1980 **

Biko

Steven Biko, a young anti-apartheid activist, was killed by the South African police in 1977. In evoking Biko’s memory, Peter Gabriel made use of South African musical sounds and sung one line in Xhosa. The song mourns the death, but it also addresses the killers (and the regime they served): ‘You can blow out a candle / But you can’t blow out a fire / Once the flames begin to catch / The wind will blow it higher.’

Peter Gabriel

1888 **

Men of England

Written after the Peterloo massacre of 1819, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Men of England’ was not given musical life until this setting of 1888 in socialist songbooks. Refashioned from six short verses to three long ones with a chorus, the lyrics remained pertinent generations on, combining poetic merit with simplicity and accessibility. In its new form, the first two verses pose provocative questions (‘wherefore plow / For the lords who lay ye low?’) that the third answers in no uncertain terms.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (ed. Edward Carpenter)

1853 **

Ten Per Cent!

Covering the strike in question for Household Words, Charles Dickens included this song composed by a striker, which was being sold on site by ‘a knot of young girls’ for a penny to raise awareness of the cause. Dickens praises its ‘earnestness and fire’; he may also have been struck by its clarity and specificity of complaint and demands, as it at once exhorts strikers to be brave, and repeats its opposition to a 10% pay cut.

Unknown

2009 **

Hollow Point

A protest directed at the shooting by police of Jean Charles de Menezes in London, July 2005. The lyric, having affirmed Menezes’ ‘ordinary’ character, reflects on the machismo and incompetence of a police force mobilised by the ‘war on terror’. As a war with only a vaguely discernible enemy, in which everyone was a potential suspect, Menezes’ Brazilian origin was enough to see him targeted as a potential enemy of the state.

Chris Wood

1794 **

The Seaman’s Nursery

Edward Rushton’s song bears the imprint of his harrowing experiences on board a slave ship. Its prefatory verse urges the ‘rulers of the nation’ to ‘destroy’ the trade; what follows is a devastating subversion of a heroic sailor narrative. Its rash anti-hero, Jem, dies of fever off the coast of west Africa, ‘uncheer’d, unnursed, nay unattended’, a grim warning to other would-be slaver-seamen.

Edward Rushton

1910 **

Rouse, Ye Women

In 1910, a minimum wage (two and half pence an hour) was introduced for workers in the chain-making industry. Employers refused to pay. The National Federation of Women Workers called a strike. The song castigates the employer (the ‘Sweater’), urges support for the union, and imagines a victory in ‘Beauty, Joy and Art’. After ten weeks of industrial action, all employers had agreed to pay the minimum wage.

Unknown

ca. 1938 **

The Rambling Royal

This is one of the few songs about desertion from the military. It tells of a Liverpool lad, who, when drunk, enlists in the marines. Regretting his decision, he escapes – twice – to claim his freedom and to declare: ‘I can fight as many corporals / As you’ll find in the Marine. / I can fight as many Orangemen / As ever banged a drum’, adding a sectarian dimension to his defiance.

Unknown

2004 **

Jerusalem Revisited

Sampling Blake, this a capella group re-present the poet’s pastoral idyll as a burning house on a ‘doomed estate’, a ‘homeland for the homeless’, scarred by crime and brutal policing. With the ideal of Jerusalem overcome by greed, dark satanic banking mills threaten to loom for eternity. A hopeful closing note, however – and quotation of Parry’s 1916 tune – proposes bringing back ‘the voice of burning gold’ and collaborating, with ceaseless mental strife, to make Earth, not England, the promised land.

Coope Boyes & Simpson

1653 **

The Parliament Routed

This song, which was performed all over the country, protests at the tyranny, corruption, and failure of the Long Parliament’s ‘Commonwealth’ government and celebrates its sudden dissolution by Cromwell’s New Model Army in April 1653. Though full of praise for Cromwell (and hopeful for a restoration of the monarchy), the ejected MPs were called ‘Rooks’ whose ‘lustful desires’ led them to ‘gull and cozen all true-hearted People’. It was so shocking that the publisher was imprisoned, and people were still talking about it thirty years later.

Samuel Smithson

1820 **

Britons Claim Her As Your Queen

Few topics can have generated so many protest songs in so short a time as the Queen Caroline affair of 1820, when the king used Parliament to divorce his estranged wife. This song is exemplary: published for a mass audience by a radical north-east printer and set to the perennial protest tune of ‘Scots Wha Hae’, it adapts Burns’ lines into a staunch defence of Caroline of Brunswick as a pan-British heroine, and attacks the ‘villain’ and ‘knave’, George IV.

Unknown

ca. 1815 **

The Hand-Loom Weavers’ Lament

Many versions exist of this well-known lament, whose grievances are uncomfortably in tension with the jaunty hunting tune it employs. Working-class lyricist John Grimshaw accuses the rich of hypocrisy and threatens the ‘tyrants of England’ with retribution, while one famous verse in later variants contrasts empty wartime propaganda against the ‘tyrant’ Napoleon with the real tyranny closer to home.

John Grimshaw

1849 **

The Distressed Sempstress

A vernacular follow-up to ‘The Song of the Shirt’, this slip-song (a cheap single sheet sold in the streets) is prefaced with the assertion that many such women are forced into prostitution, lending moral urgency to its narrative. Addressing the ‘gentles of England’, it argues for what amounts to a living wage as a question of not only ‘justice and mercy’, but patriotic duty.

Unknown

1639 **

Oh Yes, Oh Yes, I Do Cry

Inspired by a ‘Scotch sermon that compared the Kirk to a horse’, this seditious song urges the English to support their fellow Protestants, the Presbyterian Scots ‘Covenanters’ in their protest against the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, who had imposed ‘papist’ Church reforms on Scotland and England and had influenced Charles I to make war against his northern people. It also called for the release of the Puritan-friendly Bishop of Lincoln who Laud had imprisoned in the Tower of London.

A S Mill and Me (pseud.)

1792 **

The Desponding Negro

Birmingham songwriter, satirist, and publisher John Collins was a staunch reactionary, making his abolitionist song highly unusual. In a typical historical irony, it has since been mistaken for the work of mixed-race radical preacher and publisher Robert Wedderburn, who re-published the song in 1817. Compared with similar works, Collins’ is disappointing: it makes its Black narrator more victim than accuser, and leans into exoticising and even racist tropes in an attempt to engender sympathy.

John Collins

1776 **

To The Commons

Printed first as a broadside, then in the radical Middlesex Journal, this song strongly opposes the war against the American revolutionaries, urging parliamentarians to vote against it, and the government to ‘recall your ships’. Its verses are distinguished by their cogent argument and vivid imagery, while a final verse in a different metre wickedly parodies the jingoistic song ‘Hearts of Oak’, implying that Britain is a tyranny.

Unknown

2016 **

Touch Me Again

Named after the pétreoleuses (women supporters of the 1871 Paris Commune accused of arson attacks), the band asserts their right to bodily autonomy, making a political argument from first principles (‘My desire, my right to choose or to refuse this encounter … my body and my choice’). Pre-dating the explosion of #MeToo in 2017, the song is part of a wider movement involving the sharing of experiences of sexual assault so as to draw attention to rape culture.

Petrol Girls

1894 **

The Diggers’ Song

Belonging to the same tune family as ‘Sam Hall’, this enduring song of class warfare restricts its proposals to the refrain ‘stand up now’, focusing its invective on the crimes of gentry, lawyers, and clergy. Published from a manuscript copy by the antiquarian Camden Society in 1894, the song is attributed to Gerrard Winstanley (1609–76), a Leveller leader and Quaker. Its greatest impact, however, appears to have been in the later twentieth, rather than the seventeenth century.

Gerrard Winstanley

ca. 1811 **

General Ludd’s Triumph

Still known today, this Luddite anthem raises a new people’s hero to replace Robin Hood, insisting on the here and now of the people’s fight. It combines pugnacious hyperbole with a well-known patriotic melody in what is both rallying call and threat – but asserts that the cause is just and the means proportionate, and that if their grievances are redressed, ‘peace will be quickly restored’.

Unknown

1793 **

Burke’s Address To The Swinish Multitude

Published in Robert Thomson’s astonishing revolutionary pamphlet A Tribute to Liberty, this song is the first of a pair. It impersonates the reactionary politician Edmund Burke, newly infamous for his description of the British masses as a ‘swinish multitude’, and uses this voice to construct a deliberately preposterous, self-defeating argument against democracy; the second song is the far more convincing ‘The “Swinish Multitude’s” Reply’. Both use the same tune, by then perhaps the standard setting for political songs.

Robert Thomson

1975 **

The World Turned Upside Down

A stalwart folk troubadour, Rosselson’s story of the 1649 Digger commune recovers a moment of English radicalism that sacked the landlords and reclaimed the land. Named after Christopher Hill’s classic history book, the song disavows the power and ownership of property that enforces inequality. It also records the suppression of the Diggers as class power is wielded and ‘the people’ are ‘cut down’.

Leon Rosselson

1744 **

God Save the King

Evidence from verses found on purportedly older drinking vessels has convinced some scholars that what is now the national anthem began as a Jacobite drinking song, protesting Williamite or Georgian rule and celebrating the king ‘soon to reign over us’. Yet it is likelier that these vessels were themselves crafted in 1744–5 after the song became famous in London, as an immediate Jacobite attempt to appropriate an instantaneously popular song. Even more than ‘Rule, Britannia!’, this tune has been parodied ever since: especially potent versions were sung by supporters of the French Revolution, victims of the Peterloo Massacre (1819), and defenders of Queen Caroline (1820).

Unknown

1797 **

The Muse’s Friendly Aid

Of the many protest songs produced in support of the 1797 naval mutinies, this was the most damning: the authorities confiscated the manuscript copy from HMS Repulse and produced it in evidence as ‘an insidious song’. And so it is: the narrator protests their humility, loyalty, heroism, and patriotism – and uses this in support of the sailors’ provocative demands for better pay, conditions, and protection from arbitrary punishment – demands the song takes care not to reiterate.

Unknown

1747 **

Written In 1747

Fittingly for its satirical tune, then much in vogue, this Jacobite song takes a lighter tone than most, imagining a dialogue between the Devil and his ‘friend’ George II. The pair rejoice at Charles Stuart’s defeat at Culloden, as it prevents ‘Religion and Honesty’ returning to England. Interestingly, the song appeals to English Protestants, arguing along lines of competence, decency, and justice, rather than faith. Indeed George, the Devil’s ‘Tool’, is said to have no religion at all.

Unknown

1795 **

Lock Jaws

Deftly set to an infectious, even playful tune of Charles Dibdin’s, this broadside satire protests Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger’s Two Acts of 1795 – draconian measures against free speech and association. Its complex series of political complaints and references is rendered accessible to a mass audience by the ‘pair of locked jaws’ refrain, an evocative image, easily grasped.

Unknown

1852 **

Song of the ‘Lower Classes’

Ernest Jones’ song is rightly remembered as iconic. Though set to music by Chartist activist John Lowry, thereby demonstrating the talents of working-class radicalism, it was also intentionally written to fit other, existing melodies, in order to broaden its reach. Its lyric glories ironically in the epithet ‘low’, an early example of ‘reclaiming’ a pejorative term, but makes clear that the ‘we’, though ‘low’, are central to agriculture, industry, taxation, defence, and migration – before ending in stirring forecasts of freedom.

Ernest Jones

1701 **

Sir John Fenwick’s The Flower Amang Them

Of this paean to a Jacobite martyr executed in 1697 by order of Parliament, and sung by the Tory elite of the Borders region, only the tune remains. But on 22 August 1701, this tune alone led to a duel in Newcastle between the performer, John Fenwick of Rock, and Ferdinando Forster: the latter was killed and the former executed for his murder!

Unknown

1969 **

Give Peace A Chance

One of those songs – like ‘We Shall Overcome’ – that gives protesters a chant as well as a message. No other protest song has attracted the same level of attention. It was recorded in a Canadian hotel bedroom, with various late-’60s luminaries, and starring pop’s most famous couple, John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Few remember the lists that constitute its verses, but almost everyone knows the chorus. Its power perhaps lies in its simplicity

John Lennon

1989 **

No Clause 28

Clause 28 of the Local Government Act (1988) prohibited ‘promoting’ homosexuality. Resistance to it formed part of wider consolidation of support for gay rights. The song includes an impersonation of Margaret Thatcher (addressed directly as ‘Iron Lady’). A rap by MC L-Dog makes connections to AIDS, NHS underfunding, the indistinguishability of political parties and the clamping of cars. Section 28 was repealed in England in 2003; wheel clamping on private land was banned in 2012; the NHS remains underfunded.

Boy George

1681 **

The Subject’s Hope

The Earl of Shaftesbury led Whig attempts to force the king to exclude his brother, the Catholic Duke of York, from the succession. In 1681, Shaftesbury was imprisoned and tried for treason in London, a Whig stronghold. This popular song blames papists from abroad and at court for cooking up charges against him and calls for him to be freed without a stain on his character. It was perhaps sung during large street demonstrations in London calling for his acquittal. The jury found he had no case to answer, but he fled the country immediately afterwards.

Joshua Conyers

1793 **

Serjeant Kite’s Invitation

Published as a broadside set to an ancient melody at a time when radicals were being prosecuted for sowing sedition among newly-recruited soldiers, this song’s title riffs on Edmund Burke’s infamous derogatory comment (see our song ‘Burke’s Address’). Rather than preach its anti-war sentiment directly and earnestly, the song takes a comic approach, satirising the rhetoric of recruiting sergeants whilst driving home its central message: sixpence a day and danger of death is a bad deal and a fool’s game.

Unknown

1636 **

The Coaches’ Overthrow

Songs protesting conspicuous consumption of luxury goods reflected deep anxieties caused by social and economic change. In 1625, just twenty London hackney coaches plied for hire; by 1636, fleets of them blocked the city streets. In 1635, to the delight of older, displaced trades such as carriers, carmen, and sedan-chairmen, John Taylor and the Watermen of London launched an official protest against the coach trade and persuaded the City to restrain them. This ballad celebrated the success of the Watermen’s campaign and called for the coachmen to find other less damaging trades.

Martin Parker & John Taylor

1985 **

Meat Is Murder

While animal rights politics was on the rise, linked with wider opposition to the exploitation of nature, this song brought an existing slogan (associated with the Animal Liberation Front) into wider public consciousness, where it has since stayed. Opposition to meat eating is communicated through the sounds of distressed animals and lyrics seeking to effect a rhetorical ‘redescription’, changing the meaning of meat from something harmless (‘the flesh that you so fancifully fry’) to ‘murder’.

The Smiths

1646 **

The World Is Turned Upside Down

This song was circulating in London on Easter Day 1646. It combines traditional concerns of a ‘world turned upside down’ and complaints at the loss of charitable hospitality, with a new tune that became a royalist anthem. Protesting at Parliament’s abolition of Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun, the line ‘Christmas was kil’d at Nasbie fight’ refers to Parliament’s decisive victory at the Battle of Naseby on 14 June 1645. Collective action against the Christmas ban took place in 1646.

Martin Parker

1688 **

The Ungrateful Rebel

This song protests the revolution by denigrating English supporters of William of Orange’s invasion. It ventriloquises the voice of the unprincipled ‘turncoat’ - a term, character and tune that emerged only after the Restoration – to be found in William’s entourage. Their determination to destroy king and kingdom, no matter how, is made clear as the turncoat concludes ‘Religion I ne’re had none, / Except to disturb the Throne: / With Orange now … I venture both Life and Limb. / And if the Great Turk, / Wou’d set me at work, / I would do as much for him.’

Unknown

1690 **

The Bountiful Brewers

The first of a series on the same urgent topic, this song protests that rich, wholesale brewers are unjustly increasing beer prices because of wartime excise taxes. The balladeer points out ‘parliament they, was pleased to lay / the Tax upon those that are able to pay’, but that the brewers are passing the cost on to retailers, who are in turn forced to serve ‘small’ [weak] beer and short measures to the poor.

Unknown

ca. 1984 **

(Something Inside) So Strong

Addressed to those who deny rights and respect to those who are not white, this song offers a defiant riposte. Whatever barriers you put in my way, Labi Siffre suggests, the stronger I become. His tormentor is not given a name or a category. For much of the song, the contest is between ‘you’ and ‘I’, but towards the end Siffre introduces ‘we’ (‘brothers and sisters’). The personal complaint becomes a collective demand.

Labi Siffre

1644 **

The Western Husbandman’s Lamentation

Published at the height of the civil war, and written in a comic West Country dialect, this song bitterly protests at the plundering of farms by both Roundhead and Cavalier armies and calls for peace. The writer articulates complaints often made by the ‘clubmen’ movement, which saw farmers from across the western region, armed only with clubs and flails, resisting the incursion of both Royalist and Parliamentary armies into their areas.

Unknown

1846 **

John White

The fatal flogging of cavalryman John White, for physically threatening his sergeant while drunk, occasioned numerous broadsides condemning his treatment and advocating reform and petitions. But though the case was topical, it also entered song traditions: this version was taken from the singing of a Mrs Russell, 61 years later. It combines timeless phraseology with both specific details and a call for action in the form of petitioning.

Unknown

1887 **

The Land Song

It has been a long march for this song, from its origins in Chicago to its present status as anthem of the Liberal Democrats. In England, its greatest impact was in the Liberal campaigns of the 1900s, inspired by radical US land reformer Henry George. The song pulls off the deft trick of developing a compelling argument for redistribution in accessible, inspirational language, married to an intensely satisfying, catchy chorus to be sung by demonstrators.

Unknown

ca. 1820 **

My Old Hat

During the discontent of the 1820s, when economic recession and rising unemployment coincided with calls to enfranchise the working class, a raft of new editions were printed of a song that had, in some form, existed for centuries. Rather than giving topical names to its targets, this is the archetypal song of complaint: times are worse than once they were. Its focus is the agricultural poor, their wages, treatment, and the enclosure of the commons.

Unknown

ca. 1688 **

The Statesman’s Almanac

In November 1685, faced with strong opposition to his appointment of Catholics to elevated positions of state and in the army, James II prorogued Parliament. His attempts to ensure a compliant house by coercive ‘packing’ only increased opposition so that, in April 1688, he promised to recall parliament in November. This highly seditious ballad - purporting to be from a soldier abroad - attacks the papist and debauchee King and parodies an almanac calendar, showing how, ‘Ne’r a Month in the Year, / Is proper for such a Meeting’: the song’s intent is to demand an immediate election.

Unknown

2019 **

Fulfilment Centre

The long instrumental introduction, naggingly repetitive riff and world weary voice evoke the oppressive tedium and extreme demands of the Amazon warehouse. Like the songs that protested at the work regimes of earlier eras, this one attacks their online equivalent and the lust for commodities that fuels them. It is told through the perspective of a worker who imagines ‘one day, I’m going to run my own café.’

Richard Dawson

1834 **

The New Poor Law

This savagely ironic parody of mega-hit ‘Home, Sweet Home’ argues that rural Oxfordshire is now no such thing, by enumerating the daily burdens of the New Poor Law. Blaming farmers and nobles as ‘oppressors’ and the laws’ architects as ‘the spawn of hell’, the song promises retribution ‘in this world, or in the burning lake’.

Edward Lamborn of Uffington

1795 **

The Plough Boy’s Dream

This song from the Cheap Repository Tracts (a publishing endeavour by moral reformers) is a rare example in our list of top-down propaganda, subsidised for sale among the poor in order to reform their working practices. It counts as ‘protest’ because it takes the part of ‘dumb beasts’ – donkeys, horses, cattle – using the device of a religious dream narrative to argue against cruelty to animals.

William Mason

1978 **

Typical Girls

The Slits’ punk-generated protest was embodied as much by their appearance and performance as by their lyrics. Here, though, they eschew all the tropes of being a ‘typical girl’, listing and subverting the constructs of youthful femininity as presented through commerce and the media. The song exposes cliché (‘typical girls get upset too quickly’) and rejects presumption (ironising the Velvet Underground line ‘she’s a femme fatale’) to present the possibility of alternatives.

The Slits

1843 **

The Song of the Shirt

Thomas Hood’s iconic, explosive lyric began life as a poem – despite its title – but was immediately set to music. Spawning numerous ‘Song of the ...’ sequels, it set a benchmark for critiques of working conditions. The lyrics, at once sentimental and stark, name no specific targets. But its context was pertinent: dedicated to an impoverished seamstress, Mrs Biddell, published in satirical magazine Punch, and swiftly linked to numerous campaigns for reform.

Thomas Hood

1888 **

The Internationale

Eugène Pottier’s anthem was originally an 1871 reworking of the ‘Marseillaise’, before Pierre De Geyter’s melody gave it a separate identity, to be circulated and translated around the world. The English lyrics sought to balance literal sense with poetic sensibility – and though a century later Billy Bragg dubbed them ‘archaic’, the chorus remains strong: simpler than the verses, carried by a melody that, when sung by many voices, has an emphatic payoff.

Eugène Pottier

1977 **

Don’t Back the Front

One of several punk songs that responded to the rise of the National Front (NF) and its racist politics. The Desperate Bicycles combined musical experimentation (two minutes of insistent organ riff) with punk’s DIY practices (‘cut it, press it, distribute it’, as this song says). Its main focus may be on the NF, but its argument is that it is ‘capital [not immigration, that] takes your jobs’.

Desperate Bicycles

1660 **

The Covenant

This song voices the dilemma for soldiers of the New Model Army, without whose accord attempts at Restoration would end in a bloodbath. It argues that Parliament’s soldiers willingly swore the Covenanter Oath – to defend the Protestant religion and the king’s person ¬– but complains that they were deceived by their leaders and had never intended to kill Charles II’s father. Though willing to accept ‘the old king’s son’, they now fear being deprived of pay, despite all their victories.

John Wade

1763 **

Wilkes and Liberty (3)

‘Wilkes and Liberty’ was the slogan that defined English radicalism in the 1760s. This song printed for the Scots Scourge is exemplary of many in support of Wilkes, a demagogue and reformer: it celebrates his release from prison, mocks First Minister Lord Bute, and champions liberty in general. Its ancient tune ‘Chevy Chase’ highlights its English versus Scottish tone, while its engraved header image adds extra value.

Unknown

1681 **

England’s Darling

The king’s Protestant, but illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, had joined in the attempt to exclude the Catholic Duke of York from succeeding to the throne, and was exiled from the court as a punishment. Already a much-loved hero, this very popular song (adapted from an Aphra Behn poem) was one of several that protested the treatment meted out to him and other Whig leaders. It praises Monmouth’s loyal service to the crown and calls for his ‘restauration’, clearly an allusion to Charles II’s own return to the throne.

Aphra Behn

1823 **

The Newgate Street Petition

This ‘privately circulated’ anonymous song was written to protest the demolition of Newcastle’s Newgate, a much-loved ancient monument. It belongs to a local tradition of songs directly addressing and critiquing ‘Mr Mayor’. Though it caused enough of a stir to be recorded in local histories, its elaborate and often tongue-in-cheek wordplay may have undermined its intention.

Unknown

1973 **

The Socialist ABC

With the jolly rhythms and lyrics of a nursery rhyme, and Alex Glasgow’s teacherly enunciation, this song is a father’s lesson to his son on the keywords of socialism. The message of the song lies in its final verse. The father begins the song as a staunch unionist and ends it as a Labour MP, and as such has renounced the Socialist ABC.

Alex Glasgow

ca. 1778 **

Britannia’s Lamentation

This anti-war broadside ballad laments and opposes the ransacking of ‘New York and other places’ during the American War of Independence. An eloquent and unusually outspoken song, it is highly characteristic of many enduring ballads in presenting its ‘high’ subject of war and diplomacy in ‘low’ and relatable terms: fathers, mothers, sons, brothers, and a ‘house divided’.

Unknown

1640 **

Alas Said The Papist

This pro-Covenanter song protests that there was a ‘popish’ plot to revert England to Rome (MP John Pym made a speech to this effect on 7 November 1640). Parodying a popular love song of the period, it features a dialogue between a fleeing ‘Jesuite’ and a Scottish soldier and complains of the introduction of ‘popish’ rituals and music in English churches. Only half the song survives, but it is unique in using balladry to protest exclusionary church music.

Unknown

1794 **

The Rights of Man For Me

Set to a famous theatre tune, this is probably the most accessible song by the prolific advocate of land-reform and democracy, Newcastle’s Thomas Spence. It was published in a radical pamphlet that advertised it as having been written whilst in prison – bolstering its credentials – and credited Spence, perhaps apocryphally, with coining the phrase ‘the rights of man’ as early as 1780, eleven years before Thomas Paine’s landmark work of the same name.

Thomas Spence

1833 **

Negro Slavery

Innumerable political songs were set to the stirring tune of ‘Scots Wha Hae’. This London broadside uses it to add eloquence to its support of the Slavery Abolition Act, that would emancipate slaves across much, but by no means all, of the British Empire. It moves from eulogising William Wilberforce to inhabiting the perspective of a slave, and, most importantly, calls on its audience of ‘Britons’ to petition parliament.

Unknown

1994 **

England’s Dreaming

A blunt rejection of racism and prejudice, ‘England’s Dreaming’ was released as the British National Party gained support on the back of a recession. As an indie band comprised mainly of British Asians, Cornershop called out the wistful nostalgia for a lost England that infused the period and the genre, alluding to a recent controversy surrounding Morrissey’s waving the Union Flag (a gesture as reactionary as the ex-Smiths singer’s paeans to unrequited love and social isolation had once been liberatory).

Cornershop

1774 **

A Song for the Independent Burgesses of Newcastle

Set to the same tune as ‘The Harvest of Corruption’ and concerning the same election, this street ballad is notable for its subtitle: ‘By a Lady’. Eschewing the irony and wit of many election songs, its tone is earnest, appealing to voters’ self-regard. Its ostensibly female voice is key to this strategy, challenging its audience to prove themselves as ‘real men’, honest, free, and independent.

Unknown

1774 **

Death or Liberty

With each iteration, this protest grew more potent. The lyric published in 1780 came from a theatrical interlude of 1774, when its defiant refrain had no specific object. A radical 1793 reworking inveighed against despots and judges who deserved ‘the people’s vengeance’ – and it was this version that James Ings sung on the scaffold in 1820, before being executed for his role in the Cato Street conspiracy, which had sought to assassinate the British cabinet.

Miles Peter Andrews

1954 **

The Hydrogen Bomb

The threat of nuclear war was the inspiration for many protest songs, but it was rare to hear one set to a calypso beat. Its protest is directed, first, at the very idea of war: ‘I would like to know what they are fighting for’; and then at devasting effect of the H bomb: ‘it will wipe the whole world out.’

Mighty Terror

1871 **

Perseveer

Set to a recent love song’s tune, there is nothing romantic about this fervent Tyneside contribution to the Great Engineers’ Strike of 1871. Written in Geordie dialect, it exhorts its audience of workers to hold firm, holding out the example of successful industrial action on Wearside. Imagining a dialogue with a Sunderland worker, it plays upon ideas of masculinity, justice, solidarity – and envy.

Matthew Dryden

1872 **

The Agricultural Labourers’ Union Song

Fittingly, this early song of unionisation took its tune from a four-part American anthem, following earlier Chartist practice in encouraging collective endeavour through musical harmony. Published as a cheap broadside headed with a large image of bucolic prosperity, its lyrics risk didacticism as they seek to convince labourers of the union’s benefits. Still, its platitudes make for good singing by a large body of men – which was the entire point.

Unknown

1886 **

England, Arise!

Vegetarian, gay, and hailing from Sheffield, Edward Carpenter was an inspirational socialist whose songbook collection Chants of Labour went through numerous editions. Unusually, he wrote both words and four-part melody to this, his best-known song. Its words are bellicose and bold, each verse featuring a rhetorical question in the minor-key second section before an emphatic closing response, while the tune’s surprisingly sentimental opening phrase provides an indelible hook.

Edward Carpenter

1728 **

Tyburn Tree

This short song from John Gay’s phenomenally popular Beggar’s Opera – to the tune of ‘Greensleeves’ – is an eternal protest: the rich and powerful go unpunished for greater crimes than those for which they hang the poor. But it was also a direct attack on the corrupt First Minister, Robert Walpole, who actually had to sit in the audience and listen to it.

John Gay

1756 **

The Freeholder’s Ditty

This typically loquacious Tory diatribe against venality is set to a lively Scottish dance tune. Its jingoistic war-time rhetoric contrasts an Elizabethan golden age with present weakness, attacking George II and numerous ministers. Littered with topical insinuations, its anti-Hanoverian critique borders on Jacobitism – and though aimed at voters rather than rebels, it calls for the government to be hanged, envisioning a future ‘British king’ in preference to the incumbent.

Unknown

1911 **

March of the Women

Of the many songs associated with the campaign for votes for women, this is perhaps the most famous. It was performed at Women’s Social and Political Union meetings in the Royal Albert Hall and at protests in Holloway Jail. A rallying call for women’s suffrage, rather than a direct criticism of the existing system, the song announces that ‘the dawn is breaking’ and that supporters of the cause must stand together.

Cicely Hamilton

1679 **

The Sale of Esau’s Birthright

This song caused a sensation in 1679. Commissioned by a pro-Whig campaign group, known as the Green Ribbon Club, after they lost a hotly contested borough election in Buckingham, it protested at the corruption of the burgesses and bailiff, who effectively sold their votes to the pro-court candidates. It especially targeted Henry Howard, a well-to-do barber, who changed sides at the last moment, and was thrown into prison for abusing the Whig duke of Buckingham in the process. The song protests that Buckingham had sold its Protestant birthright and encouraged the advance of popery and tyranny.

Thomas and Henry Wharton

1751 (est.) **

When Popish Jemmy Ruled the Land

This is the second of two songs taken from The Charnwood Opera, a play organised by a local rural community in protest at enclosure. This four-verse protest makes expert use of its tune ‘The Vicar of Bray’ to evoke the twisting tricks over time of enclosers, and it combines a familiar nostalgia for better days with bellicose defiance, threatening violence against the despotic local landowners it ridicules as ‘little Squires’.

Unknown

1897 **

Raise Your Standard Brothers

Born in Hungary, Gustav Spiller spent his adult life in England, and was one of many central European songwriters whose works fuelled English radicalism. A secular hymn, its lyrics replace God with ‘Human love our lord’, as it exhorts activists to keep fighting in their daily lives for ‘justive’, ‘salvation’, and ‘virtue’. In common with a significant number of nineteenth-century protest songs, it was set to music by a female composer.

Gustav Spiller

1879 **

Medical Orthodoxy

The early eighteenth-century tune ‘The Vicar of Bray’ is the perfect vehicle for this anti-vaccination tirade, published in that society’s campaign journal. It adopts the original song’s device of the turn-coat, hypocritical narrator, updated from a vicar to a medical doctor whose every word condemns both him and the idea of compulsory vaccination. The lyricist leverages popular distrust of experts, science, and the new.

Unknown

1679 **

The Ballad of the Cloak

Originally published in 1663 as a protest at Charles II’s attempt to allow freedom of worship, the song was remade and reissued in 1679 in response to rumours of a ‘Popish Plot’ to kill Charles II and new parliamentary elections. Recalling the civil wars, and blaming both Presbyterians and Papists for starting them, the song prays that ‘the King / and his Parliament, / In sacred and secular things may consent’ and called for ‘One faith, one form, one Church to unite us’. Often reprinted, it became a standard protest song whenever the threat of religious toleration loomed.

Unknown

1768 **

Liberty Revived

One of many songs championing the cause and life story of demagogue and reformer John Wilkes, this celebrates his return from exile in France. It lists his powerful enemies, who are characterised as ‘the scum of the nation’, and urges Londoners to elect Wilkes as an MP. It uses a well-known tune, but the printed copy is headed with two engraved caricatures, suggesting it is aimed at a wealthy, educated audience of voters.

Unknown

1819 **

National Songs – No.1

The Peterloo Massacre prompted literally hundreds of furious protest songs. This is one of the most interesting in its use of Handel’s grandiose melody; the author’s pseudonym ‘Alfred’ – a king closely associated with constitutional reformism; and its rhetoric. Tradition and patriotism are here used to defy native, not foreign tyranny, and foretell the ‘vengeance’ of ‘millions’.

Unknown

1980 **

Skin

Targeting the fashion industry’s use of animal hides, ‘Skin’ is a visceral attack on culling and couture. The vanity of those wearing the furs and leather is brought to the fore, with facile justifications put to the sword. An item of presumed beauty is rendered ugly and obscene.

Siouxsie and the Banshees

ca. 1778 **

An African’s Appeal to the British Nation

This early and anonymous abolitionist song, distributed in cheap print, is one of several that adopts the narrative voice of a slave. It argues primarily by appealing to empathy and fairness, constantly comparing the narrator’s state with that of the free Briton, and challenging the latter to ‘equalize your laws’. Unsparing in its accusations and rhetoric, its espousal of universal human rights anticipates the revolutionary fervour of the 1790s.

Unknown

1891 **

We’ll Turn Things Upside Down

Riffing on the age-old theme of inversion, John Bruce Glasier’s socialist lyric uses the simple tune of an old sea-song, lending connotations of jollity and optimism to its promise of a coming revolution. Whilst its chorus makes the collective claim, the verses dwell on the irony and hypocrisy of the rich, turning the screw of social inequality in support of its final proposal: ‘to overturn the whole vile lot’.

John Bruce Glasier

1994 **

Hard Times of Old England

The song originates from the 18th century and featured in the repertoire of the Copper Family. Its protests at unemployment and poverty were given contemporary relevance by performers such as Roy Bailey, Martin Carthy, and Steeleye Span, who turned the song into an uptempo romp, and more recently by Chumbawamba and Andy Turner.

Unknown

1964 **

Twenty Tons of T.N.T.

Flanders and Swann filled theatres with recitals of their humorous songs (‘The Gnu’; ‘The Gasman Cometh’), but they included the occasional political song (about the EEC or about rail closures). ‘Twenty Tons of TNT’, coinciding with the election of Labour who remained committed to nuclear weapons, was unusually dark in its imagining of the threat posed by the bomb.

Flanders & Swann

ca. 1604 **

Well Met Jockie Whether Away

This unprinted song protests at the influx of Scottish court cronies after James I’s accession. Adopting and exploiting a contemporary stereotype of the beggarly Scotsman, it complains at their transformation into finely dressed courtiers, wearing luxurious foreign goods. The song circulated privately among disgruntled English courtiers, helping to build fellow feeling and identify potential allies who could pressure the king to distribute patronage more fairly. One copy came into the hands of the state.

1832 **

The Barons Bold on Runnymede

William J. Fox, a minister, journalist, and future MP, had a secret weapon in his ward and amanuensis, composer Eliza Flower, who set numerous political songs to music including this: Fox’s exhortation to support the Reform Bill, drawing on Magna Carta for historical inspiration. The song was both published in his newspaper, and sold – with its music – for the subsidised price of one penny.

William J. Fox

1818 (est.) **

The Lancashire Hymn

Self-styled ‘weaver boy’ activist Samuel Bamford wrote scores of protest songs, of which this, subtitled ‘For Public Meetings’, is his most ambitious in both musical arrangement and practical intent: a pious ‘shout’ of liberty expertly set to a four-part dissenting hymn tune. Though other radical leaders scotched his plans to make this part of meetings, he went on to sing it with fellow prisoners whilst incarcerated, claiming that it even moved – and impressed – their warders.

Samuel Bamford

1984 **

Free Nelson Mandela

Imprisoned in 1962, anti-apartheid revolutionary Nelson Mandela became an internationally recognisable political prisoner. Many Western leaders including the UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher considered Mandela a terrorist, but a global campaign to free him made him a figure-head for the anti-apartheid movement as a whole. The lyrics describe Mandela’s captivity and torture, before repeating the title’s demand for his liberation. Notably, the song is upbeat, danceable, and a joyful celebration rather than being dour or aggressively demanding.

Jerry Dammers

1844 **

The Blackleg Miner

Vastly popular and still well-known, this Northumbrian song is uncompromising in its attack on would-be strike-breakers. Its message is simple: miners should join the union and back strikes, or they will be scorned, ostracised, bullied, and even killed by one of several graphic means! Though born from one specific strike, the coalminers’ lockout of 1844, its colourful narrative and catchy refrain have lent themselves to reuse ever since.

Unknown

ca. 1719 **

A Song to a Pleasant New Tune

In 1719, a renewed Jacobite rising sought to install the newly-married James Stuart to the throne, in place of George I and his Whig government, led by James Stanhope. This straightforward song in support of the scheme berates the Hanoverian Whig faction who are likened to Roundheads; hails James as the king of honest ‘Britons’; and, most interestingly, warns listeners against ‘Lulibolero that damnable Jig’.

Unknown

1690 **

Lay By Your Reason, Truth’s Out of Season

Hundreds of songs welcomed the Glorious Revolution of 1688/9 that forced the Catholic James II from the throne. In contrast, this ballad protests that it was brought about by base treachery and self-seeking opportunism. Both words and tune recall memories of the civil wars and Charles I’s execution in 1649. Pointing out that the change of monarch has achieved nothing, because government is still corrupt and religion remains in danger, it implies that restoring the old king would be better.

Unknown

1681 **

A Raree Show

The lyrics, illustration, and performance of this song, which ridiculed the king and his ministers, created a political furore. The author, dressed in a mock military costume, performed it outside the Oxford buildings in which Parliament met in March 1681 for a showdown over Whig attempts to exclude Charles II’s brother, the Catholic Duke of York, from succession to the throne. The king won: Parliament was dismissed only a week after it met. Everyone connected with the ballad was pursued: the sheets were destroyed (three copies used in the trial survive), the printer fled to America, and the singer/songwriter was executed.

Stephen Colledge

1692 **

The Sea-Martyrs

This treasonable song protests that, under William III, sailors were ‘unmercifully’ executed for mutinying over pay ‘when their Families were like to starve.’ It argues that this unjust treatment ‘will English Subjects fright / For our New Government to fight’, not least because some already fought ’gainst their Conscience’. Asking, ‘What times are these! Was’t ever known / Twas Death for Men to ask their own?’, it urges Parliament to seize ‘the whole Government’ and ‘us from lawless Rule deliver’.

Unknown

1908 **

Daughters of England

In most respects, this is a typical Edwardian anthem of empire, all blood-and-thunder patriotism and exhortation, echoed in Needham’s striding arrangement with its minor B-section and grandiose pay-off. But the sting is that ‘England’s the loser’ when ‘half of her childre