FROM Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ In The Wind to Billy Bragg’s 1985 rendition of Florence Reece’s Which Side Are You On? and more recently Ill Manors, Plan B’s reaction to the 2011 riots, every so often a musical artist perfectly captures the socio-political ruptures of their time.

What Will Become Of England, the new single from Jim Ghedi, feels like one such song.

The Sheffield-based folksinger-songwriter found the track in the Alan Lomax Archives — a field recording of English singer and farmworker Harry Cox from 1953 at his home in Catfield in rural Norfolk.

“It felt uncanny that this was recorded in 1953,” Ghedi comments. “Everything about it feels like it was plucked from the times we’re living in at the moment, the collective sense and existential anxiety of: how much worse can things get? Or what’s next?”

Made up of just two verses — Cox said there were eight or nine but could only remember a couple — it speaks directly to our so-called cost-of-living crisis (AKA poverty crisis): “What will become of England if things go on this way? / There’s many a thousand working man is starving day by day / He cannot find employment, for bread his children cry.”

Having found his ominously majestic voice on his astonishing 2021 album In The Furrows Of Common Place, Ghedi’s vocal performance here is imbued with an intensity and gravitas rarely heard in popular music.

“Some have money plenty but still they crave for more / They will not lend a hand to help the starving poor,” he slowly intones, immediately bringing to mind the apparent death throes of the Tory government and Liz Truss’s callous indifference to the suffering of the population.

The droning instrumentation, created by Ghedi and his backing band playing guitar, fiddle, double bass, drums and synths, only adds to the almost unbearable sense of dread.

Apparently he was inspired by Barry Hines’s 1984 nuclear nightmare drama Threads, set in his native Sheffield.

That Ghedi is working on a new album is good news. However, with Truss on track to be announced as the new prime minister on Monday, aptly the date on which What Will Become Of England is officially released, the forecast for British working people looks very bleak indeed.

But don’t be downhearted — the Enough Is Enough campaign and ongoing strike actions suggest the popular fightback is gaining momentum.

So let’s not forget the words of John Ball, who played a prominent role in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381: “Things cannot go on well in England, nor ever will until everything shall be in common.”

Jim Ghedi begins his tour of Britain on October 5, details at: www.jimghedi.com/tour.