Ranting & Reeling Tim Chipping’s monthly column

I wish to protest. The problem is finding a suitable outlet for my outrage. I know there are marches I could join but all too often they feel like funerals – publicly expressing grief, knowing in my heart that what’s gone is gone and what’s going will surely go. I could stay at home and resign myself to the inevitable. Why get cold?

But I never used to feel this way. If Thatcher achieved anything in her unempathic life it was to get a teenage me out of the house. I marched against everything she imposed on this country. And I enjoyed it. In the midst of a demonstration I felt I had purpose; believed I could change things. There is power in a union. Where did that go?

I don’t believe there’s any truth in the adage that we get more right wing as we get older. If political idealism can be gauged by how loudly a person shouts at the news then I’d say I’m well on the way to writing a manifesto that’ll make Engels seem like Ed Balls. What will it take for me to take to the streets in anger again? And then it hit me. What’s missing from my ’80s ire is the music. The only real motivating force in my life since Agnetha Fältskog’s singing face proved more attractive to my four-year-old mind than building a Lego zoo, and I was lured like a sailor onto the rocks of Top Of The Pops.

Abba never played any benefit gigs for miners. But Billy Bragg did. And consequently I attended benefit gigs for miners. And when the Labour Party held their 1985 conference in my hometown of Bournemouth, Billy came too. My parents dropped me off at the Pavilion at the same time as a police escort delivered Liverpool councillor Derek Hatton to the gig (looking like a man who expected to be spat on). During the show, Bragg praised the decisiveness of Labour leader Neil Kinnock who that day had announced his intention to root out what would later be called the ‘loony left’. There were boos, probably from Hatton who was expelled from the party the following year. We all sang The Red Flag and didn’t know the words.

Bragg’s activist anthems and truthfully tender love songs became the rallying point of so many moments of massed democracy. On the hottest day of 1986 I swarmed onto Clapham Common with a quarter of a million people to oppose apartheid in South Africa. I watched Billy there too, before becoming separated from my girlfriend. I never did find her. But it seems I saw Sade, The Style Council and Gil Scott-Heron too, although I don’t really remember. Boy George sang while strung out on heroin – his face covered in flour. I don’t know what P W Botha made of that.

So maybe all it takes for me to physically register my opposition is agreeable post-march entertainment. I will always be more moved by a song than a speech.

There’s a photo of me and my Dad watching Billy Bragg at the annual Tolpuddle Martyrs Rally, taken in 2010. I’ve been vainly using it as proof that I still stand up to be counted, though it’s clearly not enough in days like these. In the picture you can tell I’m singing. It was The Red Flag. I didn’t know the words.