Macol was not about pilitics with a capital P - this is what MacColl's politics was about
If we can't discuss that, we can't discuss the artistry of MacColl

This is from a semibnar Ewah held with a group of teachers in the sixties
Take it or leave it
Jim Carroll

EWAN: If somebody put to me the preposition of doing a radio ballad on bank clerks, right away it seems to me that we're doing a programme about how a bank is run, we have to ask ourselves what is our objective? It would be to ask a very simple question. How is it that after so many thousand years of human evolution and social evolution, we can still find tens of thousands, millions perhaps of human beings who are prepared to spend their lives, not in creating wealth which men can use, coal or even motor cars or cans of peas, or whatever, but who are prepared merely in the transfer of one kind of wealth to another kind. Now as soon as you ask yourself this question you begin to see the possibility of a programme in which it is conceivably you'll get all your bank clerks speaking with the same kind of intonation, all contented perhaps, and all completely oblivious to the fact that they're wasting their lives, for basically it is a waste of human endeavour. How would you do this?   I think you'd have to set it against the remarks of other people. I think the mere inactivity of speech, if their speech did turn out to be remarkably inactive, I think it could be used to highlight the extraordinarily tragic nature of their position inside society. But to highlight it, obviously you'd have to inset it against active speech, and you'd have to get active speech from other people perhaps, out¬side the area of the bank clerks existence, you'd have to get coalminers and so on. How would I bring that in? Well, these days almost everybody banks, for holidays and that kind of thing. I'd get it from the kind of across the counter stuff. I'd say, Johnny Sangster, who is a miner at the Howarth pit, puts 8 quid a week in the bank every, Saturday morning he's at that bank putting his money in for his holidays, and I'd use him as well.   All right Johnny, you go to the bank, what feelings have you about it? You undoubtedly would get something like that.