You appear to be bullshitting again - as usual
Your opening comment on MacColl was - ""MacColl was a highly selective agenda driven left-wing propagandist"
Given the subject in hand, this is your argument for him not being a "standard bearer".
It is you who "whines on" about left politics - wonder how you would react to right wing songs - given the evidence - not a lot.
As far as his music went MacColl's politics fell into two parts - he was from a working class family and he grew up during the depression in one of the poorest cities in Britain - (Engles wrore a book based on it).
His politics were formed by his background, and when he found he was capable of doing so, he wrote songs expressing his opinions formed by his experiences - plenty of historical precedent for that. Surely you can have no objection to anybody making songs for that reason; or would you object to countrymen "whining" about being shipped to Australia for trying to feed their families by stealing game from land that was originally theirs but was enclosed by the local squire.
Harry Cox did his share of "whining" about just that - you really should try to dig out Lomax's beautiful recording of him doing so.
So MacColl's (Bert's or anybody's) left wing politics should disbar them from being considered musically important enough to be conssidered a "standard bearer".
The other side to MacColl's, Lloyd's, Hendersons....et al's politics was their advocating that folk song was the product of the (largely rural) working class; a poetic distilation of their lives and experiences.
Having spent thirty odd years ploutering around Traveller sites, or taking songs from East Anglian fishermen or carpenters, or Irish land labourers, fishermen or small farmers, or London Irish building workers.... I really don't see any great problem with that idea - perhaps the view of the tradition is different from the comfort of your armchair?
It seems your objection here is that the idividuals in question's politics don't coincide with your own - nothing more.
Jim Caroll
PS "Do I feel part of it? Not really"
Having listened to your singing - if it waddles and quacks it's almost certainly a duck. You sound like a folkie architype to me, no matter how you may see yourself. You certainly don't sound like any traditional singer I have ever listened to or met.