MARK JUDGE: Billy Bragg, You Broke My Heart.
Bragg was brilliant. He sang socialist anthems of course, but also tender love songs. He was very funny and relatable. I interviewed him after the show and the story was published. I still remember the title: “Billy Bragg: Unafraid of the S-Word.” The “S-Word” was, you guessed it, socialism. No matter how anyone might mock, belittle or threaten him, Bragg was not going to back down. He wasn’t afraid of a word.
Now in 2024 Billy Bragg is very much afraid of words. On TV he claimed we should censor “words that are abusive.” Note: Bragg was not talking about the civil language we use in our everyday lives. He was specifically responding to the question of artistic freedom. He was specifically referring to the great books of British author Roald Dahl.
Next Target: The Word of God
As many critics have I observed, when you start to censor Roald Dahl and other artists the next step can very easily be the Bible. The Bible is a hugely offensive book to those who don’t want to hear the truth. Indeed the Bible used to enrage me around the time I was interviewing Billy Bragg in the 1980s. I was a young left-winger and libertine and the searing truth of the gospels drove me crazy. I couldn’t handle the truth.
However, the suggestion that the Bible should be censored would have sent me and my friends, as well as Billy Bragg, into a rage. Bragg often told me how he was inspired by punk rock, whose prevailing ethic (other than loud music) was a total resistance to censorship.
That was Bragg in the 1980s, when western leftists paid lip service to not just free speech, but freedom itself. Sadly, in the 21st century, as Ray Bradbury wrote in the introduction to the 50th anniversary of Fahrenheit 451, “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running around with lit matches.”