Benjamin Zephaniah: 'After the Brexit vote I experienced racism that I hadn't since the 80s'

Think of poet, writer, lyricist, musician and self-described ‘naughty boy’ Benjamin Zephaniah, and the last thing you’d be likely to associate him with is Christmas.

Yet he’s just revealed that he’ll be taking part in international development charity VSO’s Christmas Carol Concert in London in December.

“It’s very odd actually,” says the 58-year-old, laughing. “A lot of friends have contacted me and said: ‘You’re doing a Christmas thing?’”

Usually around that time of year, Zephaniah – who was born in Birmingham and has lived everywhere from Jamaica to China – packs his bags and heads from his current home in Lincolnshire to a country that doesn’t celebrate Christmas. (“And where it’s hot.”)

“I guess I’m just very cynical about Christmas, and a lot of it comes about to capitalism,” he says. “Unfortunately I’m one of those people who reads how calendars are put together and stuff like that.”

Still, he says, he appreciates the work that VSO does, and tries to take part when he’s in between tours. “They stressed that it’s not like a Christmas worship thing,” he adds.

“I’m not sure what I’m gonna talk about when I get there. I used to describe it as being stopped by the police – within a few minutes I’ll know what I’m going to say. I read the situation and then just go for it.”

He’s preparing to release a new album – a follow-up 2011's wonderful Funky Turkeys – which he says will be called Revolutionary Minds. “I make music when I feel like it and I really felt the need to put out a strong, heavily political album,” he says.

Leonard Cohen’s recent death meant a lot to him, he says. His first experience of Cohen’s music was someone giving him a copy of “Last Year’s Man”, at a time when Zephaniah rarely listened to music by white artists.

“The same thing happened with Bob Dylan, with his song [“Hurricane”] about a black boxer. And I thought ‘my gosh, this white Jewish guy is writing about a black guy who was wrongfully imprisoned’. And it might sound naive but at the time I was like, ‘white people care about us!’.”

One of the most poignant things Zephaniah remembers was an interview where Cohen spoke about splitting rhymes, and noted that the people who were doing that best at the time were rappers and hip hop artists.

“And I thought that was very great of him just because he noticed… there’s a kind of intellectual type that complains and says people aren’t engaging in poetry like they used to.

“But [with rap] they’re doing it at home, on street corners… and that’s probably more interesting than them studying it at school. They’re using their own lives and creating new techniques. And as long as they grow in their own art they’ll go on to appreciate the Shakespeares.”

Zephaniah has been put off mainstream politics of late – and what that political system delivers to the public – after recent events in Britain and in the US.

“You’ve got a lot of people who don’t understand politics themselves... so when someone similar comes along and starts blaming the blacks, the Mexicans, the lesbians… you’re gonna vote for them.”

“I think the bottom line is… Trump does not know much about politics,” he says. “He can shout slogans and have ideas like the man in the pub – someone who doesn’t think about politics unless it’s over a pint at the weekend. But he doesn’t really know what he’s doing.

“Sometimes people say to me, why don’t you get involved in politics properly? And I say absolutely not – I’m an artist, and when you go into political office, the reality is that you have staff and… it’s different from campaigning.

“I remember [the late] Bernie Grant, when he became one of the first black MPs. And he said to me how different it was. After the Tottenham riots he said the police got a ‘damn good beating’. And before he was a politician he would have got away with it, but as a politician you have to do things differently."

Since the EU referendum, Zephaniah says that he has experienced the kind of racism that he hadn’t since the Eighties – an incident where, days after Britain voted to leave the EU, a man driving past shouted: “The Europeans are going and you’re next n****r.”

And it’s troubling to watch the documentary that he made 11 months ago, where he speaks about Enoch Powell and the National Front. Because you realise that the rhetoric they used sounds awfully similar to certain politicians today.

“I can remember when the National Front were just skinheads on the streets,” he says. “And I can remember when they started wearing suits. So this was this air of respectability about them. Oddly enough I think it’s happened since Brexit that you start to get the old-fashioned slogans.

“I know people that voted to leave. And what I say to them, because they keep saying they’re not racist – and some of them genuinely aren’t – but I tell them you have to acknowledge that a lot of the people voting leave were. And after the result they felt that they could be racist – they had that confidence."

Looking at the States, he dislikes the assumption by many white liberals that working class, ‘uneducated’ people should be blamed for Trump’s victory.

As a professor of poetry at Brunel university in London, and a visiting professor at De Montford university in Leicester, at the beginning of each term he walks into a lecture, looks at the students and says: “I’m your professor. And I am telling you that you’re all more educated than me.”

“Some of them don’t believe it,” he says, with a chuckle. “So I say I left school at 13, couldn’t read and write – I had to explain what an approved school [for young offenders] was because it sounds like a private school…

“And I say, you can be educated and still have no common sense. Then they say well how did you get here? And I explain that I’m here because of my experience.

“But the main point I’m making is that some of the most ‘educated’ people in our country… and I use that term loosely… are the people who are wrecking it.”

Benjamin Zephaniah will perform at the VSO Christmas Carol at Central Hall Westminster in London on 8 December