To: teller Date: 23-Jul-99 - 09:03 AM

George. The alternate view point of which I speak is that of the scab/blackleg throughout the history of industrial/social dispute

Thanks for the clarification. It's not much help, I know, but one of the things which impressed me about the recent BBC TV "DramaDoc." about the Liverpool Dockers' Strike was that it did give serious consideration to WHAT made people scab. (What makes this remarkable to me is that the film was made by the striking dockers.)

Back to your question . . it seems to me that very often the strikers were a community - in which folk music making would exist naturally. On the other hand, the blackleg work force was often pulled together as a hotch-potch of desparate (for work/money, generally!) people from different souces . . . I suspect that work force provided much less of a fertile ground for new songs, and certainly would lack a sense of "community" or common purpose in the strike breaking they were undertaking.

And, of course, in recent years the Blacklegs have tended to be on the WINNING side (not that it did the UK breakaway miners union any good in the long term . . )

BTW it strikes me there's a degree of contradiction in the views on killing I've expressed in this thread. Over the weekend I found a great (IMO) piece of (prose!) writing which addressed that contradiction - I'll post it as a BS subject here later this week!

G.