Greg Freeman reviews the launch of Release the Sausages! Bob Beagrie’s contribution to the launch is here
I’ve come across some slim volumes of poetry in my time, but this one is ridiculous. Release the Sausages! Poems for Keir Starmer boasts 20-odd pages, but apart from a preface from Andy Croft, all of the pages are blank. There are no poems at all in this slim volume.
‘Ridiculous’ is the point, of course. Release the Sausages! – a reference to a speech in which the Labour prime minister apparently said “sausages” when he meant to say “hostages” – is intended, as Croft said at its launch at Newcastle’s Lit & Phil, to be a joke, but at the same time “not just a joke … it’s a blank book, but not a silent book.”
It’s fair to say that Andy Croft, pictured below, has not taken a shine to Keir Starmer. In his preface he says: “The only poetry he is known to have quoted in public is a line from a Philip Larkin poem in praise of the late Queen. But perhaps his strange, strangulated, Beckett-Like speeches represent a kind of autocue robot-poetry for the AI age.”
At Wednesday’s launch Croft listed the failures of the Starmer government which has seen Labour plunge in the opinion polls, including maintenance of the two-child benefit cap, cuts to winter fuel allowance, and threats to disability benefits, as well as overseas aid cuts, arms sales to Israel, attacks on the right to protest, and appeasing US president Donald Trump.
But the odd thing was, the discussion that followed hardly mentioned Starmer, or the embryo breakaway socialist party that some political commentators suggest might help put Reform UK’s leader Nigel Farage in Downing Street. Instead the talk was about how to combat the populism of Reform UK, and Donald Trump’s US Maga movement, as well as the problem of satirising such political phenonema, or “how to ridicule the already ridiculous.” As Andy Croft put it: “Why is it so hard to land a killer blow on Trump?”
Teesside poet Bob Beagrie spoke of “entrenched deprivation” and “dysfunctional generations” in Middlesbrough, which saw anti-immigrant riots last summer in the wake of the Southport murders. (Then came what I saw as a Life of Brian moment, as in “What has the Starmer government ever done for us?”, when Bob said that funds released by the government after the riots had helped community groups to combat racism in the area).
There were poems at the launch, if not in the book. North-east poet Tom Kelly read one that looked back to the days of British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, while Jo Colley’s poem was about her dismay when the controversial Ben Houchen, now a peer, was re-elected mayor of Tees Valley. Andy Croft, publisher of the radical Smokestack Press for 20 years, read one of a number of poems he has dedicated to the communist Randall Swingler, who fought for the British army in Italy in the second world war. It includes this arresting line: “Something of the panto stage about the neo-fascist reptile smile.”
As the meeting drew to a close, the talk returned to Keir Starmer, dismissed by Croft for a cultural life that amounted to “Arsenal football club and Taylor Swift”. He pointed out that a few years ago music fans were singing “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” at Glastonbury, while this year the mood was “Fuck Keir Starmer”. I’m no Arsenal supporter, but maybe it’s worth recording, as a nerdish footnote at least, that its all-embracing celebrity fanbase also includes Michael Rosen, who was much praised at the launch meeting, and Jeremy Corbyn.
To be rigorously fair to Starmer, he has also quoted Auden as well as Larkin, according to Write Out Loud’s files! And, er, did you know his father was a toolmaker? It’s also true that the political left shares its antipathy to the prime minister with the Daily Mail, which seems to carry an anti-Starmer headline on its front page almost every day. Surely this frenzied rightwing rag has nothing to fear from him? Maybe we all despise the Labour leader.
The cover caricature of this thin volume, which could become a collector’s item, is by cartoonist Martin Rowson, and it is published by Culture Matters. It can be yours for a fiver.
