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16.4.13

Thatcher Free Zone



THATCHER- FREE ZONE

Can you hear me Mrs Thatcher,
will you listen to my words?
Cos if you don't go pretty soon
 it's gonna get much worse.

The city streets they're burning,
the youth ain't got no work,
your plastic bullet policies-
you know they just don't work!

And in your nuclear paradise
time doesn't fly, it dies-
I see it in the poverty
and, in the people's eyes.

Well they murdered Prosser
in Winson Green
He let out a few yells-
the shouts of the cops and
the screams of a man must have 
rung round those prison cells.

How can you love justice
if you are so unmoved
at the rights of an ordinary man
being so flagrantly abused.

So I'm lookin' for a Thatcher-free,
thatcher-free zone,
a thatcher-free,
thatcher-free zone.

The old folks they're freezin'
after all that they've seen
while bankers drive around in 
chauffered limousines

So I'm lookin' for a Thatcher-free,
thatcher-free zone,
a thatcher-free,
thatcher-free zone.


RIP MARGARET THATCHER 1927-20013



8.4.13

Margaret Thatcher dies aged 87

Well it will set the chattering classes off as we are regaled with the various paeons to the New World she ushered in.  However my own feelings about Thatcher are somewhat different-I consider her vile government and her pernicious impact to be one of the great disasters for British and European society in the twentieth century.  But I also consider her to have been a lame duck and incompetent politician saved by a momentous concatenation of events mostly reliant on two factors provided by two different very stupid men, both of whom suffered from tremendous hubris allied to an astonishing lack of strategic insight.  The first was Arthur Scargill, an egotistical communist with an agenda so hopelessly out of place that to see him lead the brave miners who so faithfully followed this strutting martinet was heartbreaking.  The other was the gold braided thug General Galtieri who invaded the Malvinas Islands as a means of stoking up his political capital at home which was ebbing as a result of his almost complete political ineptitude.
The result was that the lame duck was transformed into 'The Iron Lady', and a fantastical Catherine The Great type character was manufactured by the Media and the myth was born of the Lady who was not for turning.
The asset stripping of the country's natural wealth and housing stock from public ownership into private hands at knock down prices remains one of the great grand thefts of history.
The death of manufacturing to be replaced with parasitic financial service industries remains a huge social and national disaster whose grim effects continue.
The narrative that transfigured the great socialist objective of equality into a lie about laziness, and the 'ill man of Europe' continues as a myth underpinning greed, selfishness and the chronic cult of the individual at the expense of all else.
The legacy of Thatcher is the mentality of greed and selfish individualism over collective responsibility.
To call it Thatcherism lends it an intellectual coherence it never actually had as a set of ideas based on gut feelings much like a political system founded on the letters page of The Daily Mail.
Yet there is one thing that can be said for Thatcher as she performed in the House surrounded by her yes men-there was no doubt who was wearing the trousers!

7.4.13

Easter Sunday 2002 - Pontins

EASTER SUNDAY 2002 Pontins



The past? It's a frozen, foreign land.
A labyrinth of tourmaline-a dream
of black horses flowing out to sea.

Breaking the chains of memory
that tie us to the static of the land

The past? It is a strange and twisted tongue.
I cannot bend these chords to utter it!
Cannot find the rhythm in the line.

While fools found gold in crystal streams,
I rooted, ankle deep in mud, braying:
Who are you? Why are you here?

The past? That coldly-calculated joke.
Those idiots fell about the place side-splitted,
While I looked for help, for meaning, for a sign.

It was not that I didn’t understand.
It was that I would never understand.
Because... I seemed to be a stranger there.

The past? It is shapeless, blind, mute.
No road maps or strangers passing with news.
The very idea seems cruel!

And is it not cruel, this vile thing
set loose around the houses? This abusive
heart-skewering fear.

Nightsounds are lonely in the vale.
Smoke-rings of obliterated joy.
Oh these losings of familiar things!

These losings of familiar things.
These tales of the three rings.

And the first...shall be:

Of Despair.

Next:

Of Spirit and Healing.

Then:

Of Transformation!