'The Teddy Boys did have a choice about whether or not they commit these attacks. One is significantly being oppressed while the other group isn't.'

Well i'd give you an argument about that. The kids that became teddy boys often came from culturally impoverished backgrounds. Post war England was no bed of roses. Ask Derek Bentley how fit the judges were to be handing out such sentences.

Theres nothing ironic about this piece. Corporal punishments was only just off the general statute book (1948 I think). And it was still employed in prisons and on the Isle of man right into the 1960's. My own cousin had regualar nightmares about the beatings handed out to him by the Irish Christian brothers who taught him right into his thirties - apparently all the kids from that school did.

Anyone who advocates corporal punishment is an asshole - regardless of colour, race, or creed - black, brown, pink, aubergine ....arseholes the lot of them.

the song belongs in the joyless dustbin of history - like so many of the gems that young impressionable kids are being encouraged to dig out from the shelves of Cecil sharp house. there is a museum for such stuff - that's the place for it.

All this rooting round in the past is so uncreative. Don't young people have something to say about the here and now that should be finding its way into folksong? do you really think the guys that wrote the songs that are surviving in the public arena - Whisky in the Jar etc were people fretting about the way Sam larner and Maud Karpeles did it.

Will the fact that Trinidad still uses the cat, stop any modern folksingers from going there - in the way that another generation boycotted Franco's Spain and Verwoerd's South Africa? I doubt it - folksong is respectabised somehow nowadays - debollocked.