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Only Doing Their Job

from Rambling On (Demos 2019​-​2022) by Dan Kemp

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Ewan McColl's scathing indictment of the police released in July 1984 in the midst of the miner's strike only a month after the battle of Orgreave. In this confrontation, 6000 police charged and routed the miners mass picket to prevent them from closing the coking works. Regarded by many to be a calculated attempt by the state to confront and finally break the miner's strike, forces including the Met and South Yorkshire police brutally attacked the ill prepared picket, arrested 71 picketers and then colluded to fabricate evidence and fit up those arrested.
McColl dryly notes that the police in Nazi Germany (and Vichy France) were also 'only doing their job' when they rounded people up for the concentration camps.

Orgreave:
'Robert East et al, writing in the Journal of Law and Society in 1985, suggested that rather than maintaining order and upholding the law, "the police intended that Orgreave would be a 'battle' where, as a result of their preparation and organisation, they would 'defeat' the pickets".[53] Michael Mansfield said: "They wanted to teach the miners a lesson – a big lesson, such that they wouldn't come out in force again."[54] Civil liberties pressure group Liberty has said: "There was a riot. But it was a police riot."[55]' WIkipaedia

Collaboration of french police in the holocaust: www.france24.com/en/20180919-depth-french-police-collaboration-with-nazis-revealed

ewanmaccoll.bandcamp.com/track/only-doing-their-job

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from Rambling On (Demos 2019​-​2022), released August 14, 2023
Ewan McColl

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Dan Kemp Reading, UK

Dan is a folk singer and fiddle player from Reading, UK. He accompanies lively, anarchic folk songs with guitar and fiddle and has a particular passion for ancient songs that are still relevant today in their depiction of social struggles and call for a better world. ... more

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