Before Polling

By the day before polling, all speeches

Are spoken, the arguments won or lost,

Promises promised, fingers firmly crossed.

Meanwhile, common experience teaches,

Manifestos are just works of fiction,

No matter how detailed, or blessedly brief,

They require suspension of disbelief.

Everyone who has a predilection

To regard suffrage as a precious gem,

Might consider the parties and decline

To cast the pearl of their vote for the swine

Who have all consistently misled them.

Day after polling, as things are arranged,

Voters will find that very little’s changed.

D. A.

Partial Truths

A partial truth when forcefully stated,

By some self-promoted man of destiny,

On his nation’s behalf, can seem to be

A claim he and his people are fated,

Through some divine or secular right,

To seize land others presently hold,

With many a fanciful fable told

Justifying loosing merciless might:

Yet another slaughter set in motion.

While those who publicly claim moral qualms

Eagerly promote their supply of arms

As necessary for peace promotion.

As if an initial atrocity

Redeems acts of bloody reciprocity.

D. A.

Proposing to tax the rich is a popular trope of left leaning politics. Cue the Green Party General Election manifesto. A pledge to spend £50 billion per year on health and social care by 2030. Money to be raised by a 1% tax on assets worth £10 million or more, 2% on £1 billion+ assets. This to raise £15bn a year, but only affect 1% of households. These funds would be for the NHS.

The Henley Private Migration Report points to a net loss of 9,500 wealthy individuals from Britain in 2024, over double the 4,200 who left in 2023. Between 2017 and 2023 around 16,500 millionaires migrated from Britain. In part a reaction to Brexit, a demonstration of the fluidity of capital assets, moving away from actual or perceived threats.

What price the Green Party pledge faced with a huge financial outflow. For an indication of market reaction and the political consequences, consider the ousting of Liz Truss, a Conservative prime minister. Proposals alone are enough to crash an economy if they seem likely to be enacted to the detriment of financial assets.

Such is democracy under capitalism.

The Green Party can relax, however, as they know they can promise anything they like as they won’t be anywhere close to acting on such promises.

D.A.

Time to Change

Capitalism was once the young blood,

Overturning thrones, dispossessing lords.

It manufactured this world that accords

With its own ways and means, where common good

Is held to be the untrammelled pursuit

Of private wealth, even if that should be

At the expense of public poverty,

With a reserved freedom to profit and pollute.

But now this history lesson’s been learned,

That which loosed bonds becomes a binding force,

While the class presently bound is now the source

Whereby a new, better way is discerned.

Progress must transcend anachronism,

It is time for change, for socialism.

D. A.

Promises! Promises!

Neither Utopia nor Shangri-La

Can appear in any manifesto,

Because their authors quite probably know

Of necessity politicians are

Constrained by capital’s imperative

To, unhindered, manufacture profit:

Should that consume the world, then so be it.

A government may continue to live

For however long as it doesn’t ignore

The market, for it’ll not be mistreated,

Or that government shall be unseated

No matter what the voters voted for.

Even promises of sincere intent

Can be frustrated by disinvestment.

D. A.

D Day – Four Score On

A turbulent sea and shell fire and fear,

Foundering vessels with quailing young men

Grim tides of war brought to the beach: and then,

These remaining mark the eightieth year,

Honouring those who had eighty years stolen

That day, so many liberated from life,

So few now, comrades who’re left with their grief,

For long gone mates lost among the fallen.

Much better there be barefoot children

Building sand castles along that beach

Pounded by army boots directed to reach

Concrete bunkers full of desperate men,

Just like the ones dying to get ashore,

Divided by flags they’d give their lives for.

D. A.

What Choice to Be Had?

Conservatives are the honest party

As it’s not their intention to deceive,

But make a virtue from what they believe:

Capitalism’s the best that can be.

Labour, meanwhile, has carefully nursed

A leftish image when it arranges

Sops and reforms, although little changes,

That can be quickly and easily reversed.

Neither will hinder private wealth taking,

While pursuing general prosperity

Via perpetual austerity

For all those who must work at wealth making.

Whichever party might suffer defeat,

The choice will be between con or de ceit.

D. A.

General Election

The prime minister’s been to the palace,

As the royal prerogative’s involved,

The monarch declared parliament dissolved.

And then there began the unseemly chase

For votes; promises made that can’t be kept

To enhance general prosperity,

While maintaining stringent austerity;

Just mark your cross and passively accept.

Even the best of intentions must fail,

Left, right or centre put on a good show,

But whoever wins most certainly knows

Capital’s priorities will prevail.

Then, when a new government’s been arranged,

Whether red, yellow or blue, nothing’s changed.

D. A.

Water’s Utility

‘Water, water, everywhere, nor any

Drop to drink.’ Rain falls freely to earth,

Yet water is not free; so what is it worth?

A fortune to a water company,

Feeling free to pollute rivers and lakes

With sewage in all its variety,

Product of our effluent society.

Consumers pay the bill, while capital takes

The dividends. So, what nature provides

Becomes a commodity by and by,

To profit those who’ll control the supply

As long as capitalism abides.

‘Nor any drop to drink’ safe to say

Unless the drinker can afford to pay.

D. A.

Free School Meals

Empty bellies leave young minds malnourished,

A famine of learning that’s all too rife,

Starving children of their chances for life,

Who might well, properly fed, have flourished.

Free school meals then? Except, nothing is free

For this world in which all necessities

Have a price, and hunger is a dis-ease

Caused not by a lack of food, but money.

Capital, driven by insatiable greed,

Will not, shall not finance gratuitous fare

If it can’t claw back the cost from elsewhere,

Driven to meet profit’s demands, not need.

For now, only air is an oddity,

Not made and sold as a commodity.

D. A.