London’s Burning
One night in Tottenham we crossed a border
Into a land of riot and disorder,
And it’s our land. We law-abiding Brits
Are now the authors of a home-grown blitz.
We steal, we smash, we torch that bus,
No one’s to blame for it but us;
Our sense of who we are is shot to bits,
And wild-eyed tribesmen in Waziristan
Speak sadly of the savage Englishman.
From the dry tinder of a single shooting
Stores are burning, predators are looting;
Across the violent, vicious state we’re in
We see the rule of law is wafer-thin:
Our hellfire burns without a fire wall.
The anarchy of mobs and riot-makers
Throws this our capital into free fall;
A nation of shop-keepers? Not at all –
A nation of shop-breakers.
Riotous Illiteracy
In the rioting that spread across London in August 2011 only the bookshops were left untouched.
They looted clothes and trainers, mobile phones,
All goods of glitz and value and utility,
But never even paused at Waterstones,
Seeing its books as objects of futility:
Shakespeare’s undrinkable,
Kipling’s unthinkable,
Milton’s unwearable
Wordsworth’s unbearable
(This one at least we’d make allowance for,
The Sage of Lakeland being such a bore).
And as for our inflammatory writers,
Trotsky, Karl Marx and Chomsky – all in vain.
Not even they attracted London’s rioters,
Being judged not worth a broken window pane.
So here’s the Law of Lawlessness immutable:
Books are declared redundant and unsuitable,
Their words unread, their worth unsung,
Unwanted and unlootable,
By these our feckless and illiterate young.
Murdochracy
The operations of the Digger
Were such that, as his power grew bigger,
The moral jeopardy was graver
For those who sought his Sun-lit favour:
To their advantage or to his? Go figure.
Lachlan, Elisabeth and James,
These were the competing names
Of the next generation
Of Murdochisation,
And useful to know:
But again, Cui bono?
And those who were willing
To pocket his shilling
Had a name for his fee,
Which they called the Rupee.
The Lesson
Iraq, Afghanistan, now Libya too,
We learned one lesson and we learned it well:
Going to war’s the easy thing to do,
But getting out of it is hard as hell.
False Prophet
We followed him, as the half-blinded must;
He was our light – and what the prophet saith,
With eyes ablaze, we tend to take on trust.
We were beguiled. His truths were but a wraith,
His myths of mass destruction turned to dust.
Impenitent, he cut a fateful swathe
From peace to war and then from boom to bust;
And told us falsehoods, always in good faith.
He had this self-belief, and never hid it,
That what he did was right because he did it.
He went for it, pursued the chosen course
And never showed a flicker of remorse.
But in the end the fever in those eyes
Showed something else – and that way madness lies.
The Chilcot Committee
Three mandarins and two professors
Sit around a table:
They are the Iraq War assessors,
So far as they are able.
Let only their j’accuse impress us.
It was fought on a fable.
Principal Witness
‘Please...