Billy Fullerton, leader of the Glasgow Billy Boys in the 1920s and member of the British Fascists
You people of the Shankill Road, what’s the matter with you? Number 425 Shankill Road, do you know who lives there? Pope’s men, that’s who. Forte’s ice cream shop, Italian papists on the Shankill Road. How about 56 Aden Street? For 97 years a Protestant lived in that house and now there’s a papisher in it. Crimea Street, number 38. Some 25 years that house has been up—24 years a Protestant lived there, but there’s a papisher there now. – Ian Paisley, June 17, 1959, quoted in Paisley by Ed Moloney and Andy Pollock (Poolbeg Press 1986)
It’s the logic of the Shankill Road
Spreading out across the UK.
Flags, fake tans, ’roid rage and
Race hate. Burn out the new Taigs.
Bow down to the Big House.
Be proud, be Loyal.
And a man who talks like Mosley but looks like a rogue-trading Kermit (if the frog was a Home Counties alkie pissed on the Friday night train from Waterloo to Guildford, wolfing and grinding down packets of Polos to disguise the Doom Bar and whisky chaser breath, sick stains on the shirt and it looks like he’s pissed his Harvie and Hudson kecks) says:
Terrorists, rapists, and criminals
are getting four-star treatment
in our country at your expense.
And you know your life ain’t four-star.
Not even a two.
Easy enough to work it out.
If class is a language we no longer speak
Then anger will find another voice.
Running up flags to say
We’re still here.
We who fought your wars
And died in your mines.
But the flag
Is
A
NOOSE
The red is the blood
Of Kevin Gately.
Blair Peach.
Dalian Atkinson.
Drips from truncheons
At Orgreave and Maltby.
Congeals round the bodies
Of Mark Duggan
Azelle Rodney
Kirk Davies
James Ashley
The white
Blinds you
To facts
And binds you
To those who
Pimp you
Screw you
Rob you
Mock you
And cheer you on
From the sidelines,
In their Cordings coats,
And coach you to be
21st century Billy Boys
Waiting on their call.
In a bathroom
In Epping, West Drayton,
Canary Wharf, Waterlooville,
Nuneaton, Hoylake, Stanwell
A man cuts a picture
Of an Afghan refugee
From a page in The Sun
And uses toothpaste
To fix it to his mirror.
Staring at the picture
And shouting
House Brits, not illegals
He punches himself repeatedly
In the head until
He becomes unconscious.
On GB News a failed
Showbiz reporter
Tells us that
This far right thing
Is just a way to deride patriots.
The noose tightens.
