Extreme Right or Wrong

They gathered with weighty stones in ham fists,

With petrol bitter all along sour tongues,

With words made incendiary by deep wrongs,

And eyes blindfolded with flags that insist

Upon such myopic obedience

To the visceral, that’s so black and white

Consideration for colour is sleight

At best, when outrage remains too intense.

Meanwhile the vision of those leading the blind

Along their dead-end path is all too clear,

They have power in sight, the power of fear,

Preaching the past as the future’s declined.

First there’s anger, but that moment will pass

Until the next night of breaking glass.

D. A.

Austerity Circles

The last time a party fell from office,

It found itself very quickly being blamed,

As the new government loudly declaimed

Details of the national debt and the price

Of a necessary austerity;

So obvious, everyone must surely see

How the previous crew incompetently

Managed to crash the economy.

Now though, with new hands on the fiscal reins,

The Chancellor sombrely explains

A policy of tightened purse strings, pain

That might look like austerity again.

Only, it’s not, in any shape or sense,

Rather, it is the return of prudence.

D. A.

Political Power Grows…?

Demagogue exposed on the podium,

Madding throng milling…then pop-pop-pops,

Sirens and screams as the demagogue drops.

Some shooter has measured his odium

In bullets, calculating salvation

Is just one shot away; he can decide

The future. Only, the one who has died

Never intended to lead the nation.

Missiles into a children’s cancer ward,

Munitions are indiscriminate tools

When employed to dismantle homes and schools:

And what has offensive violence secured?

The pyric victory of vanity,

Immiseration of humanity.

D. A.  

Abstention

Ballot boxes are emptied, all votes reckoned:

The voters who truly merit mention

Is the largest group, who chose abstention.

They realised more of the same beckoned

No matter which party claimed victory.

The almost landslide was surely absurd,

An overwhelming triumph of a third

Of the vote, which passes for democracy.

Front benches in the Commons rearranged,

While members of losing parties bickered,

Financial markets’ index barely flickered;

All that campaigning, and little has changed,

Apart from the name on the PM’s door.

No wonder so many don’t vote anymore.

D. A.

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.