Lord Pishy-Pants and the Rainy Ditch

LORD PISHY-PANTS AND THE RAINY DITCH: From The Province Of The Cat by George Gunn

George Foulkes, or rather Baron Foulkes of Cumnock to give him his Sunday title, or his new moniker of Lord Pishy-Pants after some unflattering pictures of the Baron circulated on social media, was a Labour MP for South Ayrshire from 1979 to 2005. His parliamentary career, to be kind, was marked by ups and downs. Appointed to the opposition frontbench in 1983, Foulkes served as a shadow Europe minister, shadow Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs minister and shadow Defence minister respectively. He was forced to resign from the latter role in 1993, after striking a police officer and being convicted of being drunk and disorderly. He rejoined the frontbench in 1994 as a shadow Overseas Aid minister. He was a loyal supporter of Tony Blair and was a vocal advocate of the Iraq War, of mandatory identity cards and who during the 2009 expenses controversy, accused the media presenters who questioned MPs’ expenses of “undermining democracy”. 

Lord Pishy-Pants took his seat in the House of Lords in 2005 and there he remains, proclaiming, as is his want, on this and that but most recently on the “outrageous and irresponsible” idea that a party that has independence for Scotland as its founding principle and that when it is democratically elected, unlike Lord Pishy-Pants, and in government should have the audacity to appoint a Minister for Independence and use Scottish civil servants, whose job it is to work for whatever administration is in power, to draft strategy documents and independence legislation which was on its election manifesto and for which the majority of Scots voted in favour of. He has also told the BBC recently that his beloved Union is not one of equals. Well, at least he got that one right. 

From a human point of view there is something tragic about Lord Pishy-Pants, which as a playwright and a human, both draws me in and repels me, yet it is a gift of a name for a character in a play, and in many ways George Foulkes is a character in a play – his own – and my sympathy goes out to anyone who sees everything they have understood politically and constitutionally going over a cliff. 

He is a unsavoury mixture of King Lear, minus the revelation and the rhetoric, and of the Fool, minus the wit and the wisdom. But what he does share with these characters is chilling brew of dangerous tragedy. We know he – Lord Pishy-Pants – is doomed but who or what is he going to destroy as he tumbles inevitably, irretrievably, into the rainy ditch of oblivion? Looking on as he falls is another character, Mistero Buffo, the King Of Comedy, who closely resembles the Minister of State for Scotland, currently played by a certain Alister Jack, who is reciting the Apocryphal Gospels with his feet on fire.

As Lucretius put it in the 1st century BC, and as William Shakespeare stole for King Lear, “Nothing comes from nothing; not even the gods can deny it.” (De rerum natura). 

As much as we laugh at the blatherings of Lord Pishy-Pants and at the burning feet denials of reality droned out by Alister Jack we should not forget what they represent: these are the clowns given to us by the worst Westminster government since 1707. One would hope that the next one will be an improvement but everything points to a tribute band rather than any new music, and this at a time when the forests of the world are, like Alister Jack’s feet, on fire. “Sir” Keir Starmer and the majority of Westminster and a scattering of politicians in the Scottish government, who should know better, share an addiction to the rainy ditch as they renege on all green initiatives, climate net-zero pledges and environmental schemes to protect the seas off our coasts because they think they are vote losers. In Scotland, I suspect, they are vote winners. The solution to the political difficulties both Rishi Sunak and “Sir” Keir Starmer have with the Scottish people could be solved if, like the Secretary of the Writers Union who, after the riots in East Germany in 1953, declared that the people had forfeited the confidence of the government and could win it back only by redoubled efforts. Bertolt Brecht in his poem, “The Solution”, commented,

“Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?”

On Monday 31st July Rishi Sunak went a part way to that “solution” when, whilst in Aberdeen – flown in on his private jet –  he announced the granting of over 100 licences to drill for oil in the North Sea and the establishing of a carbon capture and store facility at St Fergus. 

In Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr Strangelove the deranged American Major T. J. “King” Kong straddles the hydrogen bomb like a horse as it is released from the B-52 bomber and shouts “Yee Haw!” and waves his cowboy hat as he plummets to his doom. A 100 new oilfield licences, developing the Campbell and Rosebank oil fields – who have a combined output of 1,100 million barrels of oil – and in using tax payers money to entice the oil companies to do so, the Westminster government have in Grant Shapps, Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, a Major T. J. “King” Kong equivalent. Add to this the less than critical attitude of the Tory government to Centrica making a profit increase of 900% in the last six months and what you come up with is a government that has blatantly demonstrated that it represents the interests of Big Oil and energy companies but not the interests of the people. Across the aisle of the House of Commons sits the dead soul attitude epitomised by “Sir” Keir Starmer who believes that the only way to feed poor hungry bairns is to grow the economy oblivious, or deliberately blind, to the fact that economic growth is what is burning the forests. The readers of Bella Caledonia can join the dots and piece together the component issues of this tragic narrative for themselves. Mike Small in the Sunday National (30.7.23) and on this site has done just that (How to Survive). 

On the political left our forums are full of concern and alarm about the climate crisis and the inequality between the rich and poor which is its running mate, but somehow few can find the appropriate language to articulate what they mean; they cannot put the right words in the correct and necessary order. In a certain bar in Thurso you will meet a depressingly large amount of individuals who can. There are many bar-room fascists who drink there and who spout their gruesome poetry which carries their vile opinions on such things as immigration, social security scroungers, the SNP – all of whom should be shot, jailed or done away with –  and how, in their own clueless way, they have found their appropriate ugly language. Their bleak lexicon serves their needs. All language is a code and the bar-room fascists of Thurso have perfected theirs. The old language of concern and compassion of the romantic age has failed us. It has become like an eolith or a dawn stone – is it organic, a geo-fact or is it a relic from an age long, long ago and is in fact a fossil? The planet is being cruelly ruined by airlines and oil companies and at the same moment the language used to describe this disaster is being deliberately dissipated. I am sure Lord Pishy-Pants approves.

So the question arises – how can we form a new language that serves our progressive ends as well as the one the bar-room fascists have? As a poet my tool is language. The common idea is that poetry, by its very nature, is atemporal – that is timeless and unaffected by anything. This is a bourgeois misconception. Poetry is the result of observation which moves on, through language, to revelation. From what I can see, that simple transition has been lost. Folk song, for example, uses simple images and phrases to say something complicated. Most modern poets use complicated means in order, in the end, to say nothing at all. 

Poetry can be about “feelings”, but the poet must ask, 

“What are yur feelings worth when the forests are burning? What have you to say about Lord Pishy-Pants dragging us all into the rainy ditch? The fact is everything changes but are you going to make a fresh start with your final breath?”

The modern world has been sleeping through the years of gentle sunshine. Now it is waking up to the nightmare of its own greed. We need a new language that can articulate that and can put the right words in the correct and necessary order. What is happening to our world has not been seen before by any human. We cannot rely on the past. This is a new play with characters no-one has ever heard from before. 

The same week that Lord Pishy-Pants was spouting his dangerous anti-democratic, anti-Scottish parliament, anti-SNP nonsense, 2000 independence supporters marched through Ayr. There is a delicious irony in that. But it points to the fact that activism is the only answer and the new language we must discover to articulate that will and must cut through the hopelessness and despair. We in Scotland must understand that we are time and cannot escape its dominion and that this is our time and that must we must push on and push on and achieve our independence. It is the only way we can escape Lord Pishy-Pants and the rainy ditch. 

There is a poem by the Polish poet Maria Wisława Szymborska (1923 -2012) about a famous painting by Vermeer,

“So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum
in painted quiet and concentration
keeps pouring milk day after day
from the pitcher to the bowl
the World hasn’t earned
the world’s end.”

I so deeply hope so.

©George Gunn 2023