The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #168999 Message #4208766
Posted By: YorkshireYankee
23-Sep-24 - 03:08 PM
Thread Name: Lyr Add: Songs of the Yorkshire Yankee
Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Songs of the Yorkshire Yankee
New song, inspired by a theme of "kettles" ("assigned" by a weekly zoom I participate in). I've used the tune from the children's rhyme Polly Put the Kettle On, but sort of switched around; the verses are the B part of the tune and the choruses are the (better-known) A part.
A bit of background, for those not familiar with "kettling": Defined as "confinement by police of a group of demonstrators or protesters in a small area, as a method of crowd control", this can be a rather brutal tactic, as it can last for many hours and the people inside the police cordon usually have no access to food, water or toilets (I read of an instance where one desperate person resorted to peeing where they stood, and was then arrested for public indecency). The tactic is supposed to be used when crowds are getting out of hand, but has more than once been used on protestors who were completely peaceful (the 'justification' being that they were 'protecting' the peaceful demonstrators by preventing not-so-peaceful others from joining them).
These cordons also often end up containing people who happened to be passing by and had nothing to do with the protest. In one particularly notable case, "Ian Tomlinson, a newspaper seller who had been trying to find a route home past police cordons forming kettles around the Bank of England, was pushed to the ground by a Met officer... Tomlinson, a father of nine, posed no threat... [and] collapsed and died less than three minutes later..." (This quote is from a 2011 Guardian article: "A history of police kettling".)
Kettling has been less in the news lately, but the British government has continued to chip away at the right to peaceful protest; as just one example, the Policing Act bill of 2022 includes usefully vague prohibitions on being "disruptive" and "noisy" which in effect allow police to make it up as they go along... (More info on that bill here)