Anyone who suggests a national music 'died' and those who continue to create it are in error are guilty of intellectual mischief. They've decided a music is not characterised by subject matter, preoccupations, themes or even the instruments on which it is played but by its tense, and that contains no present or future.

The conseqence of that sealing is to disenfranchise those who believe there is a popular idiom in which folk continues to be mined and that expression is important to on-going identity. Most people with an interest in folk music see the danger of that position and describe folk in the continuing line from the tradition into the various strands we have today but a few insist common music is dead and by association the common people with it.

That is a political act with ramifications.