Happy local council polling day everybody!
Sinister the puppets
as they creep across the land,
sinister the purpose
as they smile and shake your hand,
sinister the secrecy,
sinister the lies,
sinister the race
and sinister it’s prize,
sinister all they represent
despite their claims it’s You,
sinister their interest
in what the voters do.
Don’t believe the media
and don’t believe the spin,
sinister the use of words
designed to pull you in.
Sinister the funding,
the hotel and private beach,
what fate awaits the hospital
the money didn’t reach?
Sinister the power game
giving industry the itch,
they’re holding us to ransom
unless, of course, you’re rich.
Yes, sinister the puppets
standing in a row
and sinister the puppeteer
controlling the whole show.
I wrote that poem during the local elections back in 2003. I was saving it for the next General Election but a certain someone seems rather hesitant to have one of those right now so here it is today instead. Back in 2003 we were all a bit worried / flabbergasted about the direction New Labour was headed in and were equally perturbed that the weak left would fall to the hard right and the BNP was going to be ushered in as a result. This they did, much to the apparent embarrasment of the voters involved, who promptly voted them back out again the year after. Six years on and nothing much has changed, apart from the size of the Labour party. I’m no expert but I reckon you’ll have a tough time running a country if your Party has less than two people left in it. Interestingly, if you swap the word ‘sinister’ for the word ’embarrasing’, the poem reads exactly the same. So as you toddle down to the polling station today, remember above all else to smile and to try and have fun as you attempt to shape an England in which number 10 Downing Street suffers less evictions in a week than the Big Brother house manages to all Summer.
On a more serious note, today is the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, in which an estimated 2000+ people were killed by the Chinese authorities as they cleared the square of protesting students. Give thanks that we live in a democracy that allows us to take the piss out of it without fear of being run over by a tank. Not everybody has it this good.
I am saddened to say that I did not vote yesterday. This makes me feel terrible, but only for those who struggled in the suffrage movement, who fought to achieve many things, the most famous being to give women the right to vote. That’s the only reason why it saddens me, particularly when I think of the high profile activity of Emily Davison who died under the King’s Horse during the Derby.
But the current British Government, all sides, is a shambles. And until they sort themselves out and put some kind of written constitution in place to protect the people they are supposed to be representing, us, then I will not bother to turn out, because it does not mean anything and will not change anything.
Change is possibly coming, albeit very slowly and a little too late, but only from the activities of the media, in mind particularly the Telegraph’s digging around in MPs expenses. It should not be the media who decides a Government’s fate, it should be the people although I am not sure there is anyone outspoken enough to put their head above the parapet apart from my Dad!