I've got time for Billy Bragg. He wrote many a fine tune back in the day. (I can’t say I’ve heard much of his stuff of recent years, but I did, er, walk past him on Oxford Street not that long ago.)

His 1988 album, Workers Playtime, is near-flawless, and it includes the artful lines, 'I remember you said to me/That no amount of poetry/Would mend this broken heart/But you can put the Hoover 'round/If you want to make a start.’

His songs about love – be it burgeoning, doomed or distant – are his masterworks, rather than the socially conscience tracks many assume entirely make up his oeuvre.

That said, it’s resolute lefty-ness for which the Big-Nosed Bard of Barking is best known/loved/despised.

It comes as no surprise, then, that he’s currently got the steamin’ ‘ump about the earnings of City fat cats.

‘Mr Bragg… is refusing to pay his income tax unless the Government moves to limit bonus payments at the Royal Bank of Scotland,’ reports today’s Daily Telegraph, slightly misleadingly.

What the singer-songwriter – whose second full-length LP was called Talking with the Taxman About Poetry – wrote online is, ‘Unless [the Chancellor] acts to limit [the bonuses] to £25,000, I shall be withholding my tax payment on 31st January’.

This may seem like a bold threat, but really it’s weak; at best it’s a touch juvenile, a bit ‘taking my ball home with me’.

At worst, it’s tax evasion, which is not only a crime but also not helping anyone by withholding funds from country in a time of massive public deficit

Either way, I don’t envisage the Treasury bowing to the demands of a middle-aged musician whose biggest hit was a cover of a Beatles song. (She’s Leaving Home was a double A-side with Wet Wet Wet’s chart-topping version of A Little Help from My Friends.) 

The department might, however, pay attention to the thousand-plus discontented people who have joined Bragg’s NoBonus4RBS group on Facebook.

Although I doubt that many – or, indeed, any – one them could afford the possible consequences of withholding taxes, as the tunesmith urges them to do.

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