Billy Bragg: If you don’t make a pitch for inclusivity around the space we call England, you leave it open to the far right

For over four decades, Billy Bragg's music has been defined by the belief in music’s power to connect people and call out injustice. Emerging from the punk scene of the 1970s, the British music legend continues to fuse the personal with the political, from love and loneliness to workers’ rights and social change.

In this conversation for The Skylark, Bragg reflects on the idea of accountability as the thread running through democracy, art and activism, speaks about the dangers of cynicism and power of empathy, and why those who feel pride in being English must step up to protect it from the far-right.

When I was a teenager growing up in the punk rock era, there was really only one medium available to me to make myself heard, and that was music. Pick up a guitar, write songs, and do gigs – that was it. These days, along with songwriting, that might mean posting a thousand words on Facebook  or writing a book about something that’s been bugging me all week, but fundamentally it’s all part of the same impulse – to communicate.

Pop music itself has always been a kind of call-out culture. Whether you’re writing love songs or political songs, the great songs name injustices: you’ve done me wrong, I’m in pain, why has this happened? During the miners’ strike in the 1980s, I was driven forward by the ideas of socialism, but, stripped down, what it was all really about was individuals coming together to hold power to account. That’s what democracy itself is about.

You just need to look at our history to find out the best way to do that. The Magna Carta in the 13th century. The Reformation in the 1500s and 1600s. The Civil War in the 17th century. They were all attempts to hold the absolute power of the monarchy to account. Now we’re looking at the absolute power of corporations. This question of accountability has come into sharp focus with the rise of political operators, like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, who’ve never been held accountable in their lives. They operate with impunity. Seeing that has made me realign my politics, even my idea of freedom itself.

Of course, power is one thing, but holding yourself to account is another. And it’s hard. It takes a lot of concentration. But we have done it before. After the Second World War, after the Holocaust and the devastation it revealed, the world came together to create the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. For the first time, rights weren’t tied to being English, or German, or French; they were tied to being human. Fundamental rights that belonged to every individual.

I see things and think we really are through the looking glass.

For decades, we took that for granted. We thought everyone had these rights, that they were a good thing, something we should promote around the world. But at the same time, we were expanding multinational capitalism, which goes in the opposite direction, as all that seems to matter there is profit, regardless of accountability. 

In many ways, democracy was constructed to constrain that kind of power. But in recent years, people have lost faith in politics to hold power to account. We’ve seen leaders crashing through guardrails, pursuing punitive policies against minorities and enough people, angry about their situation, have voted for them. They’ve bought into the idea that their problems can be solved by rounding up a group and punishing them. That’s not what we built after the Second World War. That’s not how we tried to prevent another cataclysm. 

What we’re slipping back towards is what came before democracy: the idea that might is right. That’s dangerous. Not only can it dominate politics and change an entire country, but it can creep into the home, affecting women and families. It’s a form of patriarchy. This is the challenge we face: universal rights or might is right. 

Sometimes I see things and think we really are through the looking glass. Like this strange rise within Christian nationalism saying empathy is a bad thing, that it’s new-age nonsense, when Jesus himself was all about empathy, love, compassion. If that’s where we’ve got to, we’re in dangerous times. 

And as a songwriter, it’s maddening. Empathy is the currency of music. That’s what we offer people: a chance to feel they’re not alone. That wonderful moment when you hear a song and think, this person has been reading my emails, how do they know how I feel? It’s because those feelings are universal. When Smokey Robinson sings Tracks of My Tears and you realise you’re not the only one who’s cried from heartbreak, it’s therapy and it’s invaluable. 

You can be an internationalist and still love your country.

I’ve always felt a strong sense of belonging, a strong sense of identity. I finish every gig by saying, My name is Billy Bragg and I’m from Barking, Essex. You can be an internationalist and still love your country. You just have to recognise the positive things in it and defend them. Not everyone has to feel English. It’s personal. But for those who do, for those who want to feel pride in it, we need to make sure racists and bigots are kept as far away from it as possible.

This is why the old far-left dismissal of patriotism is unfortunate. If you don’t make a pitch for inclusivity and belonging around the space we call England, you leave it open to the far right. You leave that territory free for them to claim, to decide who does and doesn’t belong. That’s what their flags are about: territory, exclusion, division. They never say it out loud, but that’s the truth of it. Those of us who believe in tolerance, respect for each other, respect for the law, we have to step up and articulate Englishness in a way that’s accessible to everyone who wants to be part of it.

You have to have faith in people’s ability to respond. If you look at the great movements of the last decade – MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion – they might seem like different causes, but fundamentally they’re all accountability movements. They’re about holding racists to account, holding the patriarchy to account, holding polluters to account. Accountability is what drives radicalism. And as we harness that, we have to keep ourselves accountable as well.

Wow, I’m not the only person who feels like this. In fact, my whole generation feels like this.

Now, why aren’t there more singer-songwriters standing up and talking about this? It’s complicated. I come from a time when music was the only social medium we had. Music had to carry everything young people felt. It was how we spoke to each other, how we spoke to our parents’ generation. It told you how to dress, what haircut to have, who to hang out with. And it was the only place where we could sort these things out.

There were three weekly music papers in the UK where you could thrash out ideas about everything. That culture’s gone and now, if you want to talk about how you feel about the world, you have lots of ways to do it. You don’t need to pick up a guitar, write songs, and do gigs anymore. And maybe that’s not a bad thing. Not everybody wants to stand on a table in a pub full of strangers and sing their song. It was a high bar and excluded a lot of people. People who want to communicate their point and make a difference don’t need music, so it no longer has that vanguard role.

That doesn’t mean music has no power. Not the power to change the world, but the power to make you believe the world can be changed. Throughout my career I’ve been asked – and sometimes challenged – about whether art can make a difference. I don’t know, but I’ll be damned if I’m not going to try and find out. 

When you come to a gig, if you can charge the audience up, make them feel they’re not alone because everyone else in the room is singing along, and they go away thinking “I’m not the only person in this town who gives a shit about this stuff.” That recharges their activism. And it recharges mine.

That’s what happened to me. I’m not just talking as a singer-songwriter but as a punter. When I went to Rock Against Racism, I was working with a lot of guys who were casually racist, sexist, and homophobic. I didn’t really do anything about it. I just went along with it. But standing in Victoria Park with 100,000 kids like me, I thought, Wow, I’m not the only person who feels like this. In fact, my whole generation feels like this. This is why I’m different from those blokes at work. It gave me the courage of my convictions. It wasn’t the bands. It was being in that audience that made me believe I could do my bit to hold racists to account. From then on, that’s what I tried to do. And it’s incredible today to sing There Is Power in a Union and see kids in the front row with their firsts in the air. Doctors, teachers, nurses, workers; they’ve been on the picket lines in the last year, so they know what it’s about. These things don’t change.

Of course, for some artists, it’s enough just to be doing what they always wanted and getting paid for it. I don’t begrudge that. I’ve been fortunate. I’ve found an audience for my music, and I’ve been confident enough to put it out there knowing not everyone will like it.

In my experience, there’s always a minority who want music to say something more than “I’m great, you’re shit, do you like my socks?” It’s a minority, but it’s a sizeable one. And if you can connect with them, they’ll keep you going, support you as an artist. If you can play the right gigs at the right time and place, and if those opportunities come around, you can sustain yourself. 

And really, if you can make a living doing the thing you always loved, you’re lucky. It’s hard then to lean on others and say, Why aren’t you political, mate? Some people just aren’t tuned to that wavelength.

That’s what art is. You take your frustrations, put them on the easel, hold them up, and if people respond, you realise, Okay, I’m not the only one who feels this.

Recently, I wrote a song about how deprivation of food and water has been used against the Palestinian people, and then going back to the British mandate that continues under the State of Israel. I picked up a phrase Palestinians use: existence is resistance. It’s such a powerful line. I put it in the song, and it really resonated. People are sticking it on T-shirts. That’s what art is. You take your frustrations, put them on the easel, hold them up, and if people respond, you realise, Okay, I’m not the only one who feels this. For Palestinians, there’s a word; sumud, which means steadfastness. By simply existing, by staying on their land and living their lives, they resist Israel’s attempts to drive them off. That’s an incredibly powerful idea, and I felt it needed to be articulated. So I wrote a song called 100 Year Hunger, based on a book of the same name. And I’m pleased to say it’s connected with people. My faith in human nature is rewarded again.

That recognition gives you the courage of your convictions. It stops you sliding into cynicism, and I think cynicism is our biggest enemy. Not the cynicism of something like the Daily Mail, but our own. The voice that says nothing will ever change, nobody cares, everything’s down the toilet. I fight that all the time, and keep finding good people and good ideas that fire me up, that remind me a better world already exists, it just isn’t spread around fairly yet.

Woody Guthrie had This Machine Kills Fascists painted on his guitar. If I had to paint something on mine, it would say Death to Cynicism. That’s what I’m fighting against. Woody spoke about that too; he said he never wanted to write something that put people down, never wanted to make people feel worthless or powerless to change things.

That’s the spirit I’m talking about. The empathy we need to summon on stage. When I connect with an audience and send them away thinking, I’m not alone, I’m not the only one, that’s where music has its power. Not just because I said it, but because everyone else in the room cheered when I did. That collective moment. That’s where change begins.