The most exciting television this weekend was not Line of Duty, but a moment in Doctor Who.  An episode called Thin Ice, set in 1814 London at the time of the Thames Ice Fair, and the moment comes as the Doctor confrons Lord Sutcliffe, who has developed an unorthodox bio fuel supply chain – including a captive alien – to ensure that his mills are powered and his business prospers:

Sutcliffe: I made the most of the situation.

Doctor:  What makes you so sure that your life is worth more than those people out on the ice? Is it the money? Is it the accident of birth that puts you inside the big fancy house?”

Sutcliffe: I help move this country forward; I more this empire forward

Doctor:  Human progress isn’t measured by industry. It’s measured by the value you put on a life.  An unimportant life.  A life without privilege.  The boy who died on the river, that boy’s value is your value. 

(emphasis mine.  The scene can be viewed here)

To use Hamlet’s words, the time is out of joint.  I wasn’t aware of my views changing over the last few years, but things around me appear to have shifted so strongly that attitudes I thought were anodyne now appear to make me a rampant, left-wing radical. I don’t think I was complacent, but I certainly feel dully stunned to have values that make me feel so out of step.  Let me not count the ways, it’s too depressing for the moment.  So, heartfelt thanks to Sarah Dollard for writing something that made me want to cheer and weep at the same time, for stating that each life matters equally; that valuing lives equally is a mark of progress; that – by implication – the value we ascribe to others’ lives is actually a verdict on our own.  A manifesto I could recognise and a scale which I find myself returning to and resorting to.  The human scale.

A few weeks ago we heard Shake the Chains, a folk ensemble who came together to explore folk song as protest.  Their performance at St John on Bethnal Green included the privilege of hearing Peggy Seeger live and absolutely undiminished by age.  Since then, we have heard Greg Russell and Ciaran Algar at Cecil Sharp House and Chris Wood at The Old Queen’s Head in Islington, all musicians we had heard before (and Greg is also a member of Shake the Chains), all providing comfort and restoration, as well as enjoyment, in these out-of-joint times.   Folk music is inherently on the human scale:  the songs are often about small lives, sometimes idealised archetypes, maidens and gypsies, witches and kings, but more often – at least in the music we enjoy and seek out – about miners, and fish and chip shops, and people going out on a Friday evening, children growing up in the 1960s, families in the here and now.  Folk song often articulates the mundane.  It documents and creates art out of life on an individual level, with humour and dignity.   Chris Wood writes devastating, tender social observations of people just doing their best to get by, and composes music for centuries-old texts which reveals them as strikingly contemporary commentary.  Considerations of economy, politics, religion, prejudice and patriotism are all given human faces, a human touch. It’s unpretentious.  Grounded.  Glamour, artificiality and celebrity are robustly rejected:  there is a refusal to abandon the particular and peculiar.

Folk music is inherently collaborative, both in composition and performance.  It is intrinsically a small-scale, live performance genre:  individual performers, and small ensembles where the dynamic between the group members is palpable; the visual, as well as aural, impact of virtuoso playing; the warmth and excitement that develops as the audience listens and responds (often joining in choruses, offering comments, making requests, even becoming mildly disruptive).   A give-and-take rhythm, reflecting energy and warmth back to the performers for them to take forward into the next song.  It’s a collective experience.

Greg Russell was a politics student and his final year dissertation was about the “role that music and musicians can play in social movements and political change”.   And while it is true (and wonderful) that music can play a significant and overt role in social movements and political change, at present, every folk performance I attend feels subversive.  There is danger in drawing people together in this way:  we feel less isolated; we sense a commonality and community from which we can draw strength;  we recognise better the things that we all share, so we fear the stranger less; it seems possible to reject the purely economic scale, and to value the insignificant life.  At the moment, that feels bizarrely like a radical political position.