”
Indeed, social media and digital accountability are threads that run through a great deal of what Billy Bragg has been talking about. He has called for a Digital Bill of Rights as part of his programme of reform. In the days when the former deputy prime minister of an austerity government in Britain can become a leading figure in the Facebook-Meta empire, his spotlight on the social media giants is highly relevant. But I ask how would you get to the point of greater accountability? “You could get legislators in this country making proposals in our parliament, but to achieve some kind of digital accountability and rights over all those tech giants and all the questions of data and the rest of it as an international question, isn't it?”
Billy Bragg: “It is, it is and again, I think the line has to be accountability. You know, how do we hold Mark Zuckerberg to account for what he does? Are we able to come together and utilise the benefits of the internet, which I think are legion and I'm a big proponent of it - I'm not one of these people who thinks it's the worst thing that's ever happen to humanity, it's a mirror. Whatever you see in the internet is holding up a mirror to who we are, whether you like it or not, that's what shocking about it. But I think clearly the majority of people using the internet are doing so in good faith, they're doing so to remain connected to one another. They're doing so to build solidarity, whether it's emotional solidarity or social solidarity. It's just how do we deal with those people who are dealing in bad faith? And that comes back again to the issue of how we deal with facts how we deal with truth. There's that famous quote of Orwell's that's carved into the wall outside the BBC, ‘If liberty means anything, it means the right to tell people what they don't want to hear.’ I have a problem with that because I think that gives people license: people don't want to hear the Holocaust didn't happen. People don't want to hear that Donald Trump won the election. And if you bothered carrying on with what Orwell was saying he does go on to say, unless it harms anybody else. People who are free speech warriors, they forget the harms bit, they mistake liberty for license and that's where in terms of the internet where we need to bring in balance again. I mean, that Joe Rogan situation that's recently blown up could be easily be dealt with if Joe had to have another balancing voice on there.”
One of the good things about the Neil Young Spotify controversy wasn't the sense that Neil Young thought he was going to get Rogan removed from Spotify, it was more that he was using the platform to hold it to account and to hold the anti-vaxxers to account and therefore make an argument about the anti-vaxxers. I suggest that that was actually a very effective thing that he's done regardless of whether he's on the platform anymore or not. Bragg says: “The thing about pop music is it's always been a call-out culture, it's always been about calling out - not just political stuff, but emotional stuff as well, calling out - you know - when people feel they've been wronged emotionally. It's always been an absolute key part of what pop music is, so no surprise that he should do that.”
It would be odd not to talk to Billy Bragg about patriotism when he has mentioned it more than once, and it continues to be a live issue in politics, including in the Labour Party. He has taken a position for a ‘progressive patriotism’. His song Take Down the Union Jack is on a very different wavelength to the way the flag is talked about when patriotism is discussed by most Westminster politicians. “I've always tried to make a case for progressive patriotism. You know, we all know I'm sure all your readers know that there's more than one type of socialism. Well, turns out there's more than one type of patriotism.” He sees two broad types of patriotism – traditional and progressive. “I would say a traditional patriot is interested in symbols, interested in institutions like the monarchy, and the army, symbols like the flag and very much in favour of assimilation. Whereas a progressive patriot is more interested in values, the values that a nation claims for itself… Its interested in values, in justice, and in diversity, is proud to live in a diverse society where they believe that their richness comes from that.”
He says that progressives have to recognise the traditionalists’ right to feel pride in their country. “We have to recognise that and not attack them for that. But they also have to recognise our right to dissent from the traditional version of, you know, what you might call Whig history that everything got better and got better and got better and we were the best in the world. That's simply not the case. History isn't a fixed narrative, it changes all the time, things come out, nuances are discovered. History is many things, but it's never black and white, it's never black and white, it's only the distance of time that makes it look like that. And the more we can find out about our history, the more it enriches our culture, the more it enriches our idea of who we are. I think this plays into what we were talking about earlier, because I think Britain is still an imperial construct: you know, you cannot separate empire and colonialism from the Union Jack, whereas England is a bit of a blank sheet really, because there's no one around who remembers what England was like before it was part of Great Britain. If you want to know, go and read The World Turned Upside Down by Christopher Hill, it was a pretty radical place. It was a very radical place, and there’s an argument to be made that the Glorious Revolution and the settlement of 1688, and then the invention of Great Britain was a way of keeping the lid on that English radicalism.
“If we're going to try and manifest what England is, we have an opportunity to make a post-imperial state, to try and create a post-imperial state.”
One way of doing that is finding a different role in the world. He prefers to see the armed services sent to help people in dire straits, such as those caught up in disasters. “You know, our armed forces do great work doing that, and I think that kind of patriotism rather than sending a gunship into the South China Sea to try and revive the imperial idea of who we are, is a much, much more positive way to go.” Likewise, on the pressing need for countries like Britain to ensure vaccination against Covid-19 is pushed out across the rest of the world, the message should be “this is what we're going to do - we've got this great vaccine, and we're going to spread it out as many people as we can, because if we don't, the variants are going to keep rolling in.”
That alternative approach to defeating the covid pandemic brings him back to how his language as a musician evolves, albeit towards long-established goals: “Again, the politics of the common good. You know, that's what Labour Party's always been about. I find myself talking about these things so much more than I do talking about socialism or anything like that at gigs these days - I'm much more talking about compassion, I'm much more talking about empathy, the power of empathy and the need for empathy. And although I'm using a totally different language from the things that I did in the 1980s, it's still in the same context, it's still in the same goal. And I think people understand it more if you talk in those terms than if you use a Marxist jargon, it doesn't really connect with people anymore, if it ever did.”
His mobilisation of empathy in pursuit of his political and artistic aims ought to be no surprise. Bragg’s attachment to how empathy relates to socialism can be found stretching a very long way back. On the sleeve notes of his 1988 album Workers Playtime, Bragg selected a quote from Antonio Gramsci, grappling with collective and personal relationships. “How many times have I wondered if it is really possible to forge links with a mass of people when one has never had strong feelings for anyone, not even one’s own parents; if it is possible to have a collectivity when one has not been deeply loved oneself by individual human creatures. Hasn’t this had some effect on my life as a militant – has it not tended to make me sterile and reduce my quality as a revolutionary by making everything a matter of pure intellect, of pure mathematical calculation?”
What comes across today is a socialist arguing for certain things, arguing for reforms, supporting movements like BLM - using their values for the present. “Yeah, well, my job is to try and join the dots for people, you know. We all see the same star Simon, but how we join the dots between them we all have a different way of doing that.
“For instance, the notion of trans rights. I switched the words in Sexuality to from ‘just because you're gay, I won’t turn you away’ to ‘just because you're they, I won't turn you away / If you stick around, I'm sure we can find the right pronouns.’ I didn't think this was a big deal. I thought, you know, the gay community have come a long way since I wrote Sexuality. It's not a big deal for an old grey-haired guy to be saying he's having a drink with a gay man.” What was remarkable about the ensuing controversy - which Bragg subsequently wrote about – was that his changed lyrics were so moderately put. Billy Bragg has been updating lyrics, of his and others’ songs (right up the whole of The Internationale) for as long as he has been around. The arguments that followed the change to Sexuality bolster his case for staying relevant to what's happening today.
What’s clear that Bragg is a political activist who wants to push himself and his audience for what he sees as a political upgrade: not betraying the past, not standing still on past battles either, but taking inspiration from what is happening now. The fight is right in front of us, as he says.
Thanks to Billy Bragg for his time. Follow him here. His latest album is The Million Things That Never Happened.
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