During the 1984 miners’ strike, Billy Bragg’s characteristic Essex brogue was a regular fixture at miners’ benefits and political rallies, at the forefront of what he describes as ‘the worst ideological struggle since the General Strike’.
By comparison, his current political pre-occupations with House of Lords’ reform and national identity are perhaps a little parochial. Saying that England ought to adopt Jerusalem as its national anthem, as he did in a recent article for the Mirror, is after all a far cry from his time manning the barricades against the nascent forces of global capital.
Bragg, however, is philosophical, quoting George Orwell in explanation of his need to adapt to the expectations of our ‘post-ideological age’: ‘You either add to your heritage, or you lose it.’
We meet the day after a Tory-sponsored debate on Lords’ reform in Westminster Hall, where the government refused to set a date for its promised free vote on reform of the second chamber. Does Bragg shares the frustration of many campaigners that Labour once again appears to be dragging its feet on the issue? ‘My experience with [the government] is that they are just very conscious of getting it wrong,’ he says cautiously. ‘It could potentially open up a Pandora’s box if they get it wrong. I don’t think Blair is against some form of election. I think he is aware that what has been done is only half way and needs to be resolved. And I am absolutely sure that if he does not resolve it then somebody else will. And pretty sharp as well. I don’t know what Gordon Brown’s position is but I think he will move on it.’
Last time a free vote was held on Lords’ reform in 2003, the Commons famously failed to vote for any of the alternatives on offer. In response, Bragg came up with his own consensus option of the secondary mandate, whereby votes cast at a general election would be aggregated at a regional level and allocated to each party in proportion, with candidates selected from a party list. Far from being democratic, we venture, wouldn’t this simply hand control of the Lords to party fixers?
‘There is no way of doing this without the party being in control,’ he responds. ‘I want it to be party political. If you put in the second chamber 180 ice cream salesmen, I guarantee you within a month they will have formed themselves into political groups in order to get legislation through. You cannot have an apolitical talking shop as our second chamber.’
For Bragg, a directly elected second chamber, as advocated by the Elect the Lords campaign, would be ‘a recipe for gridlock’. ‘You are giving the second chamber bigger claws and bigger teeth than the Commons,’ he warns. Furthermore, ‘to ask the House of Commons to vote for a directly elected proportional second chamber – that is more turkeys voting for Christmas than asking the Lords to vote themselves out of power.’
He admits, though, that ‘if we had this debate [tomorrow] and direct election won, you would never hear me say the words “secondary mandate” again.’ ‘This issue,’ he continues, ‘whatever we all say, between directly and indirectly elected, can only be resolved in one place, and that is on the floor of the House of Commons.’ Whatever the outcome of the debate, however, he hopes it will be soon. ‘It would be awful if we go back into opposition and the Tories still have a majority in both Houses,’ he says. ‘After all that that would be hugely disappointing.’
Indeed, for Bragg, reform of the House of Lords is just the ‘first step’ on the road towards a new constitutional settlement for Britain, a settlement that should eventually include a supreme court, bill of rights and a written constitution. He objects to the fact that Britain currently has ‘no constitutional documents that begin with “we the people”’, from which we can derive ‘our common values’.
This preoccupation with ‘common values’ reflects Bragg’s ongoing engagement, in both his music and political activism, with the question of national identity. He is writing a book on Englishness, due out in the spring. Like Gordon Brown, with whom he shared a platform at the recent Fabian conference on Britishness, Bragg feels the left should embrace patriotic sentiments or leave the far right an open goal.
‘I think we on the left have got to stop having a knee-jerk reaction to ideas of identity,’ he says. ’Every time we turn away from this issue we create a vacuum that is readily filled by the BNP who dictate who does and who doesn’t belong, and we can’t afford to do that anymore.’
Bragg rejects ‘the fight between multiculturalism and Britishness’ the far right have made out of the 7/7 bombings. Instead, he proposes an inclusive vision of national identity that is ‘porous’ and ‘accessible’. ‘Looking at the union jack now I look at it as being a symbol of multiculturalism,’ he says. ‘From its very inception the idea of Britishness has been accessible and multicultural and that is our tradition in our little island. We have come together, we are a united kingdom, we are a multicultural state.’
Some would view Bragg’s admittedly rather vague notion of Britishness as so much wishful thinking. Saying that Britishness and multiculturalism are identical is after all a good way of avoiding the question of what happens when two fundamentally different sets of cultural values collide, as they in the recent controversy over the Danish cartoons.
No doubt issues of national identity and the far right are pressing for Bragg partly because of his own roots in the traditionally white working-class constituency of Barking, where the BNP polled its highest vote at the last election of nearly 17 per cent, coming in less than one percentage point behind the second-place Conservative candidate. The Barking boy, however, is anxious that the residents of his former hometown are not simply written off as racist.
‘You have to understand that Barking traditionally has been quite a white area. When I was a kid in Dagenham it had about 20,000 people [who were largely] white, skilled working class. And these massive forces of globalisation, which are invisible to us all, are made manifest to these people by the arrival of these outsiders. And the pace of change is pretty fast now, you know, from my mum’s generation, it’s very fast.’
‘I don’t think the people of Barking are racist,’ he continues. ‘The BNP are racist, there are racists in Barking, but the people voting BNP are saying f**k off to the Labour council. Sad I know but unfortunately that is true.’
Suddenly, it is not the mild mannered constitutional reformer or commentator on Englishness, but a much younger, angrier Billy who is speaking.
‘You can have as many seminars about Britishness as you like. I can write as many albums about it and it makes no difference whatsoever unless you have social justice. If all boats are going to rise with the economy, that is fine. But if you ain’t in a boat and you are in the water, the water gets deeper and you get in more trouble. And no matter how big our boat is or how powerful, we will never be able to escape the cries of the people in the water.’