’”A rising tide lifts all boats” but others will run aground’
And if you have no boat, at all, eventually, you drown.
Conservatives: You down there: where’s your boat?
Libertarians: You’re gonna need a bigger boat. We have armbands to let.
Corbyn’s Labour: There will be only one boat.
Brexiteers: Come on in; the water’s lovely!
Hugh Muir on Capitalism: “a ‘better model’ is needed”. A better aphorism wouldn’t go amiss, either. And not the one about ladders.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Proper Nanny-posh
Fiat eccentric
Rudimentary Tory tosh
Clueless windsock
Neocon rising
Into popular despot
Of inadequate pricing
He’s the cloying shadow fog
Of the quid pro nada
MoggMentum ad portas
To his alma martyr
He’s a Brexit Pollyanna
Always ultra polite
Bangs the patriotic hammer
Of his god and his Right
Augmented by faith
In his Latinate gob
Puts vicarious blame
On a bigoted god
With a silk hogwash
And the charm of a cilice
See him handing out the crosses
For his god of decrease
He’s the Passion police
Non sequitur ad ignorantum
Honi soit qui you like
But don’t think public office
Is a suitable site
Your antiquated affectations
Are exceedingly trite
And your unicorn worldview
Is a plasticised blight
Your opinion of the People
Is pompous in its spite
And Jacob, your ad hominem
Of god is pure shite.
Mon Dieu! amirite?
Obviously, he can believe what he wants and his freedom of speech, I would not seek to take away. Nonetheless, I am horrified that he is so popular with voters and that his popularity within the Conservative Party could give him access to real power.
Here we go ’round the Burning Bush
Just one more push
Now shake your tush
Here we go ’round the Burning bush
Praying for an illusion
This is the way we keep the dosh
By corp’rate cosh
Woo hoo! Bish bosh!
This is the way we feed at the trough
Every day is our payday
This is the way we slave each day
Well, you, anyway
From cradle to grave
This is the model we have paved:
Delegating your serfdom
This is the way we spin our words
That’s right, you heard
Define ‘absurd’
This is the way we shepherd the herds:
Every act by our say so
This is the way we use our tools
To shape the rules
Ha ha! You fools!
This is the way we pull the wool
So close your eyes a bit tighter
This is the way we bake your heads:
He said/she said
Our daily bread
This is the way we mould your dread
All our facts are elastic
This is the way we iron our crimes:
We cross a line
Then redefine
This is the way we waste your time
So we will see you next Tuesday
[August 2014] Plus ça change…
Magic me a money tree
So I can eat its nimble fruit
A bonsai for my patio
Would be so cool and look so cute
I promise to be sensible
About the purposes it feeds
I won’t create an orchard
For a harvest of gratuities
I will not squander its supply
For quantitative daily ease
Nor let it grow unwieldy
Like a beanstalk or an eager weed
I’d spend it on posterity
For ethical prosperity
With vision, tangible and wise
I’d build a life that’s worth the price
Just send a little cutting
And I’ll nurture it with love
Let me feel the sunny uplands
Like the canopy above
I always believed that with great responsibility came humility. I am so naive. I thought that to serve in public office was both noble and an honour; that to be in the Government, bestowed with making laws and policies that determine the quality of life of the millions of one’s country’s people, was such an enormous privilege that one would be devoted to justifying it. I thought it required integrity and reasonable measures of wisdom and competence. Even more naively, I actually assumed that, simply by mere virtue of achieving and holding such a privileged position, on a personal level – the generous income, the security of an ample pension, the opportunity of network – it meant that they would have a persistent, collective sense of “there but for the grace of…” and act on it.
Generations of Revolution:
Stencilled shadows;
The traced punctuation of fealty to forgetting
And wistful recovery.
Ranting for melodrama;
Tinkering at the edge of increment
And, always, the bitten hand that feeds.
Brexit is all smitten
With the label ‘Global Britain’
Reminiscent of the time the Sun
Was always in position;
Gonna give EU a kicking
If it doesn’t get its way.
[Every self-entitled bulldog has its day]
Gonna threaten, preach and overreach,
Cajole and whine and then beseech,
As self-inflicted victims,
Sudden keen on Foreign Aid.
Gonna get an awful shocking
At the mocking they engage,
When the only offers knocking
Are from profiteers and souvenir
Collectors making hay.
Having doubled down on doublespeak,
Perfidious Blighty’s gonna reap
Some karma as alarming sway
of asymmetric power licks its lusty lips
And squeezes dry
A desperate pipsqueak’s isolated
Pips.
Now they’ve spoiled the share
They want us to share the spoiled
Reality bites
As beacons of banality
Draw vacuous navigation,
Fascism, like vampires,
Requires invitation.
juxtaposed 