...and Vin Garbutt, Colum Sands, Jez Lowe and... - the list goes on and on.
I don't like the term "protest song" myself and never have, and didn't back in theb 60s - it sounds like it's people stamping their feet petulantly, or going off in a sulk. But if you write songs about real life, a lot of them have to be about things that are wrong that ought to be fixed, and if people want to call them protest songs, fair enough.
There are probably more good songs like that being written and sung than there ever have been. If you take the mass media as your measure of what is happening such sings don't exist, of course, but the mass media is on its way down the plughole of history anyway.
I spend more time on the Mudcat these days than I do watching telly, and I seriously think that's the way things are headed. And I don't listen to many records of people I haven't heard directly, not when it comes to this type of music anyway.
What is missing in most places is a popular radical political movement for the songs to plug into, but that's not down to the music. Anytime there's a movement the songs will appear and reinforce it. (And don't quote the petrol-price thing in England last year against that, because so far as I was concerned, that was a Tory media-generated con, and if I'd ever come up against one of their picket-lines I'd have gone straight through it, and that'd have been a first for me.)