Billy Bragg speaks at Crikey Talks (Image: Private Media)

In the year 2000, Billy Bragg and Boris Johnson, then editor of The Spectator, went to Glastonbury together.

Johnson was, according to Bragg, “sort of harmless then”, but he really hasn’t changed a bit; you can see the whole thing on YouTube, and there’s not much that Johnson does — his insistence on pronouncing it Glars-tonbury, getting up on a side stage and faffing his way through a verse of The Iliad — that you can’t imagine him doing now.

The anecdote, which Bragg shared with Crikey editor-in-chief Peter Fray as part of an exclusive event for Crikey subscribers, is illuminating in a few ways.

First, it shows how much has changed — and how much has stayed the same — during Bragg’s long career as a singer-songwriter, activist and author. Second, the accompanying clip features Johnson claiming Glastonbury’s hippies as natural libertarian conservatives — and Bragg earnestly agrees.

While he doesn’t draw a direct line, Bragg’s reflections on COVID-19 gives a clue as to why he lets Johnson have them.

“The pandemic has shown us the real political divide, probably for the last 150 years, is between individual freedom and the notion of the common good,” he said.

“And it’s clear that some people feel that acting for the community is somehow an infringement of their liberty, and I don’t have a lot of time for that streak of libertarianism. I read someone saying: ‘When everyone’s shouting at you to do something, it makes you suspicious, doesn’t it?’ I mean, that’s a 12-year-old’s argument.”

Bragg has been mixing pop and politics, writing keenly observed and deeply human sketches of life — political life, romantic life, domestic life — for more than 30 years. And he doesn’t miss any of the great antagonists/muses he’s accrued.

“I don’t miss Thatcher, don’t miss Reagan, don’t miss the Soviet Union,” he said. “I worry sometimes when I play Between the Wars that my audience might get a bit nostalgic for the ‘good old days’. They weren’t good old days as far as I’m concerned.”

But does pop music hold any revolutionary potential in 2021? Bragg says the best political music is still being produced at the margins of society, as it always was. Those margins had simply moved since he started out.

“When I was 19, if I wanted to tell people how I felt, I had to learn music, write songs and do gigs,” he said. “Now young people have a lot more options — they’re getting involved and organised on social media, making films on their phone.

“There are a lot of people left out of the mainstream conversation — people of colour, people from the transgender community — who are still making music that has an edge. They’re working on the good assumption that a heavy beat and a good hook is a good way to spread your message. So it’s at the margins; it’s just that for most of the 20th century, all youth was at the margins.”

And it’s in the young that Bragg sees the most reason to hope.

“The big political movements of this century — Black Lives Matter, Me Too, Extinction Rebellion — they’re accountability movements,” he said. “And social media has allowed young people to organise under their own steam and set the agenda more.”

While he’s intrinsically uncomfortable with the idea of de-platforming, he has no sympathy for complaints about “cancel culture”.

“As a middle-aged white man from the Western world, is it really right for me to tell a person of colour or a woman or a transgender person: ‘You’ve gotta let this arsehole speak’?

“You’ve got to make sure the real victims of bigotry are having their voices brought to the fore, and you’re not getting in the way or applying your anodyne sense of right and wrong to something that they’re facing every day.”

The overriding theme of the evening, and the question Crikey readers put to Bragg the most, was this: how do you stay hopeful as a progressive in the face of rising authoritarianism, eroding working conditions and environmental catastrophe?

Bragg has a simple answer: empathy.

“If you can’t love people other than your family, what use can you be as a socialist when our politics is based fundamentally on empathy?”

And if mixing pop and politics has any use, Bragg says it’s in bringing that empathy about.

“When I come offstage, my activism is recharged and my cynicism is kicked to the kerb for a few hours, and my job is to make the audience feel the same,” he said.

“Not because I’ve been brilliant or written great songs, but because people are looking around themselves and thinking, ‘I’m not alone in this. There are other people who care about this shit.’

“Cynicism isn’t the same as doubt or scepticism. Cynicism is about giving up, and I don’t want to do that.”