Staggers Political Verse
 

This is Staggers Comp 4172 by 7 April. 14 lines of political verse. They stipulate it should be verse from a particular political party.

Well, this might do from me.

Blue Anthem

Join the Tories’ march to glory,
Bold and blue and tried and true!
Slash taxation, save the Nation,
You and you and you and you!
See our hit-list scare them shitless:
Social scroungers, Europhiles,
Foreign muggers, lefty buggers,
Re-offending juveniles!
Marxist error flees in terror;
Middle England shows her teeth;
Ring the bells in Tunbridge Wells!
Go light the lamps on Bexleyheath!
Save our sainted grammar schools!
Bring back hanging! Maggie rules!

I think I'll re-use my political poem from an old Speccie comp.

That's what I did. Don't forget to drop two lines. The Staggers has a fourteen line maximum.

John, old friend, if I didn't know you were serious, I'd say it's a delicious piece of satire. :p

Janice, nobody ever knows whether I'm serious and perhaps I never am. Anyway, it's only as satire that it could possibly win a Staggers Competition. They believe, along with all lefty persons, that conservatives are DEEPLY immoral.

Nobody can be truly serious about British politics anyway. Nobody should be. We have a leader of the Labour Party who thinks when he addresses a ragbag of the usual suspects out for a Saturday March, that he is Emmeline Pankhurst and Martin Luther King rolled into one. He isn't.

And of course big Boris the Turk (bless him) is the Mayor of London.

Whatever it is, John, it's a fine verse. You're sure to win.

Yes, lively, John. Seems the idea is to provide something for the various equivalents of the 'Penguin Book of Socialist verse', which I'd never heard of before.


The Tory tree just blocks the light,
The Labour rose bears thorns;
The Bird of Liberty took fright
When Clegg donned tail and horns.

The others? Daft, or Europhobe,
Parochial, unclean!
Support our poor polluted globe
By up and voting Green!

Edited by the late Alan Bold, a convivial Scots poet of impressive avoirdupois who ran for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry and garnered nul point. Not much of a book, alas.

I would like to suggest 'The Penguin Book of Reactionary Verse', which would include 'Beowulf', Ulysses' Speech in Troilus and Cressida, Coriolanus' Curse of the Roman People, Prospero's speech against Caliban, Pope's 'Essay on Man', a bunch of later Wordsworth Sonnets, The Satirical Songs of Canning and Frere, Tennyson's 'Idylls of the King', W.S. Gilbert's 'The Gondoliers', large and noisome chunks of Pound's Cantos, particularly the stuff on Usury, Vachel Lindsay's 'Congo', 'Sweeney Agonistes' ... Any takers?

Golly, John, you've scared them all off.

In the interests of colour-blindness . . .

The scarlet standard's fading fast
It seems a relic of the past:
The people's cause has grown so old
We've wrung the juice from every fold.

The rank and file have learnt to think
They like their leaders nice and pink
As modern times mean lots of brass
And workers turning middle-class.

So raise on high the stylised rose
Beneath its shade we'll blush and pose;
New Labour having made its bow
Red flags are just for beaches now.

Apathy rules, OK?
 

Or then again . . .

As they attempt to puncture my apathy, like
archers confronting St Sebastian’s torso,
The two main parties leave my gorge rising
like taxes or prices, only more so.
Whatever the waters they prefer to muddy
One side remains grisly, the other bloody.
So shall I turn tactical or flibbertigibbety
And award my vote to the Bird of Liberty?
Alas, since this now flies in a pale-blue
coalition, a state of affairs I deem toxic,
even if not constitutionally illicit,
Rather than present my face in a polling
station, I shall turn round and present
something else and they can all kiss it.

OOH, to think that I just wrote about 20 lines of heroic couplets satirizing the American religious right. Unfortunately, I have no idea how I could adapt it for the UK.

I don't see why you would have to adapt it, Gail. We know about the American religious right, the more so since all those beheadings. Send it in (or sixteen lines of it) and see.

Thanks, John, I'll try it.
Since you mentioned Ulysses' speech in Troilus and Cressida...this is
a big favorite with my husband, who used to give it to his history students to illustrate points about the Great Chain of Being. He still believes that "when degree is shaked/The enterprise is sick."

Here's an old, obscure party (USA) with a cutting edge agenda:

The Know Nothing Party (1840-1860)

The Know Nothings—they had the knack.
Their goal was simple: send 'em all back!
Start with the priest, that foe of thrift.
(We’ll nail him when he gets stuck in the lift)
The Irish, the Greeks, the Dagos and Yids.
Easy: we just poison their kids.
The school lunch is where we’ll do the deed.
Those foreign chappies have to feed.
The Frenchies, too, they have to go.
Those kraut lovers with their guts of dough.
Norwegians and legions of Chinamen, too.
Too bad we can't put them all in a stew.
One by one we’ll purge our tree
Till there’s nobody left but you and me.

Tea Party Song
 

My husband says I run the risk of making people think I am advocating the Tea Party's ideas with this, so I hasten to say that I am NOT.


Tea party song

The way I love this country is way inside my gut,
you wouldn’t know the feeling, you all just talk a lot.
It used to be the rights of folks like us were understood,
the government was righteous, and life was hard but good.

No liberals to tell them to share their hard earned take
to pay for others’ weakness, they kept what they could make.
You only know from books, but it always is you lot
who tell us to pay taxes on everything we’ve got.

The infrastructure’s crumbling, so build it up again,
it can’t be that expensive if they could build it then.
This is the land of plenty, I’ve always heard them say
the government has money, we shouldn’t have to pay.

Cut budgets, cut support for care and cut the arts right out.
Eradicating socialism is what we’re about.

(And I repeat: This voices the views of the conservative Tea Party. NOT MY VIEWS. I'm for everything the Tea Party is against.)

Hi Birthe,
I'm not sure if you're familiar with this publication, but

Eradicating socialism is what we’re about

won't cut it with Staggers, unless you're being ironic - they are socialists!

Oh, Jayne,

My husband was right - you think the song voices my views even though I wrote above it that they are NOT.
I am a socialist if I am anything. The views in the song are those of the opposition, the odious US Tea Party. It is their song, I am quoting them. I thought it would be clear as clear that I was making the views as awful and as despicable as I could. How can you think I would think this? It is a Tea Party song. I mean to show their silly opinions on country and government - and taxes.

I think it's obvious that you are writing satirically. But socialists are notoriously cloth-eared. It is a problem when writing political stuff for the Staggers. Only the broadest brush will do - see my entry. But give it a whirl. There is a rumour the present NS Editor actually has a sense of humour, which would be a notable first.

Mind you, a party which elects the ridiculous Miliband Junior as leader MUST have a sense of humour, you would have thought.

don't see why you would have to adapt it, Gail. We know about the American religious right, the more so since all those beheadings. Send it in (or sixteen lines of it) and see.

John, think you had a typo here. The maximum is fourteen lines, no?

Yes it is. Sorry. I confused it with the Speccie.

John,
I am very relieved that you see the satire. The idea of cutting out all the social programs that help education, health care, the arts is horrific. Socialism is a naughty word in the US, and so is Taxation, and Liberal is a slur.