Question: What is the Hope not Hate campaign, and who is involved?

Billy Bragg: The Hope not Hate tour is aimed at highlighting the dangerous, fascist and racist threat posed by the BNP we are hoping to portray a positive, anti-fascist and anti-racist message of Hope not Hate in workplaces and communities, in towns and cities in the run up to the May local elections.

The Hope not Hate tour is backed by four of the country's biggest trade unions - Amicus, GMB, the RMT and Unison - along with the campaigning organisations Unite Against Fascism, Searchlight, Love Music Hate Racism and Glastonbury Festival's Left Field.

Question: Do you think a campaign - working with GMB, Amicus, RMT and Unison - such as this shows that trade unions do have a role in politics outside of the work place and beyond the direct interests of their members?

Billy Bragg: Most certainly and I think they always have done, that's my experience of working with the unions since the miners' strike.

They are not just about their members but about their members' families and the communities where their members live and work, and I think that is a more important issue for the unions than perhaps for the mainstream political parties.

It was the unions which got us the minimum wage, it was the unions which got us the weekend and it was the unions which founded the Labour Party.

If the unions had consigned themselves just to the workplace there would be no Labour Party.

Question: Questions are now being asked about union funding of Labour, do you think now is the time for unions to show clearly that they do have a role?

Billy Bragg: I think they do, I think that the working people need representation and if the Labour Party can't do that then we had better find a party that can.

If Labour want to cut off the representation of the working people then we have to ask ourselves questions. This isn't just about party funding, its about how ordinary working people getting their representation because they have traditionally got it from the Labour Party.

If the Labour Party is not interested in that anymore and is more interested in business then we need to start thinking about other ways of organising.

Question: A YouGov poll has suggested that seven per cent of people are intending to vote for the BNP in the local elections, and 24 per cent of people have considered it at some time - do you find these figures surprising?

Billy Bragg: I don't find them surprising in a country where you can't put your vote anywhere positive as a protest - we don't have proportional representation.

If we did have, I think that like in Scotland people who are pissed off with the three mainstream political parties would have somewhere positive to put their vote, like the SNP, Scottish Socialist Party or the Greens.

We don't have that in UK elections, and if you want to stick your fingers up to the main political parties in a town like Barking, where Labour has been in control since the town was founded in 1931, if you want to really annoy the local Labour council and get them to sort shit out then the nuclear button to press would be to vote in a BNP council.

Unfortunately the ramifications of that for community relations and for the reputation of the town are entirely negative.

If Barking should get a reputation as the Burnley of the south, no amount of what the council can do is going to bring big companies, big stores and big employers into our town. They are going to leave our town behind and that is the real danger of voting for the BNP

Question: In your old home town of Barking, local MP Margaret Hodge has said that eight out of 10 white families are considering abandoning Labour to vote BNP. Does this reflect on what you have seen there yourself?

Billy Bragg: I don't think it does actually. What I have seen is that there are a group of people who are struggling to compete for resources. This is not about race, what is happening in Barking is about resources.

There are fewer and fewer resources for low paid and unemployed families in the borough. The borough has the cheapest housing in the South East, which has created a huge influx of people without a lot of money coming into the borough looking for cheap housing.

The collapse of the manufacturing base has badly affected Barking and Dagenham, which really economically doesn't belong in the South East, it belongs in the North.

Barking is like an old mining town, since Ford now employs a 10th of the people it employed when I was at school. We had a lot of skilled workers in Barking, skilled engineers and traditionally when you did well in Barking you moved out to Chigwell, Debden and Hornchurch and those kind of places.

Because house prices in Barking have fallen so much, that route out for the skilled working classes has closed. They are trapped in some ways; they are trapped in a negative house price situation while in the surrounding areas everything is booming.

So they are very frustrated, there are no council houses anymore because the Tories sold them all off.

Unfortunately all these things are putting pressure on the people of Barking, the long term traditional indigenous population of Barking, who had always been well served by the Labour Party.

Their loyalty to the Labour Party has in the past been rewarded. When Margaret Hodge became the MP, they thought that they would have a representative who had Blair's ear and their loyalty would continue to be rewarded but unfortunately it hasn't been.

The people of Barking have been very, very frustrated and they are striking out in a very negative way.

The Labour Party and the policies of the Labour government bear considerable responsibility for that.

I don't think voting for the BNP is going to help the ordinary working people of Barking at all but I would argue that this is about resources and not race.

Question: So do you think that if the Labour Party wants to stop the BNP, it needs to look internally at how they represent working people?

Billy Bragg: I think Labour needs to look away from middle England and looking more towards the phenomena they have in the US that they refer to as the working poor.

People are working two or three jobs just to make ends meet and they aren't managing to do that.

Traditionally the trade unions would have helped to sort that out, but the ability of the unions to do that has been hugely stymied by Tory anti-union laws which the Labour Party have not repealed, so there is a real problem there.

In a place like Barking it is not a measurement of deprivation, Barking is not a particularly deprived borough. But it is a borough that has undergone a huge change in the last 10 years. It had the largest influx of non-white residents of any town of the UK, between the 1991 census and the 2001 census.

In a town like Barking, which has traditionally been a white town and is still in the top 10 most white boroughs in London, the change has been huge and visible. For someone like my mum who has lived there all her adult life the changes have been massive.

I think it is the feeling that people can't do anything about this change, what has happened is that the invisible hand of globalisation has done my home town over very badly.

And that has caused a lot of people from elsewhere to come into the borough, and the BNP are connecting those two things together; they are saying "it is these people which have come into the borough that have made the situation like this".

Where actually it is the global economic situation which is the problem, and I think traditionally the Labour Party would have help to ameliorate some of those circumstances and whatever they are spreading around, I can tell you now it's not reaching out to the old Becontree Heath estate where they are electing BNP councillors.

Barking is no more racist and no less multicultural than any other London borough, there are a lot of good people in Barking and I have been out delivering leaflets with them.

The BNP have looked at these figures I have just quoted and they know because of this huge amount of demographic change they can get a toe hold there, and if they can get a toe hold there then there is a whole arc from Walthamstow in the north down to Streatham where they think they might be able to edge their way in.

So it is crucial that we defeat them in Barking.

Question: Would you echo David Cameron’s sentiments that voters should consider voting for "anyone but the BNP"?

Billy Bragg: Yes I think they should, they should find somewhere positive to put their frustration.

I feel what we need is to renew the collective idealism that founded the welfare state, essentially people working together.

That was the great experience of the Second World War when people crossed over the divides in class, which were broader than the divides in race are now, and worked together.

And we can't renew that collective spirit if there is a bunch of people going round focusing on ethnic minorities, blaming them for everything.

In England we have a strong tradition of standing up against fascism and in some ways that is what defined us in our finest hour and out of that defiance of fascism came the welfare state. We need to reconnect with those collective ideas and supporting the BNP isn't the way to do it.

Question: In your proposed changes to the House of Lords - secondary mandate system - a seven per cent or even three per cent vote for the BNP would give them a voice in Westminster. Would that be an acceptable price to pay?

Billy Bragg: I don't necessarily agree with that. There is proportional representation in Scotland but no BNP. The SNP, the SSP and the Greens all have representation but not the BNP.

I think that if you give people somewhere positive to put their anger and frustration at the three mainstream parties you then draw the sting.

The BNP are not the only people knocking on the door offering to solve everyone's problems.

What the BNP do is very simplistic. They come and see you and they ask what is your problem? If you say my roof is leaking they say 'well that's the fault of multiculturalism'. If you have a toothache, it's the fault of multiculturalism. Whatever it is, that is their simplistic response.

If a party said to the people that we are really about how to organise your community, like the SSP have done in Scotland, if we could have some political activity like that in England it would garner votes.

Let's argue from the left of the Labour Party rather than the right of the Conservatives.