The Beatles’ history and its accompanying mythology has represented John Lennon as the political Beatle, with McCartney being defined, almost by default, against this image. It was Lennon who, with Yoko Ono, produced Sometime in New York City (1971), an album that was given over to explicitly political songs. And then there were the singles – ‘Give Peace a Chance’ and ‘War is Over (If You Want It)’ – that provided a platform for his anti-war sentiments. The music’s politics was supplemented by, for example, his interview with Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn for Red Mole, and his appearance at demonstrations and his support for a variety of radical causes.

Although the evidence of their respective post-Beatles output would seem to confirm the general impression that Lennon did the politics while McCartney did the opposite, the real picture is more complicated. Lennon may have been cast as the political one, but McCartney played that role as well. He engaged with politics, less often maybe, but in interestingly different ways.

Early in the documentary about the making of Let It Be, McCartney sings a version of ‘Get Back’ which he uses to attack Enoch Powell’s anti-immigrant politics and to sympathise with the plight of Kenyan Asians. On a bootleg album (where ‘Get Back’ appears as ‘The Commonwealth Song’), McCartney sings:

Don’t dig no Pakistani taking all the people’s jobs
Get back to where you once belonged²quoted by MacDonald, 1995, p.267.

On the page, these words seem to echo those of Powell, but it is clear from their context that they are intended as a satirical riposte to Powell’s anti-immigration stance. And perhaps because of the dangers of misinterpretation, this original version of ‘Get Back’ never received an official release.

‘Get Back’ did not signal the end of McCartney’s engagement with politics. In 1972, he released ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’. It was an attack on the British presence in Northern Ireland at a particularly fraught time. This was the year of the Bloody Sunday killing of 26 unarmed civilians by British troops. The song was banned by all the UK’s mainstream radio stations.

The message conveyed in the title is blunt, but the lyrics themselves deliver a more complex message. They can be seen to express McCartney’s much vaunted charm, but directed to making a political argument. In the second verse, he flatters Great Britain in order to persuade it to end its involvement in Northern Ireland:

Great Britain, you are tremendous
And nobody knows like me
But really what are you doing
In the land across the sea?

He also personalises the politics, by asking his listeners:

Tell me how would you like it,
If on your way to work,
You were stopped by Irish Soldiers?

And he humanises those who challenge British rule:

And meanwhile back in Ireland
There’s a man who looks like me
And he dreams of God and country
And he’s feeling really bad
And he’s sitting in a prison
… Should he give in or go mad?

Although the political aims are radical (given the British government’s absolute opposition to any dialogue with those it saw as terrorists), McCartney’s approach is to persuade his listeners of the reasonableness of his cause. ‘Give Ireland ...’ is not a polemic in the way of Lennon’s ‘Luck of the Irish’ or ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ on Sometime in New York City.

It is admittedly the case that the unreleased ‘Get Back’ and ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ are exceptions in McCartney’s catalogue in that they address a political issue directly and overtly. But they are not the only songs in which McCartney engages with politics. Where politics is present, though, it is engaged with in less explicit ways. Take, for example, his hymn to friendship from Let It Be, ‘Two of Us’ (1970). It contains this couplet:

Two of us riding nowhere
Spending someone’s hard earned pay

It may be a simple, or even simple-minded, point, but it demonstrates a form of political awareness, a sense of privilege and how it is provided. It nudges the listener, rather than berating them.

Other songs do make more direct allusions to politics. In ‘Junior’s Farm’ (1974), the second verse begins:

At the Houses of Parliament
Everybody’s talking ’bout the President
We’ll all chip in for a bag of cement

This is written with Richard Nixon in mind, but while McCartney is offering criticism of ‘Tricky Dickie’, the then US President, his solution is more mischievous than malicious in its invitation to Mafia-style solutions to enemies.

Where does this political sensibility come from? With Lennon, it was evident that his personal political intuitions were mediated by his interactions with the Marxist Left in the UK and the Yippies in the US. McCartney did not seem to seek out the same company, but he too was curious about politics (as he was about much else). Instead of Tariq Ali, McCartney called on Bertrand Russell. He describes his meeting with Russell as the result of a friend’s suggestion. ‘He [Russell] was the first person to tell me about what had been going on in Vietnam, and he explained that it was an imperialist war supported by vested interests.’ ⁵2021, p.131. He returned to the studio to tell Lennon. And he dates this as the moment when politics became a regular topic of conversation in the band.⁶p.132.

McCartney’s politics, insofar as they are revealed in his songs and his contextualising of them, are more social democratic than Lennon’s version of utopian socialism. Talking about his 1970 song ‘Junk’, he describes it as ‘a comment on consumer society’.¹²p.389. And he goes on to say, ‘I put opinions in my songs’, but then adds: ‘not always an opinion I hold, but just an opinion I’ve heard or I like or that interests me.’ Ending with the disarming claim that ‘it’s mostly a love song’.¹³pp.389–90.

His song ‘Jenny Wren’ (2005) was inspired, he says, by his love of birdwatching, but it draws on the idea that Jenny Wren stops singing ‘as a form of protest’ at ‘how we screw things up and how we sympathise with the person who protests’. For McCartney, the source of much political dissent is poverty: ‘poverty breaking up homes, creating wounded warriors’.¹⁴p.371.

His later songs reveal a growing concern with the environment, an issue with which he has long been associated, particularly as a result of the influence and impact of his first wife, Linda. His 2018 song ‘Despite Repeated Warnings’ uses the metaphor of the ship of state, steered, in this case, by a captain who ignores the warning of impending dangers. The song speaks only of the wilfulness of the captain, and the failure of the crew to get him to change course. Despite the repeated warnings he keeps heading for the danger. And the final message of the song is that ‘he should have listened / To the will of the people’.¹⁵p.115. This conclusion serves once again to assert McCartney’s social democratic perspective. He is not advocating populism, because he argues elsewhere for the need for elections of government that will give expression to ‘the better side of ourselves’, something that he says is also revealed through the power of song.¹⁶pp.371–2.

It is probably true that more of the songs on our list follow a Lennon-ist approach to protest, but there is a tradition that might be deemed McCartney-ite in its resort to reason and popular sentiment to mobilise protest. These differences in political address may also be the result of differences in musical approach too. If we see Lennon as a confessional writer, someone seeking to express or reveal his feelings about the world and his place within it, then McCartney is the ventriloquist, the writer who explores the experiences and styles of others. In The Lyrics he speaks of how he likes to observe the world and how, in writing songs, he would pretend to be Buddy Holly, Bob Dylan or Ray Charles. ‘There’s always someone else you can invoke,’ he says:¹⁸2021, p. 437.

You can put on a mask and a cloak as you’re writing something … It frees you up. You discover as you get through it that it wasn’t a Ray Charles song anyway; it was yours. The song takes on its own character. The road leads … to somewhere you never expected.

The difference in songwriting styles is also reflected in – or perhaps shapes – the differences in political style, and might make sense of how Lennon and McCartney differed in their songs and their politics.