To remove any possible doubt, my quoted example of snidery was from Fakesong, and a response to Jack's question: "Is there anybody Harker shows actual dislike or disrespect for, rather than saying they had limitations that need to be recognized?" My own view is that the comments about Baring-Gould and Sharp went way beyond describing limitations, and into disparagement of them personally.

I don't have 'One For the Money' and Jack has already pasted what it has to say about the Critics Group. However, Vic Gammon's review (discussed further up the thread) has this to say about the treatment of MacColl (who I believe like Lloyd was CPGB and therefore a sectarian enemy for a start):

"But this is not criticism, it is character assassination masquerading as criticism; and for all its socialist rhetoric what criticism there is is of a very old fashioned and discredited type."

He supported this by quoting passages such as:

"The radio ballads, according to Harker, were 'a series of programmes celebrating the "worker as hero" in which they [MacColl and the producer Charles Parker] romanticised, over-elaborated, indulged stylistic whims, and generally intellectualised and mediated the taped material given to them by workers'"

"Parker and MacColl are said to have 'foisted their version of the Big Hewer myth on working miners as a whole' and never to have thought that 'the mythical figure might have been a deliberate and grotesque caricature of the self-exploitative worker'." [my italics]