Billy Bragg hails from the UK, but a lot of the topics the singer-songwriter/progressive activist covers in his music span international borders: Back in 2023 he expanded Oliver Anthony’s viral “Rich Men North Of Richmond” into an anthem for unionizing, and this past September he shared t’he moving “Hundred Year Hunger” about the Israeli military’s strategic starvation of Palestinians. Today Bragg returns with another politically charged song that feels right at home over here in the States: “Put Christ Back Into Christmas.”
“Put Christ Back Into Christmas” is a response to Tommy Robinson, one of the UK’s most prominent far-right activists. He rose to prominence after founding a short-lived anti-Islam organization called the English Defence League, later serving as a political advisor to Gerard Batten, former leader of the neo-Nazi UK Independence Party. Recently he’s been adopting the familiar tactic of appropriating Christian messaging into his own xenophobic stances; the Church of England is not having it. Bragg explains it better than I can in a Substack post, which reads in part:
Far-right attention seeker Tommy Robinson is mounting a campaign to “put Christ back into Christmas”, but his sudden conversion to Christianity has nothing to do with faith and everything to do with identity politics. It follows on from this summer’s flag waving Unite the Kingdom march, where Christian symbols were brandished as a way of othering migrants, despite the fact that the most of the growing Christian congregations in the UK are made up of people from the African diaspora.
In response, the Church of England are launching a poster campaign using the hashtag #joyforall to challenge the anti-immigrant message that Robinson is promoting. A coalition of church groups called the Joint Public Issues Team, including the Church of England, the Baptist Union of Great Britain, the Methodist church and the United Reformed church, have put together a “rapid response” resource for churches, with a call to focus particularly on Sunday 14 December, the day after Robinson will hold a far right carol singing rally.
Bragg’s new song is one of a few he says he’ll be performing during a counter-rally this Saturday, in opposition of a “Putting Christ Back Into Christmas” carol service Robinson is hosting in central London. It’s pretty vivid: “Peace on earth for everyone/ So let the bombs be still/ Let the guns fall silent/ Let the hungry be fed/ And let the tyrants of the world/ Lie uneasy in their beds.” Listen below.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source stereogum.com ’
