Poem – and sculpture carved from Ye Old Oak ham – by Martin Rowson
If…
If you could keep your head when all about you
Were telling you your brain had caught on fire;
If you trusted yourself when we all doubt you,
Based on evidence that you’re a liar;
If you could say, when you stood for election.
That you’d do this or that, however crass,
While simultaneously, upon reflection,
Readying yourself for your volte face…
If you could say, straight-faced, you thought Fraternity
Would guide your every step, yet think it’s fine
To deny your party’s own paternity
And run away from every picket line;
If you could blithely organise a witch hunt
On anyone if this would guarantee
You consequently greased up to some rich cunt
And kept on spreading lies though all can see…
If you beheld a whole electoral system
That’s so unfit it’s worse than a disease
But say (though never quite getting to list them)
“Fix this? It’s not in my priorities”;
If you could see your country being broken;
Trashed by a blustering grifting fascist schmuck
But say “Let’s be like him!” but as a token
And end up with a classic clusterfuck;
If you could dream (you do that when you’re sleeping?);
If you could think (so quiet it seems you can’t);
If you could make a stand (but then start creeping
Off to the right like some invasive plant);
If you could see the poorest people queuing
For food banks or a place where they’ll keep warm
And think that this endorsed you then pursuing
Yet more Public Sector so-called “Reforms”…
If you could use a play book that you reckoned
Worked, though it’s three decades out of date;
If you could see the lure of power beckon
And yet won’t see the failing British State
Is so beyond repair that this whole nation
Is doomed – and let me now be quite explicit –
Then your placebos for resuscitation
Mean, when it collapses, you’re complicit…
And when confronted with collapsing Tories
Who’d fall to dust if all you do is breathe
Instead of seeking out paths to new glories
You said “tough shit” and gave us Rachel Reeves;
And even if, in mitigation fleeting,
Musk hated you, counting his first trillion,
It was still you gave office to Wes Streeting,
His face as shiny as a full Brazilian.
If you could make the right to protest criminal
With valedictions forbidding the mourning
Of murdered kids, the message ain’t subliminal,
But loud and clear; that you valued fawning
To all the world’s worst monsters and their lies,
Demanding we squint through a broken prism
Denying what we see before our eyes
And if we won’t, you called it terrorism.
If you can’t even hide what’s your worst defect,
That you just want to keep us in our places
Like some monstrous overgrown school prefect,
Stamping a polished shoe on human faces
While silencing all those dissenting voices
And always kicking down onto the weak
When you said that you must make tough choices…
No wonder everything’s now seems so bleak.
You never paused to stop the world from burning
Or fixed the problems markets cannot solve,
Just dicked around with all of your u-turning
Until you couldn’t stop yourself revolve
In circles that kept growing ever tighter
Unable to accept what came to pass
When you promised not to be shite, but got shiter
And then you got your head stuck up your arse.
If you, in short, had not been oh so wooden,
More woodily than forests full of trees,
More woodenly than puppets, then you should in
All honesty have thought of ways to please
This yearning for some hope, so strong you taste it
So when the last election had been won
A chance came, but instead you chose to waste it,
And that is why you’re History, old son!
