Billy Bragg on UKIP, the BNP, Scottish independence and skateboarding

Bragging rights: Bragg doesn't want UKIP representatives gagged

Last week UKIP held a mass rally at the Gateshead Sage, a music venue in the north-east of England. Protesters pointed out the Sage was built on European Union money, making it a deeply ironic choice for anti-European party, and musicians called for a boycott of the venue.

The lone voice speaking out against a boycott was Billy Bragg.

“I want people to hear UKIP,” he says. “Every time they open their mouths everyone can hear what crazy people they are. It makes them feel like martyrs if they are banned. Let them come, make their argument and then we’ll put some facts into it.”

Nigel Farage, the UKIP leader Bragg says is a “saloon bar bore”. “He’s a deluded populist, but he’s basically a Tory through and through. If you cut him in half he’d have Conservative stamped through his middle. I’ve opposed people like him for a long, long time.”

Farage should fear the former Bard – now Beard – of Barking. The Hope not Hate campaign, of which he is a patron, is close to victory in it campaign to vote Nick Griffin out of the European Parliament. “This May could be a really special moment,” he says when we meet on London’s Southbank. “Britain could kick its last elected fascist out of office.”

It is four years since Griffin, the leader of the British National Party, won a seat alongside Andrew Brons, who has since left the BNP and is not standing for reelection. The vote on May 22 could remove Griffin for good.

Bragg is proud of the role his hometown has played a major role in the BNP’s demise. In 2010, it dealt the party a body blow by voting them off their council by 51 seats to 0. “Barking and Dagenham delivered such a blow to the BNP that it ultimately proved terminal,” he says “I’m proud to have been part of that campaign.

“It would have been easy to say all those people are racists in Barking and Dagenham who voted for the BNP. They are people under the same pressures that most people in the country are under and they were registering their anger. Hope not Hate didn’t dismiss them and turn our backs on them. It was about local people helping other people organise and get better representation.”


Tory boy: Bragg says if you cut Farage open he's still Conservative through and through


Bragg was among the local army who knocked doors, dropped leaflets and persuaded voters that however disillusioned they were, the racist BNP was not the answer.

“It will be an important moment if Griffin goes,” he says, “but of course those people never really go away. We might defeat the BNP or succeed in getting rid of the EDL but there will always be people who want to divide communities rather than bring them together.

“Look at the UKIP posters going up. UKIP have the sort of broad support the BNP could only ever dream of.”

The demise of the fascist party he has long fought against could mark the end of a landmark 12 months for Bragg. It began with the 30th anniversary of Life’s A Riot – his first album, famously hand-delivered to Radio 1 reception with a mushroom biryani, after he heard the legendary DJ John Peel say he was hungry on air.

It has also seen him play his grandest-ever gig, selling out the Sydney Opera House, and release a critically acclaimed new album of mainly love songs called ‘Tooth and Nail’ described by one critic as “Americana with an Essex twang”. On Mayday in London, he plays the 5,000-capacity Hammersmith Apollo.

On his Australian tour, as well as the Opera House gig, he played dozens of small venues including student bars. “In Tasmania a bloke got on stage during Sexuality and started stripping off,” he says. “At first I thought he was doing a bit of idiot dancing, but then I saw his top coming off. By the time he’d got his kit off, he’d tripped over the drumkit and broken one of the cymbals.”

Now 58 and with a salt and pepper beard – an experiment he kept because his missus Juliet Wills liked it – Bragg is showing no sign of mellowing. “The fights that I’m picking aren’t getting any easier,” he smiles. “As I get older I see myself more and more as Henry Fonda in 12 Angry Men. The one that says, okay, but what’s really happening here, let’s look a bit deeper.”

We meet at London’s South Bank, where he has recently “upset some skateboarders” by refusing to support their call to keep the historic skate park – the birthplace of skateboarding in the UK – when the arts centre is revamped.

“Where the skate area is, under the new plans, you could have rehearsal rooms that would benefit kids in South London, places for them to practice music,” he says. “The skateboarders have been offered a purpose-built skate park. It’s become a cause celebre to keep the skate-park but I don’t think it’s the right decision”.


Out: Bragg is hopeful Griffin can finally be driven out of British politics soon


During our interview his phone is buzzing with indignation. Bragg has written an article calling on people in Scotland to vote Yes in the Independence referendum – “And set us free”.

“It’s not mischief-making,” he protests. “It could completely reinvigorate our democracy and bring more devolution. I want to see the West of England as a region like Wales or Scotland. A line drawn from Bristol to Bournemouth.” His own seaside home in West Dorset would be inside the line.

In 2010, he withheld his income tax in protest at the size of bonuses at the tax-payer-funded Royal Bank of Scotland. This year he is fighting new laws for prisons that have seen books and steel-stringed guitars banned. His charity Jail Guitar Doors has brought hundreds of steel-stringed guitars into prisons over the past five years. Now, under new rules brought in by Home Secretary Chris Grayling, they are mostly under lock and key.

“We can’t restring them as nylon string because they attach differently,” Bragg says. “Prisoners used to be able to use these guitars to practice – they were used as part of rehabilitation – but now they have to be locked up between sessions. Yet with all those 300 guitars no-one has ever attacked anybody.”

Jail Guitar Doors takes its name from a Clash B-side – the band he saw at the Rock Against Racism gig in 1978 that changed his life and gave him the confidence to speak out against racism. “It was the day I saw that music could change the world.”

I wondered if the guitar ban made Grayling his least favourite Coalition minister, but Bragg shakes his head.

“That’s Michael Gove,” he says. “Because he’s messing with our kids and messing with our teachers. I’ve a great deal of respect for teachers. They have a role in shaping the world that is greater than any role I’ll ever play.”

With a year to go until the general election, Bragg says he is fully behind Labour, whose job he sees is “holding capitalism to account”. “I think Labour needs to start offering people security,” he adds. “Security in their jobs, housing, on the streets, education.

“I don’t think it’s about aspiration and opportunity. Not everyone is aspirational or opportunistic. At the moment most people just aspire to have five days work and a couple of days off with their family, a bit of time to have a cup of tea.”

His kind of politics has its own name. “Socialism of the heart.”

Billy Bragg, live at Hammersmith Apollo, May 1

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