Are folk songs political? – depends what you mean by 'political' surely.
In Ireland, the third most popular subject for song-making over the last two centuries, (love and emigration being the first two) has been the fight for national independence. Not only have you the national repertoire of political songs, (1798, 1867, 1916 etc) but many town and villages have their locally created ones, dealing with happening in the immediate areas. We have found at least 2 dozen from Miltown Malbay and the surrounding areas. Literally hundreds upon hundreds of political songs form the national repertoire here.
In Scotland, the Jacobite wars, and later the clearances were the subjects of many songs.
It seems to me that the term 'political' when applied to folk song has a number of levels.
You have the overtly political repertoire as above, certainly present in the English and Scots repertoire, less in England, but not entirely absent.
Then you have those which indirectly deal with the political/social situation. Typical of these were the poaching songs.
A few years ago I gave a talk to our local history society on song and history and came up with this (at the risk of making this another epic posting):

'The songs I have mentioned so far deal with specific events in history. An example of how songs and poetry generally comment on the prevailing situation rather than identifiable events is to be found in a rhyme which was popular in England at the time of the Peasant's Revolt of 1381. This uprising came about as a protest to the imposition of a Poll Tax, a tax levied on every individual, regardless of income or property. It started in Kent and was led by a priest named John Ball together with Jack Straw and Wat Tyler. John Ball preached an early form of Communism and his egalitarian philosophy is summed up in the little rhyme traditionally said to have been taken by him as the text of his revolutionary sermon on the outbreak of the revolt. It is claimed that he was the author:
"When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?"
Land ownership in England was one of the great causes of contention and has influenced the making of many songs and rhymes.
The seizure of what was originally common land began in England in the 14th century and became widespread in the 15th and 16th centuries. Wealthy and powerful landowners annexed huge tracts of commonage as part of their own estates, planted hedgerows and built fences around them to prevent access by members of the public.
Common land was used by working people as an essential source of food to sustain their families. It was the practice, for instance, of factory workers, landless labourers or tradesmen and artisans involved in cottage industries to use common land to graze a cow or a sheep or raise poultry, even to have a small market garden. Commons were also places where a rabbit, a pheasant or even a small deer could be got to supplement the family diet. With the closing off of the land this vital source of sustenance disappeared overnight. The effect on rural life was devastating: it caused poverty, homelessness, and rural depopulation, and resulted in revolts in 1536, 1569, and 1607. A further wave of enclosures occurred between about 1760 and 1820.   Numerous government measures to prevent depopulation were introduced between 1489 and 1640, including the first Enclosure Act (1603), but these were sabotaged by local magistrates who were usually influential landowners.
A new wave of enclosures by Acts of Parliament from 1760 to 1820 reduced the small landowning farmers to the status agricultural labourers, or forced them to leave the land altogether. The Enclosure Acts applied to 4.5 million acres or a quarter of England. Some 17 million acres were enclosed without any parliamentary act.
It was probably the last bout of enclosures in the first half of the 19th century that inspired, not a song, but this anonymous rhyme which begins:
"The law locks up the man or woman, Who steals the goose from off the common, But leaves the greater villain loose Who steals the common from off the goose" - and ends: "If the law locks up the man and woman, Who steals the goose from off the common, The goose will still a common lack, Until we go and steal it back".
Apart from the songs produced directly by the enclosures in England, a side effect of the appropriation of common land provided one of the largest and most poignant bodies of songs in the British and Irish repertoires, the poaching songs.
Deprived of the right to legally catch game on the old commons, the poor resorted to taking it illegally. Many of them continued, as they had always done, to go out at night setting traps to snare rabbits and pheasants. The landowners retaliated by employing keepers to protect what they considered their inalienable right to their newly-acquired property. They also resorted to setting mantraps, large, viciously toothed, spring-loaded devices capable of breaking a man's leg and tearing off chunks of flesh. The response of the poachers was to go out armed and in larger numbers. This escalation led to a period of English rural history known as "The Poaching Wars".   It worked like this. Men who had previously gone out poaching singly resorted to teaming up with others to offer resistance to the gamekeepers employed by the landowner. The landowner would, in his turn, employ more keepers and so ad infinitum. One song from the eastern county of Lincolnshire, entitled "The Rufford Park Poachers" tells of a pitched battle between forty poachers and a similar number of keepers.
On being apprehended the poachers would be tried by magistrates, who were themselves local landowners, who would, as was to be expected, show little mercy. First offenders would usually be heavily fined, but the most common punishment for a repeating offender was transportation to the penal settlements in Australia, usually for long periods.
The songs created on this subject cover the whole gamut of attitudes and emotions: despair, anger, defiance, repentance even a boisterous humour.
Poaching songs were to be found in abundance throughout Britain and Ireland, but to my mind the best of them is the one popularly found in the Eastern part of England in East Anglia.   Entitled simply 'Van Dieman's Land', it deals with an event said to have taken place in Warwickshire on Squire Dunhill's (sometimes Donniell's or Daniel's) Estate. In my opinion it is a perfect example of a narrative English traditional song, and what makes it so good is its matter-of-fact presentation of the events. It tells how one of four young men who go poaching together, is taken by the keepers, tried at Warwick Assizes, and sentenced to be transported for fourteen years. He is placed on board ship, endures a three month voyage, lands in Australia, is taken ashore yoked together with other convicts, auctioned to the highest bidder like livestock, and finally settles down to his fate.
Whether the events described can be pinned down to one particular occurrence is debatable, but they are so typical of what was happening all over rural England that the song passed into numerous versions with different names and locations. This version was sung to us by the late Walter Pardon, a carpenter who came from a farming background in a small village in North Norfolk. He described it as "a long old song, but then", as he said, "it was a long old journey", which, for me, is an example of a singers relating perfectly to his song. I won't play all the song as it is over six minutes long, having nine verses and refrains, but to give you a flavour here are a couple of verses......."

The third 'political' implication of folk song is the very existence of large body of song, more or less anonymous, to be found in the possession of, and almost certainly created largely by a rural working class.
If I wanted to discover when, say, the Battle of Trafalgar was fought, what ships were involved, who were the officers, how many men, etc., I would go to the history books. If I wanted to know what it felt like for a weaver, or farm worker, or a miner to be pressed into service and thrown into the horrors of a sea battle, I would have to go to the folk-songs.
Our traditional songs not only entertained and diverted, but also recorded the history and the aspirations of generations of ordinary (whatever that means) people; is that political or what?
I believe Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun had it right in 1704 when he wrote "If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation".
Sorry this has been so long – again.
Jim Carroll
PS Shimrod referred to David Buchan's comments on the ballads; he was dealing with 305 'Classic Ballads' which are distinct from the general repertoire, but equally relevant in their way.