Right on

In Competition 2522 you were asked to submit a right-wing protest song. There are some fine examples of this underexploited genre in Tim Robbins’s mock-documentary film Bob Roberts which features a guitar-playing senatorial candidate who appropriates the language of the Sixties protest movement to peddle his ultra-conservative message. The campaign trail is peppered with numbers such as ‘Times Are Changin’ Back’ and ‘My Land’, which rail against drugs and lazy people.
The standard was disappointing this week, with only four of you making the cut. Most went for the anthemic model of Bob Dylan or Pete Seeger, but this is hard to pull off from a right-wing perspective that lacks the righteous indignation of a mass movement feeling oppressed. The alternative might have been to focus on a sense of pathos and injustice by telling the story of an individual victim (as in Dylan’s ‘Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’) or group (Woody Guthrie’s ‘Ludlow Massacre’). You could have crafted a telling ode from the plight of a small businessman who loses house and family thanks to red tape and Brussels regulation (Gerard Benson touches on this).
The winners, printed below, get £35 each. Few entries demonstrated the simple economy of many great protest songs, but Sid Field captured some of the spirit of the early Clash. The bonus fiver belongs to Adrian Fry.

When Health & Safety have an ‘accident’ and old Nanny State’s been sacked,
The BBC’s been cleared of Trots and we’ve National Service back,
When the cops are out nicking villains instead of policing the smoking ban,
The dogs this country’s gone to will turn and give it right back to man.

When there’s education back in schools and discipline sees it stays,
The idle are chucked off the sick list and entrepreneurism pays,
When being ‘green’ is just a consumer’s choice, not a Puritan crusade,
We’ll pull back the handcart we left in Hell and point it a different way.