Today, it’s hard to imagine an artist crooning “I don’t want to change the world” and becoming a left-wing icon. But when Billy Bragg released “New England” in 1983, Margaret Thatcher was pursuing a radical program to destroy the postwar Keynesian consensus and usher in a brave new world of capitalist hegemony. What the Conservative Party termed “progress” in that year’s elections meant the ruination of British working-class political power.

“I don’t want a new England,” Bragg opined, and who could blame him?

When miners initiated their national strike a year later, Bragg threw himself into solidarity efforts, performing in miners’ towns across the country. Later, inspired by the 1970s Rock Against Racism tours that pit antiracist performers against neo-Nazis, he set up the musicians’ collective Red Wedge to organize opposition to the Tories.