The Progressive Patriot: A Search for Belonging by Billy Bragg
Bantam Press £17.99
At the beginning of the Boulting Brothers' film I'm All Right Jack (1959) we are shown footage of the VE Day celebrations in London and hear a posh and pompous newsreel narrator praising the courage and fortitude of the British fighting spirit. With victory, the voice continues, has come a new age in which the working man will carry the spirit of common endeavour from the battlefield into the factory. At which point we glimpse a drunken Victor Maddern in the character of the obstreperous Knowlesie, halfway up a lamp post outside Buckingham Palace, giving that sentiment the two fingers. This is an image that readily comes to mind after reading Billy Bragg's book. The Second World War, especially the Blitz, means a lot to him. He calls it the 'old country' stories about which, like the stories migrant children might hear about the homeland of their parents, were an important part of his youth. Bragg, of course, has delighted in giving a punkish two fingers to the establishment and the 'two' would be important for he is as British as his favoured cup of tea and for him none of your American tall skinny espresso enemas (as he once described the Starbuck's invasion). He has been a rebellious spirit, an irreverent voice, an oppositional bard for whom, rather like Knowlesie, personal independence is more important than grand schemes for improvement of which working people are often justly suspicious for they usually mean nothing but trouble ('I'm not looking for a new England/ I'm just looking for another girl'). Bragg's personal story here will be one familiar to readers of a certain age. It recalls the days before rock and roll when, like the Irish poet Paul Durcan, we were down on our knees at the wireless knobs searching for Radio Luxembourg, though in Bragg's case it was a reel-to-reel tape recorder that opened the gateway between the bland world of the Kingston Trio and the anarchic world of the Sex Pistols. Much of the book recounts his rites of passage through popular musical culture and some of the major influences on Bragg's work, like Simon and Garfunkel, may come as a surprise.
And yet there is also Bragg the political visionary who – if not quite in the mode of that other character from I'm All Right Jack, Peter Sellers's shop steward Fred Kite, dreaming of the workers' paradise in Russia with 'all them cornfields and ballet in the evening' – wants to make the world a better place and devotes significant moral energy in the cause of human rights, anti-racism, multiculturalism and social justice. Cynicism, he argues, is more dangerous, more soul-destroying than either capitalism or conservatism and it is this theme of moral responsibility rather than political policy that makes Bragg's book so engaging. Here is the story of someone who is looking for a new England, who does believe that it is possible to build a New Jerusalem because we already have the righteous text of the Beveridge Report. The Babylonian conquest of the political Right may have deprived the British people of their inheritance but it will be only temporary and despite Bragg's dismissal of yearnings for the 'good old days' this part of his book evinces a genuine idealism of nostalgia.
The most interesting part of the book, however, is Bragg's discovery that his great-great-great grandfather had helped found a Baptist chapel in the village of Rattlesden. Like an anti-bourgeois gentilhomme who suddenly realizes that he has been speaking prose all his life and never knew it, so too does Bragg come to the realization that all his life he has been part of a tradition and never knew it. That discovery helps to make sense of Billy Bragg and his Englishness. The 'healthy disregard for deference' that he celebrates is now understood as the contemporary individual 'flowering of a dissenting tradition' (Bragg as Knowlesie) but one that can help advance the cooperative 'process of democratization' in which 'the freedom of the individual is underpinned by the collective provision of education, health care, housing and pensions' (Bragg as Fed Kite). Moreover, the discovery of that larger dissenting tradition and its radical political lineage has the effect (or is it the justification?) of liberating Bragg's patriotic spirit from the lingering loathing of the sectarian Left. Though much of the political passion in the book is devoted to fighting the good fight against the phantom army of fascism in the devilish shape of the British National Party, The Progressive Patriot is now self-consciously speaking - as E P Thompson once put it - in the idiom of English politics. Abandoning the absolute opposition of modernity and tradition has the generous effect of allowing Bragg to acknowledge some virtue in the work of those with whom he would disagree politically, like Roger Scruton, and also to accept that modifying the institutional inheritance of the past is often preferable to smashing it.
Indeed, the Englishness of Bragg's politics is actually confirmed by what he denies, and what he denies is "the Whig interpretation of history," an interpretation he can only associate with the deluded or disingenuous 'traditionally correct brigade'. Macauley's idea of English history as one of physical, moral and intellectual improvement is dismissed only to re-emerge in 'The Bragg Interpretation of History' which charts the road to popular liberty from Magna Carta to the Welfare State. Furthermore, his story of improvement does not rely on 'foreign philosophies or imported ideas' but is 'part of the core fabric of our nation', something of which Bragg is 'immensely proud'. He has found a reason to belong because he can identify with 'British values of fairness, tolerance and decency', those very values which, as Herbert Butterfield argued in The Englishman and his History (1944), made for dubious history but for decent politics. As an Englishman Bragg's history may not be very sound but his politics are certainly decent and they are a vital element in the national conversation. The Progressive Patriot is a collection of thoughts rather than a coherent thesis about either English or British identity and what unites them is Bragg's personal affability. As the Hollywood Reporter once described his stage performance, this book is comedy, history lesson, political rally, all entertainment and those are good enough reasons to read it and enjoy it.
