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) Blair of 1997, and precedes by a decade and a half the last stage of the conflict within Labour over control and direction of the movement, surrounding the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, which Motton, along with others, was later to describe in articles as the end of the same process. Cat and Mouse (Sheep) was the first of four satires by that author using the same characters. The others are "Gengis Amongst The Pygmies", "A Holiday In The Sun" and "The Rape Of Europe" The play and the subsequent three plays in the series, are useful as a register of