[John Whitworth]

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!

[Orwn Acra]

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

[John Whitworth]

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

[Janice D. Soderling]

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

[John Whitworth]

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.

[Janice D. Soderling]

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

[Jerome Betts]

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!

[John Whitworth]

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?

[Jerome Betts]

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.

[Jerome Betts]

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.