Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act 1913 was viewed as violating basic human rights, not only of the suffragettes but of other prisoners. The Act's nickname of "Cat and Mouse Act", referring to the way the government seemed to play with prisoners as a cat may with a captured mouse, underlined how the cruelty of repeated releases and re-imprisonments turned the suffragettes from targets of scorn to objects of sympathy. The Asquith government's implementation of the Act caused the militant WSPU and the suffragettes to perceive Asquith as the enemy — an enemy to be vanquished in what the organisation saw as an all-out war. A related
Cat and Mouse (Sheep) wing politics as defined by the middle classes, a phenomenon now broadly discussed and to some degree acknowledged including within the Labour Party, was strongly at odds with opinion amongst British theatre practitioners at a time when left wing consensus centred around the emerging middle class leadership of the Labour Party whose success was to dominate the political scene for the next decade. Cat and Mouse (Sheep) marked the end of Motton's initial popularity with British theatres; The play was not accepted by any theatre managements when it was written in 1992, and has never been produced in Britain. Until