It really would be a whole lot easier to discuss these matters if you didn't persist in insulting me at every turn. But, in the spirit of general bonhomie, & some much needed clarification...

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".

My comment was actually made in response to Ray saying that McColl was a possible standard bearer nominee for his song writing and historical preservation of the Social history of working life through song. I disagree with this, for the reasons stated. But I've no problem at all with his with Traditional material - material which is, essentially and entirely, one hopes, a-political and the common reserve of us all, one which engenders individuality rather than the consumptive collectivity imposed upon the working-classes by Left and Right alike.

wonder how you would react to right wing songs - given the evidence - not a lot.

A reference to my fondness for Kipling no doubt? Well, I doubt his stuff is as political as you like to think, though I do object to Left-wing Folkies insisting The Land is some sort of Socialist Polemic, or that the Humanism manifest in A Pigrim's Way is anathema to Kipling's political stance and therefore indicative of more left-wing sensitivities. I'm not a Kipling apologist though - I find most of it utterly nauseating, patronising, imperialistic, sexist & racist bullshit - The Land included to be honest, which is why I sing it, as a perfect commentary on the nature of the sort of English Apartheid that underwrites our culture in general and the patronising nature of the (bourgeois) Folk Revival in particular.

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.

If the songs are generated by direct experience of such matters then fine. If they are, on the other hand, just romantic formulations of right-on middle-class songwriters then I think I'm justified in being a bit sniffy. This is my interest in Traditional Folk Song by the way - as an expression of working-class creativity. Precisely as you say: advocating that folk song was the product of the (largely rural) working class; a poetic distilation of their lives and experiences.. Absolutely, Jim. Hell, I'm still just about naive enough to believe the old songs are formed by working-class experience - certainly the songs of Tommy Armstrong were and I sing them avidly.

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?

Not at all, just I fail to see what that working-class experience has to do with the political song-writing of Ewan MacColl et al which has no experience of such matters first hand. Perhaps you might like to enlighten me?

It seems your objection here is that the idividuals in question's politics don't coincide with your own - nothing more.

On the contrary - I appreciate only too well that there a myriad different political perspectives flying around - and that there is as much blood on the hands of the Left as there is on the Right, and that Left-wing Governance is no guarantee of the sanctity of human rights. Neither Left nor Right has done much to empower the working-classes of our country, and Revival Folk remains largely the reserve educated middle-classes. Exceptions there are, for sure, but exceptions only serve to prove rules. The odd thing I find is that where you do get a lot of working-class folkies, there's not much interest in Traditional Song as such.

You certainly don't sound like any traditional singer I have ever listened to or met.

True, but then again I'm not claiming to be a Traditional Singer. I'm just a bloke who sings traditional songs in his own idiosyncratic fashion, as we all must really - those of us who are moved to sing the bloody things anyway. Actually, I'd say my singing style owes as much to my asthma as Ewan MacColl; it was actually better in the days I used to smoke and demolish chimney breasts to clear out impacted decades of jackdaw nests. I blame all this bracing sea air myself.