I spent a lot of 2017 and 2018, including eight days in Committee Rooms Two, Four and Five in the Palace of Westminster, speaking against and fighting a Private Bill going through Parliament. You may know that a Private Bill is a mechanism through which private interests can have access to the means of changing the law usually in pursuit of commercial advantage. The process for proposing and opposing a Private Bill is somewhat different from those of Private Members' Bills or Parliamentary Bills. A few of us who live on boats on a bare minimum wage were up against big business and landed interests. They eventually got the Bill through, but not before we’d managed to secure some twenty amendments and undertakings that would, if adhered to, make the new laws less draconian than they started out. It wasn't a bad result for a muso, a postie, a delivery driver and a care worker pitted against a barrister, three solicitors, two accountants and two chief executives. The fight continues as the waterways authority attempts to achieve its goals through introducing new bylaws.

I wanted to document my experience through song, but couldn't really think of a way to do it until the tried and trusted David versus Goliath metaphor came to mind. The tigers in the song are the "Fen Tigers" who opposed the drainage of the Fens in the seventeenth century which they could see was going to result in the loss of a way of life. As a way of stopping them wrecking the embankments leading agitators were offered inducements such as houses in nearby towns and the promise that navigation on the newly created and restricted waterways would remain free for non-commercial traffic in perpetuity. The law we were fighting threatened to remove that benefit amongst many other rights and freedoms.