test.py

import bleach
import markupsafe
from mako.template import Template


def HTML(html):
    return markupsafe.Markup(html)


def remove_markup(html):
    return bleach.clean(html, tags=[], strip=True)



template = """
<%page expression_filter="h"/>
${html}
"""

data = "<b>Rock & Roll</b>"


bleached_html = remove_markup(data)
HTML_bleached_html = HTML(remove_markup(data))


mytemplate = Template(template)

print mytemplate.render_unicode(html=bleached_html)
print mytemplate.render_unicode(html=HTML_bleached_html)


####### OUTPUT
# Rock &amp;amp; Roll
# Rock &amp;amp; Roll