Of Our Time
Welcome to Britain four years after twenty-twenty
We’ve lived through a pandemic now state coffers state empty
The cost of living’s gone up in a time of austerity
Our Prime Minister wouldn’t resign he was so full of temerity
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Everybody’s noticed ten pounds won’t go far
It will get you even less if you have to fill up your car
The prices in all supermarkets have gone up across the board
As if the big four have all signed an accord
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I’m not the only one who’s noticed inflation’s sky high
When quizzed about it the Government gives conflation a try
Blaming COVID alone for price rises galore
What about Brexit and an impending Cold War?
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We can all try to stay alert and keep up with the news
But increasingly it seems its designed to confuse
We all know the papers have political bias
With little say on policies, these things were sent to try us
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Our press is supposed to hold our government to account
But with politicians and pundits as editors recount
Stories designed to distract and offer some spin
Column inches of political scandal end up in the bin
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In modern times of social media reportage around the clock
With proliferations of articles based on videos on TikTok
We are living our lives online, working from our living room
We have no commute, and all meetings on Zoom
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In the 1980’s Margaret Thatcher said ‘There’s no such thing as society’
She taxed the poor with political impropriety
Forty years on from her coalmines, we’ve had another fuel crisis
We’ve had war after war in the Gulf, now still fighting ISIS
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Our musicians and bands are amongst our martyrs
Earning next to nothing from Internet streaming; the Web’s had their guts for garters
It used to be album sales made profits that were handsome
Now hundreds stream for pennies, the music business is held to ransom
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Next in the cult of celebrity is our exercising people power
If our spokespeople say something wrong cancel culture is how it all turns sour
In present times it’s important to end on a positive note
Remember don’t just vote with your feet but get on your feet and vote
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I welcome this discussion and have hopes of the contribution. We would do well to focus on how things are being discussed and responded to in Italy, France, Germany. What moves are successful? Clearly alliances have promise and we need to make them work. We need more internationalism to overcome the isolationism in these rightwing movements
@Cathie Lloyd, I think isolationism is not the most accurate description of the far right in Europe. For example, in the past they usually criticised the EU, but with recent elections, now are more likely to advocate its usefulness. A lot of them are Zionists. Very few appear to be autarks, preaching national self-sufficiency. I don’t know enough about their foreign policy stances, but many seem happy to take funding from USAmerican Christian white supremacists, and their stances on NATO membership seem variable. In broad terms, the far right parties have to have an enemy to mobilise its base (and if they don’t have an enemy they’ll invent one), and if you’re in Eastern Europe the enemy might be Russia, in Western Europe it might be Islam, and alliances of convenience (rather than principle) are adopted to position against the currently chosen enemy.
Some have aggressively and successfully championed gay rights, like the far right in the Netherlands. This helps them position themselves against allegedly socially-conservative immigrants who would allegedly take away those rights if they managed to ‘replace’ the existing population. In other countries, far right links with the Catholic Church or other conservative traditional organisations might be more common, as in Poland.
My impression is that they will back capitalist globalisation (the position of many of their financial backers) but spin their positions to seem to back repatriating jobs from abroad. They may favour a monopolar geopolitics with weakened international institutions and treaties (like the USA does), but still buy cheap goods from China. Their political ideologies don’t have to be consistent or really make much sense to be electorally effective. But supporting the division of the world into ethnostates, mandating the creation of self-pleasing national myths instead of a shared global history, feeding the worst impulses and valuing the worst characteristics of their supporters (delusional hatred, greed, lust, ego-dominance, ignorance, superstition, racism, misogyny) the militaristic far right is setting out its ambitions for forever wars, while the planet burns.
I was thinking of the U.K. tendency to isolationism compounded by lack of language skills. It is useful to think about their connections
@Cathie Lloyd, as in the sense of not wanting to watch movies with sub-titles? Even if that was true, there are a lot of USAmerican movies to choose from, and a lot of pop culture is either in English (certain Swedish bands, say) or translated/dubbed (Japanese Manga and Korean TV shows, perhaps).
The UK is not the UK-in-isolation in the sense that it remains an imperial metropole. The British Empire still rules over militarised base-supporting territories in Cyprus and Gibraltar, a host of Caribbean tax havens, territories in the Indian Ocean, a slice of Antarctica, South Atlantic islands with all the marine and airspace extensions etc. If British imperialists wish to copy the Devil’s allegedly greatest trick (to persuade people he didn’t exist), we don’t have to fall for it. The influence of the Crown and British neocolonialism extends still further.
Yet in foreign policy the British Empire is very much the subordinate of the USAmerican Empire. David Cameron had to quickly scuttle off to get instructions from USA Secretary of State Antony Blinken before taking up the Foreign Secretary role.
https://www.declassifieduk.org/us-air-force-deployment-in-britain-is-third-largest-in-world/
The British royal family is an oddly foreign bunch, as if we were still ruled by vestiges of William the Conqueror’s Normans (whose language apparently still persists in our quasi-constitutional flummery).
We are surviving in a soup of so much rubbish…suffocating so many folks ability to pursue decent human lives…this election is just adding insult to injury
I dont think France is faring well ..reading the same restrictive ideaolagy being inflicted from equally dubious sources.
Independence is of value if it truly is independent of the overruling structures that seem to be here and overseas..and.what a travesty of democracy in usa…… complete confusion reigns
And still i put my cross in postal ballot box..hoping for something miraculous….believing that out of chaos something better must be reborn.joining up with Europe will only work if it too goes through sone kind of recreation otherwise its the devil or the deep blue sea scenario….as far i can see in my very humble opinion
Even if one agrees with the sentiments expressed here,
Its failings of rhyme and metre mean, I fear,
That this is not poetry, but doggerel,
And more fittingly should have been written on bog-roll.
I respectfully disagree with these disrespectful comments. I thought the author captured the frustration many people feel with the current state of politics. But then, it’s always easier to criticise than create…