Apathy in the UK

What’s so bloody marvellous about “democracy”?

Just because we don’t all drop off joblessly

with leprosy and dropsy, we think it spotlessly

grand and lofty like some pompous opera, see,

but poverty still hovers over Britain ominously,

we wander disoccidented, our hopes all lost at sea.

Is Tory policy what the Scots want to see?

Does a crossed box in ten million obviously

make you free, or is this mediocrity

of a media-sovereignty a plump hypocrisy?

Our leaders bleed us, feed us the noxious innocuously,

so what’s so bloody marvellous about plutocracy?

 

Apathy in the UK

is voting for those who say

“Vote for us in clued-up millions!

We’ll really act on your opinions!”

 

Apathy in the UK!

Roses with no bouquet.

Now voting for the fake and gimmicky

is the height of political activity.

 

Left Right Left Right Left Right Left Right

the Apathetic Army chants, marching in a slouch,

labelling me lazy, squeezing from their clefts trite

words of spending, taxing, as I, slumped on my couch,

scribble “The only good liberal is a dead liberal,

and his name’s John Stuart Mill, so there!

A vote for anyone is a vote for frilly drapes

and slit-throated vagrants, that’s why I don’t care!”

Left Right Protect Corporatism Left Right

and central governments and their ordinary slaves

toe the straight tapering line bereft of light

to see or read or let ideas out of the caves

at the end of history, where meaning is minimal,

our old party wrapped around Tony Blair

like a wet pair of jeans shrunk out of its shape

to fit its turncoat master. That’s why we don’t care.

 

Atrophy in the UK!

A sniffle underneath a duvet

that votes and sparks no conflagration

of our history-dead nation.

 

Atrophy in the UK!

Let Whitehall burn! And then, touché!

We don’t want to participate

in your single-party state.