My England

TWENTY years ago he wanted a new girl, not a new England. Now that he has found her and moved to Dorset, Billy Bragg is going to great lengths to celebrate that elusive new nation.

His first album for more than two years, England Half English brims with the trademark Bragg blend of pop and politics, but there's a new focus to his writing. England.

Not the England of clock-watching, window-shopping and fish on Fridays, but the 24-hour England of every shade, flavour and colour. His new Britannic verses celebrate the diversity of modern Englishness and warn against the dangers of being ruled by a misplaced sense of a past that never was.

He's always stood up for the lovelorn and lust-torn, but where he once spoke the rhetoric of International Socialism, he now applies its spirit to lionising the joys of Englishness.

"I'm a polemicist, that's what I am - whether I'm talking to you, or writing an article, or singing a song, or being interviewed on TV. What I'm trying to do is communicate ideas, so in that sense I suppose I'm in the kind of pamphleteering tradition," says the ever-matey 44-year-old Essex man who has made his home in Burton Bradstock, near Weymouth, with his missus, Juliet, their son, Jack, and her son, Jamie.

To some, the fondness for all the good things epitomised by the flag of St George (whom we commemorate this Tuesday) sits uneasily on a man who stopped going to watch his beloved West Ham because of the incursion of Union flag-waving hooligans. Both on and off stage he has consistently railed against intolerance, xenophobia and prejudice of all kinds. And still does. It's just that nowadays he senses that liberalism is closer to the mainstream.

"I've always been interested in identity and with the demise of ideological-type politics I think there has been a few inklings of a resurgence in nationalism," he says, pointing to the heightened sense of confidence emanating from Scotland and the on-going debate on the single European currency.

But he also recognises the dangers inherent in opening the box marked English Nationalism.

"I'm sure your readers would be as appalled as I am by the language that's used by some people that oppose the euro. There's a definite Germano-phobia there.

"I think the argument is political and economical and I want us to have a debate about it but I don't want it to be in terms of what happened in 1940. I want it to be in terms of what's happening in the 21st century. I think in my heart it's a good idea, but in my head I worry that it's Europe for Big Business, so like most people I haven't made my mind up completely yet.

"I have friends who really don't like me stirring this stuff up. They say: 'Are you just being ironic at the end of England Half English when you say: Oh my country, what a beautiful country you are?'

"No, there are things in this country that are beautiful. It's like you mustn't ever mention the issues for fear of frightening the multi-cultural horses. I actually happen to believe that you can't have multi-culturalism without Englishness."

Billy is just the latest in a long line of social commentators stretching back at least as far as the Civil War to wonder what makes this country tick. What is it that makes England English? It's much more than the Little Englander view of red pillar boxes, bubble and squeak, hankies on heads and jam tomorrow.

"All the way back to Anglo hyphen Saxon," he says.

"The British National Party need someone to point out to them where the Angles came from - they came from Denmark - and where the Saxons came from - they came from Germany. So, the only bit of Anglo hyphen Saxon that comes from England would be the hyphen and the British National Party need to be poked in the eye with that hyphen and reminded that the great thing about our country is its diversity based on a historical openness to the rest of the world.