I think this long and interesting quotation from Peggy Seeger has been posted before. In a sense the discussions it continues illustrate the fact that different people have different memories and views of the Critics Group and its 'policies'. So while some see the group as having been democratic, others see it as being dominated by MacColl. The recordings I have heard tend to confirm this, with one showing MacColl setting homework to be done for the next time. There is also with the information that he often gave long lectures.

We can't seem to get the full 'backstory' about the quotation. Why did 'the editor' ask who Jim Carroll and Pat Mackenzie were? You cannot find out by looking at the web site in question.

Some view the 'policy' as being a group decision, not something dictated; MacColl himself, as in the quoted comment from the sleeve notes mentioned earlier, seems at the very least to have come to see the 'policy' as something he personally insisted upon.

It interests me that Seeger says that it wasn't until after MacColl died that she realised how many 'ex post facto' critics they had made: the book gives an account of the ending of the Critics Group that suggests that at the time Seeger and MacColl were not aware of the unhappiness that had built up. If I remember aright, this was after a theatrical production: the members agreed to see the project through to its end, and then took away all the equipment, and that this came as a surprise to Seeger and MacColl.

It does seem to me that not all of the criticism was 'ex post facto' as some people tried the Critics Group and did not like it at the time, as opposed to afterwards as implied by the 'ex post facto' label.

On the point of how 'democratic' decisions within the group were, the idea of MacColl as a 'guru' of some sort (as opposed to his being a participant in some democratic enterprise) seems implied by Seeger when she says: 'What he was really trying to do in his later years (and I will be the first to admit that sometimes we could both be hamfisted about it) was encourage understanding of where these songs came from and how easy it is to ruin them, to turn them into something else.'

To go off tangent for a while, Seeger mentions Sir Patrick Spens; a song whose origins have been studied and which remain, as I understand it unclear, so nobody has a full understanding of where it came from, though there are theories about it ...   

Not everybody would agree with Seeger when she says that MacColl was always willing to discuss stuff with people who took different views, if they came with a 'less than hostile' approach. One thing that seems to come out of the biography was that MacColl often did not like it when people disagreed with him. It gives a list of people missed out of his autobiography on the basis (the biographer asserts) that they had upset MacColl.