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) new work was now as unpopular with managements as it had previously been with critics alike and the play was only able to be shown in Britain as part of a programme of "foreign" plays in a production financed by French money. Motton's was an early and isolated dissident voice, but one of limited effectiveness due to his marginalisation, in the nascent debate within the left over the direction of the movement. "Cat and Mouse (Sheep)" was written while the middle class leadership established control of the Labour Party and five years before it formed the centre-left government under Tony