Phil Drane This song came out of a conversation one night after a gig I did in Leicester. I was talking to an old bloke of 80-odd who I’ll call George. And we were talking about, not just Leicester, but England in general and I asked him “What do you think of England the way it is?”. And he said “I hate it. I hate what the British Government’s done to it, how they’ve divided the country and the people. I especially hate what they’ve done to native English people like me and how we can’t even talk about our grievances safely in public”. And for an hour or so he explained how the ethnic English continue to be racially abused in what is, after all, their country. George asked me to put all this into a song. And I agreed to do it because when I was a lad that’s what folk singers did – they protested against injustice. Except in this case, no one had bothered. Basically I suspect, out of fear - the same fear as George. The fear of reprisal by the self-righteous, self-appointed guardians of political correctness who now infect this country. Originally it was called simply “George’s Song”. Since then I’ve spoken to many urban English people who confirmed what George said is true. So I called it “The Englisc (Ethnic English) Lament” instead. We should all be alarmed and ashamed that this was allowed to happen in so-called multi-racial Britain. That ordinary ethnic English people have not only been disenfranchised … they have been systematically cowed into silence.

This tune/ song was written fairly recently in NZ but has everything to do with the 1960s North West of England folk scene, the Manchester Sports Guild Folk Club (the Guild), and of course, the demon alcohol. Hic.