Songwriter, performer and tireless socialist political activist Billy Bragg says Britain is having a "midlife crisis".
"Britain - as a whole we've tried to deal with the end of empire but it's very hard for particularly politicians of a Conservative stripe to sit around the table in Brussels with 27 other nations and not feel like they're part of somebody else's empire, it's a bit too much for them."
Photo: AFP / FILE
Bragg, who is returning to New Zealand for three solo 'One Step Forward, Two Steps Back' shows in Auckland, says the Brexit vote was about identity.
The English, he says, have an odd identity - less defined than their Welsh, Scottish and Irish counterparts.
"The Scottish and the Welsh and the Irish all have parliaments and have reconciled themselves to post-British identity, whereas the English have no parliament of their own, we don't even have a national museum, we don't even have our own national anthem.
"At the World Cup this summer there was only one country that didn't have its own national anthem and that was England."
So is the anti-Brexit Bragg also an English nationalist? Not so, he insists.
"I just recognise there's something missing on who we are. A lot of the Brexit vote is about the sense of belonging and who we are in the world and the English identity is a strong identity, it's an identity to be proud of - Shakespeare, The Beatles and the football World Cup.
"It's nothing to be ashamed of, being English, it's just obscured beneath a bit too much 'red, white and blue' and 'Rule Britannia'.
"One of the strange outcomes of Brexit may be that Scotland becomes independent and possibly even Northern Ireland is reunited with the rest of Ireland, so we're going to have to get used to the idea of being English whether we like it or not."
Bragg's music career goes back to the early 1980s when he broke through with distinctly English post-punk folk classics such as 'Between the Wars' and 'New England', and released his first album, Life's a Riot. It contained seven songs recorded on a punk rock electric guitar. The album's sleeve bore the message 'Pay no more than £2.99', and it went on to chart at number 30 after being played by Radio 1 icon John Peel.
Bragg's championing of social justice has provided the theme to 13 studio albums, eight compilations, two box sets, and countless tours. In 1984 - along with other musicians such as Paul Weller and The Communards - he formed a collective called Red Wedge that supported the left wing of the Labour Party.
In 1998 he turned American folk legend Woody Guthrie's unrecorded material into the album Mermaid Avenue in collaboration with American alt-country band Wilco.
In May 2018, he was honoured with the PRS Outstanding Contribution to British Music award at the Ivor Novello awards.
Photo: Murdo McLeod
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Bragg has also written books on English identity: The Progressive Patriot where he argues that English socialists can reclaim patriotism form the right wing, and Roots, Radicals and Rockers - a history of the British skiffle movement.
Such is Bragg's standing in British political and social life he was asked to give address to the Bank of England this year.
"I really wanted to go in to the Bank of England to see if they had this famous magic money tree. Apparently it's in the Cayman Islands, they told me."
He tells Kim Hill he quoted Tony Benn [the long-time left-wing Labour MP] to the bankers of Threadneedle Street.
"What I was talking to them about was that accountability is a key aspect of freedom. In a free society, it's not just about free speech and equality, it's also about being able to hold those in power to account.
"The Bank of England isn't really accountable. In giving money to financial institutions since the crash in 2008 - what they call quantitative easing - the plan is that it trickles through to the real economy, but it hasn't. It's stayed in the financial system and it's made people who have assets - houses, stocks and shares - richer."
Paraphrasing Benn, Bragg asked the bankers;
"What power do you have? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you use it? Who are you accountable to and how can I get rid of you?
"The Brexiteer slogan that got through to people was 'take back control'.
"But you've got to take back control from Westminster too," he says, "we live in a very centralised country in the UK: Westminster more or less controls everything …part of that invisibility of England is partly to do with accountability as well."
Bragg supports Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
"He's talking about empowering people, particularly in the workplace.
"The inability of workers to bargain for wages and conditions has really undermined a lot of people's livelihoods. He's talking about putting a statutory number of workers on the boards of companies - it's not such a huge thing, they do it in Germany - renationalising the railways again, creating 400,000 jobs in the green economy."
He believes a second referendum on any final Brexit deal is the only way to resolve the situation.
"I can't see how else it's going to be resolved because it is so clearly not what people voted for, the Brexit that is emerging. One of the big problems we've had is the Conservatives' failure to declare exactly they want from Brexit. They've made it very hard for anyone else to land punches on them.
"I think Brexit for the British is a deep, dark truthful mirror and we are finally going to see where we are in the world, we are going to realise when we step outside the EU ... we're standing there in our string vest and our underpants.
"We're going to finally see that we're a great country but not a great power anymore, and it's going to be a real shock to lot of people I think."
Billy Bragg with fellow Red Wedge artists and the then Labour leader Neil Kinnock in the early 1980s. Photo: Wikicommons
Bragg himself says he has no interest in a political career.
"I think there are enough middle-aged white males in parliament already without me adding to that. I've spent 35 years becoming a beloved entertainer, why would I want to take a job up where everyone hates you?"
He says his Auckland shows will draw on a rich, 35-year-old catalogue of material - the first night a selection of career-spanning Bragg favourites, the second featuring songs from his first three albums Life's a Riot with Spy Vs Spy, Brewing Up with Billy Bragg and Talking with the Taxman about Poetry, and the third he'll play tunes from later records Workers Playtime, Don't Try This at Home and William Bloke.
"I'd like to think of it as a celebration," he says.
"I've been doing this a long time now. What I haven't been doing for a while is playing solo with an electric guitar. It's a bit of a romp through me back catalogue."
