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Billy Bragg Transcript

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“Billy explains what he means by a Bill of Rights”

I believe that a Bill of Rights fundamentally should be a set of rules by which we, the people, consent to be governed, and as such, I believe that there is a conflict of interests for Politicians to try to construct a Bill of Rights.

We’ve all seen how Labour having brought in the Human Rights act, John Reid is now been trying to subvert it, to get around it.

Politicians always try and subvert the Bill of Rights, that’s why Guantanamo Bay is in Cuba it’s because it cannot be built in Alabama because of the American Bill of Rights.

So, although I am not a cynic, I find as I grow older it’s cynicism that I’m fighting against rather than capitalism or conservatism, I believe the Politicians, on this issue, have too strong a conflict of interests to be trusted to write a set of rules which they themselves have to be bound by.

And that’s why I believe that we should write these rules ourselves, we should articulate these rules ourselves and then ask the politicians to plant them firmly in our constitution.

“Defining British-ness”

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I did quite a bit of speaking last year about the book and it was very interesting and a lot of fun but it was just like a gig with no music.

So, it seems to me it would be much more both interesting for me and also constructive to actually step forward from waffling about British-ness and try to get some definition into what British-ness means.

Now, it’s my belief that every single one of us in this room would have a different notion of British-ness. Identity, I think, is a personal thing – you borrow some bits from your environment but mostly you are what you think you are.

And that diversity I think is one of the strongest things that we have and one of the most important aspects both now, in the 21st Century, and also historically.

You know there’s a reason why there’s a hyphen in the word Anglo-Saxon, we’ve always been a diverse people. But what in this diversity do we have that unites us? What do we have that is at the centre of our society that gives it its gravity?

Politicians have recently been referring to British values; it’s a phrase that I first began to focus on in the days following the July 7th terror attack on the underground and the bus in London when some newspapers argued that this was the fault of multi-culturalism and that the best response would be a return to British values.

Well I Googled the hell out of that phrase and I found nothing.

There is no document which expresses what British values are, there is no consensus around what they mean and once, like a car that you’ve never seen before and you suddenly spot one and the rest of the week you see them everywhere, as soon as I got onto that phrase “British Values”, I started noticing more and more people using it and I started to become more and more suspicious of what they were trying to say when they used it.

Because there are certain words, such as multi-culturalism, which become pejorative in some people’s mouth and British values, particularly in the debate about assimilation integration, has almost become I think a pejorative term.

“Foundation of the debate”

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Every school in the country now has in the foyer, when you walk through it, has the list of rules so the school has to work by so, the kids know where the line is, they know when they’re stepping over the line. I’m talking about something as fundamental as that.

I’m not talking about something that’s going to bring us a new constitution and necessary make better governors or reform the judicial system.

I’m talking about the foundation for this debate, you know there are many things that flow from this debate but I’m trying to get to the absolute bedrock of it, where we can actually get hold of some of these ideas in a practical Bill of Rights than can be easily communicated to people.

“How would the Bill be implemented?”

Say we do manage to get a Bill of Rights, it would need to be put into the constitution in a way no other piece of legislation has ever been put in.

It then becomes a matter of your question sir, whether people care enough about this that we should do that, if there’s enough of a head of steam to do that.

Because you know I would like to ask the Tories, you know if they’re going to write the Bill of Rights, what’s to stop the next Labour Prime Minister, whoever that might be, to come in and just get rid of that?

If we are going to take the idea of Bill of Rights seriously, then we’ve actually got to go beyond our present constitutional arrangements and actually put something in some sort of plebiscite.

“Personal Privacy”

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Just recently last month, the new serious crime bill, which has already become law I think, includes in it the right for the government to use data they collected for one reason for another reason.

What that does is open up all of the data the government has to something called data-mining, where they can simply, with a computer, put in a particular profile of a suspect, run it through the computer and everybody who fits that profile will come up on the screen.

Now, you may never get a knock on your front door but a little mark will go down against your name that you fitted into a particular suspect behaviour and of course, who will decide what is suspect behaviour? It’ll be the government.

So right to privacy is going to be one of the big pushes for this campaign and why it does connect people in perhaps ways in which, although we would like economic justice rights to touch everybody, it’s the right to privacy and that idea of private individual, this is ultimately about the individual and how the individual relates to society, I believe.

“Freedom versus responsibility”

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The responsibility part of liberty is what keeps us all cohesive, which should keep us as a cohesive society.

So, yeah, freedom but responsibility.

The trouble with the government and this agenda is sadly they want the responsibility first, they’re always going on about responsibility, and it’s the only thing they’re interested in.

But you can’t have one without the other, as far as I’m concerned and together they make liberty.

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