MICHAEL ALAN GOLDBERG: Thanks for taking the time to chat. How are you?

BILLY BRAGG: I’m doing well, thank you. I’ve been waiting patiently this afternoon for [Woody Guthrie’s daughter] Nora Guthrie to get to her office. We have a little difficulty with … there’s a fascist party in Britain called the British National Party -- they’re a racist/fascist party, they have a record label, of course, and they just put out this album by this guy who writes white supremacist songs, and one of the songs is a rewrite of “This Land is Your Land.”

MAG: Oh man, that’s awful.

BB: Someone said to me earlier today, how do you think Woody would feel? I know how the guy would feel, I’ve always resisted speaking for him because it’s not my job, but lemme just tell you, it said on his guitar, “This Machine Kills Fascists” …how do you think he would feel?  Hopefully Nora will be able to do something because she’s got the moral authority to do something about it, because they’re gonna give the song away in schools, believe it or not.

MAG:  Is it depressing at all to know that in 2006, these things are still happening?

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BB: You know what’s worse? These bastards won a seat on the council in my hometown. The first seat they’ve won in London for 10 years, and in my hometown, an industrial area in East London. My own people. It was just unbelievable.

MAG: So when you think of all the years you’ve spent fighting this kind of thing around the world and then you see it happen in your own backyard, what does that do to your spirit?

BB: Well, it just reminds me that the fight goes on. I came into politics to fight against these people with Rock Against Racism, you know, and if you look at my last album [2002’s England, Half English] I’m trying to address issues of identity again, and I think unfortunately that in the wake of 9/11 and in my country, since last summer’s June Bombings, which were done by British citizens, the issue of who does and who doesn’t belong has become a real big hot potato. In fact, I’ve been writing a book for the past year on this subject, and it really was inspired by this party, the BNP, winning a seat in my hometown. It made me think, is this all I am? And if this isn’t who I am, why not? What happened to me that makes me different from those people?

MAG:  What do you think it is?

BB: Well, I didn’t really get any politics from my parents when I was a kid. This is the weird thing -- all the politics in my childhood came from music, and all the music that gave me politics came from America. The music that moved me as a kid when I was 14, 15 years old was Aretha Franklin’s Young, Gifted, and Black, Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come,” and Bob Dylan singing about the civil rights movement. That’s what politicized me, listening to that kinda music, and then when the Clash came along in 1977, the outburst of anger and the fact that on their first album they had a cover of a reggae song … all these things seemed to light the cultural path that I followed. So when they began doing concerts for Rock Against Racism it seemed the most natural thing in the world for me to go along and support that, because the fascists, their opposition was mainly to black culture, and black culture had been an important part of my life and still is. So you know, I felt that they were attacking me, and sure enough, they were attacking me because they didn’t like punks either. That was how I was politicized, so these guys turning up again is just, in some ways it’s reaffirmed my politics, it’s taken me back to those issues, because unfortunately, nationalism has raised its head in the West, partly because of the end of the cold war. There’s a vacuum where there used to be strong ideological positions, now you’ve got these weird people called neo-cons who don’t seem to have any ideology but keep doing shit, and then you’ve got [Tony] Blair, who doesn’t even seem to have any politics, and then you’ve got the traditional left who are still talking in terms of Marxism, which doesn’t mean shit to anybody anymore.  So into this space has come the absolute certainty of nationalism. And it’s not just in Britain -- look at the riots in France last year. I even see it in the United States of America. George Bush is still wearing the stars and stripes on his lapel.  He’s still sending a message every time he appears on TV – you’re either with us or against us, you’re either behind this flag or you’re not, and that’s nationalism. That’s not any kind of sort of patriotism at all -- loving your country does not mean subscribing to “my country right or wrong.”