I try and write honestly about what I see around me now.

You can be active with the activists or sleep in with the sleepers while you're waiting for the Great Leap Forwards.

Going for constant growth is not actually delivering a decent standard of living and the prospect of your children having a better life than you do. That is the key thing that politics needs to deliver: a better life for your children. That's why people are taking their lives in their hands and crossing the Mediterranean and the English Channel.

But, in the end, even a song that's as politically bland as Blowin in the Wind, you probably wouldn't get up and sing that now, whereas some of Bob Dylan's love songs that were contemporary with that, like say Girl from the North Country, you can still get up an play now.

We've heard so much about the American dream: well, Trump is the American nightmare made flesh. All the things about 'the ugly American' that we worry about and which the Americans see in themselves, it's all of that. This is a politics of egotistical display.

Were it not for the Clash, punk would have been just a sneer, a safety pin and a pair of bondage trousers.

Never trust anyone who has no doubts. And I'm not talking about scepticism either: scepticism can be a healthy thing. You can have an argument with someone who's a sceptic. When I say 'cynic', I mean someone who has given up, and they want you to give up too, so it makes them feel better about themselves.