The Yuppies just didn’t buy it.So why has political protest regained its credibility? The answer is a mixture of disillusionment and a new generation of consumers who don’t remember the sad strikers-and-singer-songwriters’ alliance. New Labour received the kind of rapturous national homecoming once reserved for Richard the First. Bad King John was swept out of power and we were all waiting for the new beginning. Unfortunately, what many expected to be a golden era has turned into a Ratner age.

It might have looked promising straight out of the packaging, only to disappoint on close inspection.But we should enjoy the revolution while we can. How long will it be before Sting appears in a doCKers T-shirt? (If anything is going to ruin their future it’ll be that old Tantric toad). Or Mick Hucknall starts bringing out protest songs (“My Money Belt’s Too Tight To Mention”)? It’s only a matter of time before celebs jump on the politico-cred bandwagon or big business pretends it has a heart. The revolution will be televised, but Rupert Murdoch will own the rights.’Rock The Dock’ costs pounds 9.99 and is available from record shops throughout the country. Politics, we are told by the spin-meisters is the new rock and roll. But those of us who feel that it’s only a matter of time before Cool Britannia thaws and melts away, remember when rock’n'roll was the new politics. Billy Bragg was there at the barricades singing about a new England long before the re-branding of Blair’s Britain.

Over the past 15 years, Bragg has done more than any other to shape a British political consciousness through music – he formed Red Wedge in the Eighties, the glorious but doomed attempt to back the Labour Party.
Bragg was near tears at an election-night gig when Old Labour suffered its last defeat, and must have been tempted to weep since the New Labour victory last year. “The labour movement remains a mass grassroots movement,” he explains earnestly “That’s the real broad church, not the Labour Party. And there are some New Labour MPs who are actually still in the labour movement”.Even so, in this post-ideological age, what is left of the Left? Bragg defines the new politics as a “socialism of the heart”: “You have to ask yourself, in a time when socialism seems to have lost a lot of its meaning, what do we actually believe in, instead of a word or an ideology? ‘Socialism of the heart’ seemed to be a way to make people not think that we were just giving up and going away and looking for soft words that mean nothing Compassion does mean something; empathy does mean something. They’re the roots of a caring society.”It would be easy to see his pronouncements as those of an earnest agit- prop politico who never quite recovered from the Conservatives’ slash- and-burn attitude to industrial relations and social cohesion But Bragg is anything but a self-righteous ideologue.