If you don't like the ones I suggested, then pick a method of political activity that you think DOES work then - it's all the same to me. You've a real talent for focusing on the particulars in order to conveniently ignore an overall point, Lizzie.

The point, in this instance, being this: if the aim is to get an unambiguous and easily-understandable political message to the biggest number of people, then you're shooting yourself in the foot trying to do it with folk music. Folk music is, it pains me to say, in terms of popular cultural reach, a drop in the ocean today.

I don't doubt that Show of Hands song has been enjoyed and celebrated by many and passed around on youTube, but I don't think it's success ought to be measured by "how many people it converts to communitarianism" (or whatever; insert alternative appropriate ideology here). That frankly won't be very many people (and that has nothing to do with Show of Hands or their songwriting). As with everything else, it's success is ultimately measured in whether it's good art or not.

I know plenty of people who don't like "political songs" because they find them either clunky, cheesy or stupid. You can sum this attitude up as "some information works better as a newspaper article than a poem". I generally share this opinion, but on the other hand I do like politiics in music when it takes this kind of bluntness to the same sort pithy extremes as a protest-march placard.

I kind of veer between the two extremes: I want either personal politics in lived daily life (which I get from pretty much every folksong EVER, but rarely from the stock phrases of pop); or I want blunt truths stated brutally.

A good example would be Public Enemy's "911 is a Joke", or James Brown's "Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud". In fact, black 60s soul pretty much wrote the manual on how to write good political pop. If you're going to sloganeer, then sloganeer, like a good placade. Don't pussyfoot around with all these "Naughty Liars and their Lying Lies" type song titles.

Over the last week I've kept thinking of the song "I Wish There Were No Prisons". Now there's a song title with impact.