[Lunch With the FT] Billy Bragg By David Honigmann
Billy Bragg rolls up his right sleeve. "Look at that." His biceps bulge with a fresh tattoo of the English St George flag. "I hope it'll wash off."
It will. It is a souvenir of a BBC programme about English identity that Bragg is fronting. "I'm trying to keep this on so my son can see it."
Always fascinated by Englishness - one of his best-known songs was titled "A New England" - his mind is now full of thoughts about where Englishness fits in a globalising world.
The east Londoner was dubbed the "Bard of Barking" for his rasping leftwing songs in the mid-1980s, his lyrics full of passion and anger. At his insistence, his records sold at below average prices and he became a fixture at political rallies and benefits.
His recent output has been a pair of CDs setting the US folk singer Woody Guthrie's lyrics to music (which won him a Grammy nomination). Now, for the first time since the Labour party came to power in 1997, he is writing new songs of his own. They grapple with what it means to be "an Anglo-hyphen-Saxon in England-dot-co-dot-UK" and celebrate the multicultural, "half-English" England.
"It's not been rebranded yet, England. A lot of people feel ambivalent about it, particularly people on the left. There's been a vacuum where Englishness is, and that vacuum's been filled up by bootboys and the Tory Right."
Bragg's England looks out rather than in, from music, football and - though he doesn't care for it - from fox-hunting to food.
"Even Sainsbury's in Plymouth has this stuff from all over the world. Part of the success of capitalism is not only putting sushi there, but people knowing what sushi is."
Bragg, toying with his rocket and parmesan salad, gestures at my merguez sausages and cous cous. "Look at the menu in this boozer." The William IV bar and restaurant, opposite Kensal Green cemetery, has undergone a suitably 1990s transformation.
Once a "boozer", it has sprouted a restaurant with its own website and impeccably post-modernist cuisine: chorizo, manouri salad, kleftiko, courgette guacamole.
So are there such things as English values?
"Every time I see a list I think, these are fine values, but I'm sure our French neighbours would also aspire to these values. 'A sense of fair play'? What does that mean? What are the things that are really distinctive about England? Chalk horses on hills. No one else has that. You need chalky hills."
I suggest red buses? Dodgy beer?
"Chicken tikka masala!" says Bragg in triumph. "Try and order that in Spain. Or France. Or Germany. Or America or Australia." Or, indeed, India.
This discussion brings us to Rudyard Kipling, often seen as an imperial apologist and thus not, on the face of it, Bragg's natural soulmate.
"I like the idea of getting on with Kipling. He wrote well about ordinary people. Look, I'm not trying to recast him as William Morris [his utopian socialist contemporary], but I do think he's rather hard done by."
Kipling, I propose, keeps strange company. One step down the line you get to G.K. Chesterton, another quintessentially English poet accused of flirting with anti-Semitism and espousing a reactionary brand of Catholicism.
Bragg screws up his face: " 'We are the people of England, that never have spoken yet'," he quotes from "The Secret People", the anthem of silent-majority Little Englandism. Bragg washes his mouth out with Evian water.
The couplet was the unlikely talisman of Martin Bell, the war reporter turned anti-corruption MP. "That poem is almost fascist in its content. Martin Bell should know better.
"When he quoted that I thought, Martin, you've got to read this poem. These squires who ride off towards the sea - these were the guys in their petrol tankers. They weren't doing it because they were trying to make a better society. It was pure self-interest.
"When they blockade because the pensions are too low, or blockade petrol stations until you get health service waiting lists down, they'll have my unabashed support. While they're trying to get two pence off the price of petrol, I find it all very short-termist."
He points to recent freak weather from South Asia to Southampton: "We know the use of fossil fuels is leading to that." His cauliflower cheese arrives. "Hurrah. If you want some . . ."
Petrol Poujadism, Bragg quickly points out, is a Europe-wide phenomenon. "I was in Barcelona last week; it was the same - and their petrol taxes are far lower."
What will be the next expression of volk power?
"I don't know. I hope it's something less to do with self-interest and more to do with a better society."
So Bragg is saying that people should only take to the streets to benefit others, not themselves? How does this fit with his vociferous support of Britain's miners in 1984, at the start of his career? Wasn't the miners' strike about self-interest?
"That's not direct action, that's a trade dispute," he retorts briskly; clearly, this is not a subject open for reassessment.
He shifts the subject slightly, to anti-globalisation protesters: "How you change the world by smashing up McDonald's I really don't know. I support some of the things they talk about, but the world they want to live in they have not yet managed to articulate in a way I can recognise. They just seem to be about pulling it down."
But resisting global capitalism is one reason he wants a strong European Union. "Everything seems to be moving towards one big record company, one big food chain, one big car manufacturer. Is it possible to deal with supra-national corporations on a borough-by-borough level? I very much doubt it. We need to be in a supra-national state with supra-national trade unions, supra-national interest rates and supra-national petrol taxes."
He muses about the prospects for autarky in the EU, before deciding that would represent a victory for the command economy. Bragg spent the 1980s supporting the struggle across the globe - from Moscow to Managua, he must have played them all - and saw enough at first hand to have no illusions about communism.
We move on to the implications of the petrol blockades for national politics. Bragg once campaigned enthusiastically for the Labour party, but is less enamoured of Tony Blair's version, apart from its moves towards lasting peace in Northern Ireland.
"The reason there's no Third Way is that the world is divided into two types of people: people who care and people who don't give a shit about anything except their own selfish greed."
Echoing that morning's opinion polls, I float the possibility of a Hague victory. Bragg waves it away with a forkful of haddock: "I look at William Hague and his voice and his demeanour and I kind of see why some people couldn't bring themselves to vote for him, not if he promised them the world."
How will he feel if Labour does fall?
"I'll tell you how I'll feel: it will be a real lesson for us. We got in, and we behaved like Tories and they still wouldn't vote us back again. Let's be what we really are. Let's go in and say, we are unashamedly a tax-and-spend party. If you want a free health service, we're going to have to tax those of you that make more money."
I suggest, mischievously, that he'll be voting Liberal Democrat at the next general election. He lives in Burton Bradstock, a village on the west Dorset coast - strong Lib-Dem country.
"I can happily vote for the Liberal Democrats and if enough of us do it, we'll keep the Tory out. The joy of seeing the Tories get stuffed [in 1997] was such that I do have to wonder whether I'm actually a New Labour supporter or still just anti-Tory."
Fuelled by a cappuccino the size of a soup-bowl, Bragg concludes that the collapse of ideology makes it easier to see what is undermining our society.
"Cynicism. That to me is the root of all prejudice in society. It was the root of all the panic buying recently. And sadly, by its actions, this government is breeding cynicism."
If Bragg is immune from cynicism, it is because he judges issues first according to his emotions, and only then searches for reasons. Sophistry will never bully him into accepting an argument whose truth he cannot instinctively feel. "Socialism of the heart" is how he described his philosophy in a recent song, and although that can be dismissed as an empty phrase, it serves him well as a touchstone.
One instance is his unease at the myth of 1940, when Britain supposedly stood alone against Europe. As Bragg insists, it was Britain and the Empire and the Commonwealth fighting fascism. "If the myth didn't stir something in me, I wouldn't be so cross about it."
As we walk out on to the Harrow Road, we discuss one unlikely Tory hero. "Winston Churchill could have cut a deal with Hitler and saved the Empire. He didn't - he decided Britain should share in the sacrifice and be part of Europe.
"That," concludes Bragg, "is why he is the 20th century's greatest half-Englishman."