In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk

  • I Came Running

    When Theresa May, the UK’s Conservative Prime Minister, called an election for June 2017, her manifesto included an opportunity to repeal New Labour’s ban on fox hunting. The Conservatives had expected to increase their majority, which would have eased May’s ability to push through Brexit. Instead they lost it.

     

    I came running. I’d heard

    them earlier of course

    the bugles, the hounds, the quads

    and all the tall king’s horses.

    But now, suddenly,

    here they were

    yards away

    in the public park where lovers meet

    and our children play.

    And I arrived at that precise moment

    everyone talks about

    when the fox stands

    at the last of itself

    its lust and pride all used up

    and now there is nothing

    but fangs to undergo.

    And the hounds crouch

    back on their haunches

    and just before they leap in

    for gut and muscle

    to rend and rip and nullify

    they cease for a moment

    their frenzy of sound.

    And a few riders, having

    just caught up, they

    also pause and you can see

    tongue slide along lip

    and eye glitter in the wet

    and silent ecstasy of this moment.

    And suddenly I knew that here at last

    we had come full

    circle and stopped

    and as a planet might stop

    but then perforce will roll

    backwards onto itself,

    our nation had taken

    back control.

                                         Rogan Wolf          

     

    (the picture of the fox above has been taken from the website of the League against Cruel Sports. See : https://www.league.org.uk/fox-hunting)

     

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  • Word across Distance

     

    The collage of photographs above records a small exhibition of bilingual poem-posters that has recently been showing in a popular public setting managed by Bristol University. The poems were selected from “Poems for the Wall,” a project I founded almost exactly twenty years ago, and still run. The exhibition went up under the stewardship of the university’s Bristol Poetry Institute.

    Half way up the collage, towards the left, you can see a background photograph of all the poems together displayed on the wall. Four of them are printed on paperboard at A3 size, the rest on card at A4 size.

    Look carefully at the group picture and you’ll see that every small poster has two passages of text on it, printed alongside and opposite each other. In each case, one passage of text is the original poem composed in a non-English language ; the other is its English translation.

    It’s as if there is a conversation going on in each poster. Or exploration.

    For information, there are ten different languages represented in the group    picture :  Arabic, Dutch, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Japanese, Latin, Mandarin, Punjabi, Tigrinyi.

    Five times that number are represented in the project’s collection as a whole, comprising over 200 poems. You can find all them on the project’s website https://poemsforthewall.org and can download them free of charge.

    I have been able to enlarge five of the languages for the collage above : Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and two ages of Mandarin. One of the Mandarin pair  – by Gu Cheng  – was written approximately a thousand years after the other – by Li Bai. And the poem by Li Bai was almost certainly painted, not written.

    And when Li Bai positioned his letters, he started at the top and from the right and his eye ran downwards and leftwards. By the time Gu Cheng was writing, a thousand years later, he saw his writing in the same way as the western – horizontally and from left to right.

    And for those Westerners who don’t know, please note that the Arabic and the Hebrew you can see in the picture above here are both written and read from the right.

    The poet David Hart once said of the “Poems for the wall” project : “we have the chance here to open people’s lives to each other.”

     

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  • Dust

    The poem I’m publishing here foresees the end of the world. The false god Me n’ Mine has too many worshippers to be withstood. Besides Greed, the angel which serves Me n’ Mine most faithfully is the Lie and it is the Lie by which the false god rules and will destroy us all.

     

    In the beginning was the Word.

    Conceived by light

    and the power of human brain

    it traced the flight of breath

    and through the soft and wondrous delicacy

    of throat and tongue and lip

    became sound and meaning.

    And the Word was with God

    and the Word was God

    and the same was in the beginning

    with God.

    But an instant after the Beginning,

    unseen by God,

    the Lie

    stole into the garden

    like a shadow

    the shadow of the Word

    and slid between the fact and the fear,

    between the wonder of I and all that’s outside of Me,

    and its tongue was forked and all a-flicker

    and its eyes were cold and alert.

    Nah then, the Lie whispered,

    What gives ‘ere ?

     

    And there were gods in the garden, many gods –

    the true, the One, the one true God –

    and the many that were false.

    Nah then, said the Lie.

    I need some living space.

    To whose temple shall I offer my support

    in return for my breakfast

    my “daily bread” ?

     

    And God the One, the only true,

    Creation itself, Alpha, Omega,

    the Creator of Matter, the Fact of Matter

    the Matter of Fact and Reality,

    made no answer to the Lie’s deliberations

    and merely wept.

     

    And all along the Lie knew

    its way to go and where to rest

    and slid by devious means

    to the gold-clad tower of a deadly

    god of human sacrifice

    called Me ‘n Mine.

    I shall place myself

    at your service, O mighty

    Me ‘n Mine and help you claim

    the garden for your purposes,

    your jealousies and terrors

    your hatreds and your pride.

    I shall help you in this great work

    of poison and pollution, ruin and degradation,

    in return for a daily spot of breakfast –

    and let me add that more than a spot –

    a “full English”  you might say –

    would encourage my loyalty still further

    to the point

    of not infrequent overtime.

     

    They sealed their pact, recognizing

    the blood-tie. And the Lie became an angel

    in the service of Me ‘n Mine, a foul demi-god

    with gold-lacquered wings and that familiar forked tongue,

    an angelised recruiting agent

    an evangelist , a soul-stealer, a maker of creatures,

    creatures in thrall to Me ‘n Mine

    creatures of the Lie.

     

    And following the customs of Middle Earth

    where Good meets Evil, light meets dark,

    they gave these captive creatures

    the name “orc”

    which, when registered

    and beamed onto a screen

    is always twinned with a virtual dot.

    Thus : Joe Bloggs.orc

    means we got ‘im

    we stole the soul of that Joe Bloggs

    and another one bites the dust.

     

    And our garden once so fruitful

    turns to wasteland ever more swiftly

    as another one bites the dust

    to the glory of Me ‘n Mine

    to the glory of the Lie

    and another one bites the dust…

    and another one bites the dust…

     

    So let us review

    a few of these dot orcs

    in their robot squadrons,

    these creatures of Me ‘n Mine.

    Let them engage in a short march-past

    eyes right and glassily alert,

    clutching to themselves

    at an angle of sameness that spans the world

    their dread weaponry of the Lie.

     

    And of course there’s Trump.orc

    Or Drumpf, or Tromb, or Dromb,

    or drum or tomb or bomb.orc

    dealer in dust, in money, in lies,

    who favours towers which flag his name

    and feudal walls of delusion and fear,

    walls that divide and also confuse

    fact with fantasy and truth with lie.

    Where there are tired, poor and huddled masses

    there we find Trump.orc,

    strutting and twittering, making hay

    and puerile scenes of fire and smoke.

    Not America great again.

    Each breath he breathes

    America falls further from esteem

    and becomes a fearsome joke.

     

    But let us look eastward now to find

    a lesser though similar joke.

    Please regard the Maybot.orc

    parading down the street

    weak and utterly unstable

    on a pretend chariot of painted gold

    drawn by three dementing daleks.

     

    And Brexit means Brexit

    and nothing has changed

    and red white and blue

    and stuff you, you and you.

     

    But in fact and truth, that chariot

    is a vast and noisome bubble of fart

    produced last year

    by half the UK population

    who felt let down and counted out

    following years of belittlement,

    “austerity,” unworthy leadership

    and then a foul feast of lies

    dished up by orcish fanatics trained in deceit

    and a venomous chorus of dot orc billionaires.

     

    It was a fart

    swiftly trapped by liars

    and forced into a cart-shape

    and then wrapped in a flag

    to make it look like a decision.

     

    And the EU was not what it meant.

    It was not the EU at all.

    The EU was not it at all.

     

    But Maybot.orc, seized that moment

    of national distress and manifest need

    and made it hers:

    “The People have spoken ” she lied

    in a hushed and reverential tone.

    But it wasn’t the People she revered.

    Maybot.orc is a pious devotee

    of dust and Me n’ Mine.

    “Listen to me,” she cried.

    “It is I, the Maybot, who speak.

    Here on this fart disguised as a chariot

    I have come into my own.

    And I shall bring global glory

    to my fraught, distraught and tiny island

    and I shall have control.

     

    And I shall spray that dark tower

    at the heart of Kensington

    in a golden dust of denial. And I

    shall bring back foxhunting,

    grammar schools, aircraft carriers,

    bows, arrows and the battle of Agincourt.

    I shall bring back everything

    and everything I restore

    I shall cover in a golden dust cloud

    of lie and denial. So let us now praise

    the Lie and reward all liars

    with tax relief and an OBE.

    For principle, competence and honour are dead.

    Me ‘n Mine is all that matters in the world.

    Play that again, Sam. Mine and me.”

     

    And in Maybot’s noisome train, we must pay

    a moment’s attention to BoJo.orc

    as he stumbles and fumbles along,

    our Bullington Braveheart of the lie.

    BoJo.orc makes jolly funny jokes

    in Latin and loves it when we look at him

    but if in some Etonian classroom

    he once was taught to tell the truth

    he forgot that lesson ages back.

    Bully bully bully, mutters Bojo.orc

    let Maybot just try to give me the sack.

     

    And look, there’s Gove.orc

    skipping about on the Maybot fart

    waging war on the “Blob”, our teachers,

    wielding his long knives, that clever man

    wearing the livery of the Lord of Murdor

    and those other billionaire barons

    who’ve fought these many years

    to make this country mean again,

    in thrall to Me n’Mine.

     

    Oh those billionaire barons, those global brothers in arms.

    They devote their lives to helping each other

    keep their fortress walls intact

    and a clean and peaceful community at bay.

    With their long knives out

    the barons range the public highway

    scattering gold dust, meat and wine

    on any procession around the world

    that marches for Me n’ Mine.

     

    In the beginning was the Word

    and the word was the silence of God

    and an outcast child

    asleep in a stable.

    And the end when it comes

    will be the triumph of the Lie

    that pours like dust

    from the jaws of Me’ n Mine.

    We shall end in flames

    in darkness and in disgrace

    not with a bang

    but a dust-filled whimper.

     

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Rogan Wolf, November 12th 2017

     

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  • Poet on the Cliff

    Let’s look again at St Aldhelm’s chapel, a small square Norman building on a  cliff-edge. It stands at the very tip of a promontory on the Dorset coast called –    a bit confusingly – St Alban’s Head.

    Image result for st aldhelm's chapel

    The chapel is small and dark and inside it is very damp. This is because the door into it is always open and of course the sea is close, down below. Also there is no electricity to the place, so never any artificial light or heat.

    I have given poetry readings in the chapel at various times in my life, to small gatherings of people sitting on the rather hard benches there. I can’t think who is the more eccentric – me for wanting to read in that place or them for being willing to join me there. But of course that’s not really true. It’s a wonderful wonderful place for words to be telling in. For words do tell in there. And of course one feels duty bound to use words that are worthy of the setting and somehow speak for it or in accord with it, or join what the place is already saying itself, just by standing there through the centuries. It actually feels like a responsibility and weighs on you a bit.

    I once carefully scattered some of my mother’s ashes on the grass outside the chapel and the wind took her up and sent her dancing out over the sea. I might ask if I can join her there sometime.

    I gave a reading in the chapel on the 14th of this month, during a still and beautiful Autumn afternoon. Just before the reading began, we saw a few swallows rushing about overhead, maybe the last of the year in this country. And there were still some bees about. I think in the Summer they nest inside the chapel walls. But during the afternoon I read, they were inside the chapel itself, on the wing, but interested only in the walls, nudging up against them as if trying to push them over. Their steady buzzing felt profoundly companionable.

    The reading began with poems which sought to explore exactly where we were, in that particular location at that particular time in 2017, quite close to the Christian festival of All Soul’s, quite close to the Brexit blockading of our cliffs. I felt a bit like a bee myself, nudging and bouncing off the various aspects and levels of our position. First, the interior of the chapel. Then further out into the Dorset landscape. A theme of the reading was stone and – as a climax – words, the false and the true. For poetry is just breath turned into words but the power of the word is without limit and in the beginning through to the end the words we speak reflect an elemental struggle between truth and lie.

    My friends Tom Burgess and John McClorinan also read that afternoon and Hannah McClorinan played the Sarabande from Bach’s cello suite number 5.

    Some of the poems I read in St Aldhelm’s chapel are shared with the “Poems for the Campaign” collection described in the previous post.

    I am going to take the liberty of quoting some feedback I received after the reading, almost less for the praise it included, which of course I find immensely gratifying, than for the quality and profundity of the feedback in its own right :

    “It was indeed a wonderful occasion and day. The poetry recital restored the chapel to its function – existence considered sub specie aeternitatis, the currents that run through life that need to be brought to the surface. It felt like a very authentic church service (not riven by doubt about ancient views of the world). I was very struck by your poetry’s reframing of life in larger temporal and spatial scales, exploring interdependencies but holding the human subject in view  – poetry recalling science but poetry nonetheless. I have often thought that poetry or poetics might be the future of (some) religion, because in fact it has always been central to religion (I think quite a lot about religion – I studied Theology and Religious Studies at Clare before medical training later).  It was also lovely to meet your friends and family  – a very special occasion…”

    The writer is pointing to a great chasm here, I feel. A great fissure running through our time, our societies, each one of us. Can poetry fill that howling fault-line ? Can poetry be a match for Trump, for Brexit, these various versions of human withdrawal into brutishness and delusion, dwarfed and dehumanised as we are by our towers and temples of glittering technology ? Actually, I fear not.

    Here are all the St Aldhelm’s poems, ordered as we performed them that lovely afternoon.

     

     

     

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  • Poet on the Team

    Earlier this year there was a General Election in the UK. Beforehand, Theresa May had insisted she wouldn’t call one, but apparently changed her mind whilst out walking in the hills. Perhaps she saw a fox and got over-excited. For, as we all know, the election didn’t go well for her. The fox escaped and she lost her majority.

    Since then, the Tory problem family has been tearing itself apart, even while engaging in disreputable ploys for hanging on to power, so that they can stagger balefully and without true mandate over the Brexit finishing line.

    In doing so they will ensure that this nation is torn apart  – from our bearings, our history, our health, our integrity, our standing, our true place in the world.

    And – further – from our future, our own young, who did not vote for this and whom Brexit is betraying.

    What a sickening, poisonous story. What an inheritance. The impact of this dysfunctional Tory family upon our islands and our continent has long been, and continues to be, astonishing.

    But for some people, the Summer election of 2017 went very well indeed. One such person was the MP for Bristol West, Thangam Debbonaire. She was already MP for that constituency, but in the course and as a result of the election, increased her majority by over 30% to more than 37,000. And that figure was just her majority.

    Good going and, had the national news about the Tories’ overall loss of majority been less dramatic, the events in Bristol West might have made the national headlines. As it was, even the Telegraph commented on it.

    But, outside Thangam’s campaign team, no one knows that throughout the campaign they had a secret weapon at their disposal. By agreement with Thangam, and for the duration of their arduous campaign, I had supplied a poem of mine every day to her and her team, as an email attachment. Pour encourager tous. Well. What else could account for their astounding success ?

    I can’t guarantee that all the members of the team read each daily poem as it arrived in their communal in-tray. And I wouldn’t and shouldn’t have expected that. But I do know that the poems were read.

    Here’s a comment from one of Thangam’s team, writing on behalf of the others, after the election had been won : “Dear Rogan, just a final word of thanks for your poems, which have perked us up in the occasional grey moments. Thank you!”

    And this came from Thangam herself, in an immediate response to one of the poems, half way through the campaign : “Thanks Rogan, I particularly loved this one!”

    The poem that struck her that busy and demanding day was an excerpt from a series called “Reflections on Stone.” Here it is :

     

    Consider the options : –

    strike down

    the tribal demon

    for at least a generation ;

    travel a few feet

    down the beach ;

    or settle a millimetre

    further into the sand.

     

    In other words, do something. Don’t just settle.

    After the election, I gathered all the poems into a brochure and delivered it to Thangam and her team as a single item. Perhaps inevitably, I called the brochure “Poems for the Campaign.”

    But I didn’t mean just that particular local campaign which has led to a slightly more difficult communal trip towards the cliff-edge and absurd irrelevance than Theresa May was expecting. I mean any campaign for and towards health and sanity and community and renewal.

    This larger Campaign has no end-date and will never not be difficult ; it needs a set of values to do with inclusiveness and empathy and the responsibilities of freedom, which are actually hard to keep clearly in sight and abide by and must be defended constantly ; it needs astonishing strategic and tactical ingenuity and originality, even genius ; and it needs great strength, guile and intelligent survival strategies. The poetry collection may take as long to complete as the campaign itself.

    But with Thangam’s permission, I am publishing the collection as it presently stands, initially by just formatting it in pdf and linking to it here

     

     

     

     

     

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  • Lying to the People is a Crime of High Treason

    All Westminster MP’s are required to swear to tell the truth. I have been told this on the good authority of my own MP. She told me that new MP’s must swear to abide by the seven Nolan principles. The sixth of these states that holders of public office should be truthful.

    But the Nolan principles are not enforceable, nor are they a legal requirement. Elected members of parliament who fail to honour the code they have sworn to uphold cannot be penalised and are often not even challenged. Thus, those who lie for their own or their party’s ends do not even have to account for their dishonesty to their peers ; and certainly they are not pursued as common felons by the nation’s police force.

    But why not ? The language we use to speak to one another is a currency upon whose integrity and viability we all rely for our individual and our community’s welfare, even survival. It is as crucial for the sustaining of our community as a sound blood circulation or untainted drinking water are for the sustaining of our bodies. It is at least as important and material a currency as the money we exchange in the market place.

    Yet we don’t treat those two equally essential social currencies with matching care. Quite the contrary. In the case of money, we know that if fraud or forgery go unchecked, so that the pound in our pocket or in our bank account becomes unsound and untrustworthy and hence worthless, our society will just break down. It will stop working. Therefore, people who engage in financial fraud or forgery are pursued as criminals and, if found guilty, sentenced under the law.

    But we surely also know that if we can’t trust the honesty of our chosen leaders’ words, if politics become “truth-free” and wholly fraudulent, then our politics will be nullified and our democracies will come unstuck – since the whole democratic package of parliament, debate and argument, election and referendum, and so on, is held together by and relies absolutely upon words, words we must be in a position to trust. Yet asked to consider how the holders of public office address and speak to us, we barely turn a hair at the lies or evasions we are offered, again and again. “Ah, they’re all the same,” we say. And just shrug. And carry on. And the lies carry on, as well, corrosively.

    In fact our politicians are not all the same. Most have integrity, though many just disappear behind their party’s line, which in the long term does great harm, in my view. And some are outright liars, seeking to profit from their dishonesty.

    Would we just shrug if our house were burgled ? In my opinion, holders of public office who defraud the public by lying to them, are committing a crime at least as serious and material as fraud or burglary. Yet the liars go free, however momentous or dreadful the consequences of their lies.

    Furthermore, journalists keep approaching the liars for their thoughts, inviting them again and again to pollute the air we breathe, for the liars’ own irresponsible and anti-social ends.

    Do journalists approach forgers and thieves for their responses to events ? Is there a daily queue of journalists outside our many jails, clamouring for interviews with the prisoners inside ? Obviously not. But why the difference ?

    I am going to develop my argument further along two fronts.

    The first one concerns codes of good practice.

    Many if not most activities or occupations or professions in our society have public codes of conduct, or definitions of standards by which to ensure and maintain good practice. It is a way of establishing and keeping public trust, as well as ensuring a sufficient level of professionalism both competent and honourable. And human nature being what it is, those codes are broken from time to time  and – in response – the perpetrators are penalised or sanctioned. For the codes have to be enforceable. They must have teeth.

    Thus, even PR companies have a code, and a body empowered to police it. The body in this case is called the Public Relations and Communications Association committee, the PRCA, and recently a UK PR firm called Bell Pottinger ran foul of it, to that firm’s significant cost. Here is a summary of the story, supplied by “The Guardian.”

    Perhaps the most famous code of conduct of all is the Hippocratic Oath, which all medical practitioners are required to swear and abide by. The code articulates a set of standards associated with good and ethical medical practice. Breaking it to any serious extent renders the doctor concerned liable to be struck off the medical register, after which it will surely be difficult for that person to find another job.

    But is there any prospect of a UK MP – or Minister, or assistant – being struck off for lying ? Any powers to penalise the Right Honourable Gentlemen and Right Honourable Ladies for proving themselves unworthy of those grand old titles, by lying ? It appears there are none. Not so long ago, Lord Sugar referred to the EU referendum and the behaviour of certain politicians during that time : Michael Gove and Boris Johnson should be in jail, he said. Under which law, Lord Sugar ? A few days later, James Chapman, former chief of staff to David Davis, tweeted much the same thing : “Let’s be honest, if we had an effective electoral law, leading Brexiteers would now be in jail.” If. But we don’t.

    If the People were lied to, then they had their capacity to make a proper decision stolen from them. Lied to in so many ways last Summer, the People could not “speak” in reply. It could only gag, splutter, throw up. Anyone, of whatever party, who tries to legitimize that disastrous incoherence by saying “the People have spoken” is an accessory to a lie.

    Here is a second prong of my argument.

    Over the centuries, democratic nations have come to the conclusion that national sovereignty must be placed in the People as a whole, not the Monarch, not a Tyrant. Thus can tyranny best be avoided and rights protected under the law. But for a Sovereign People to make real, meaningful and responsible decisions, it has to be properly informed. In the same way, a doctor’s patient is required to be properly informed before he or she makes a critical decision on which treatment to accept ; and a jury must be properly informed before deciding on someone’s guilt or innocence.

    That is why an accountable parliament must always be the place where the People’s decisions are made. Competent and worthy individuals, elected by and answerable to their constituents but also to their consciences, and properly equipped with knowledge and having enough time to scrutinize the executive’s intentions, must have the final responsibility for decisions made. For if a decision is not based on proper and thorough information, it is not a decision at all. It is not even a leap in the dark. It is a voluntary, irresponsible and infantile collapse into come-what-may.

    The UK’s 2016 referendum result was exactly that :  an ill-informed, a misinformed, voluntary, irresponsible and infantile collapse into come-what-may, following behaviour, on both sides of the referendum campaign, which did not qualify for the term democratic.

    For demagoguery and lies took over our streets in the Summer of 2016, unrestricted and unregulated, making nonsense of the task and of the subject, and disgracing this nation and its history. Such behaviour should have resulted in a nullifying of the result and a significant number of serious criminal charges. Those charged should have included a few delinquent billionaire press barons. For what crime ? For the capital crime of lying to the sovereign power.

    For it is through language that public servants communicate with, and account to, the People they serve. It is through language that the process of elections is conducted and – depending on how trustworthy the language used there  – is either meaningful and beneficial, or absurd and poisonous of effect.

    Holders of public office who lie to the People are therefore committing a crime worse than fraud or theft (though those as well). In a real sense, they are committing High Treason.

    Accordingly, I propose that a greatly extended and more detailed version of the Nolan Principles needs urgently to be formulated and made enforceable, to apply to all public servants and their advisors, with transgressors liable to rigorous punishment under the law. The credibility and authority of politicians, the survival of our democracy, the future of our nation, require us to take this step.

    I would suggest that such a code, once composed and agreed, should be passed into Statute by the House of Commons, so that transgressors should be seen and treated for what they are – as dangerous and disgraceful felons, subject to the law of the land. Yes, it will be difficult to compose and implement. But surely the genuinely true and worthy and right honourable politicians in the House would see this as being in their own urgent self-interest ?

    And if judges can enforce the law of perjury, cannot the first court of the land enforce a law that protects our nation from the mortal danger of the lie ?

    Only days ago, Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, has suggested the UK could still decide to reverse Brexit. The invitation is there and it is not yet impossible to accept it. Just in time, the tide may turn, common sense return, reality hit home, the time-servers, the fanatic idealogues and self-interested billionaires, be driven into retreat. In that case, there are likely to be more calls for a second referendum, to add to those recently delivered by Tony Blair and Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London.

    For the reasons set out above, I think a properly functioning Parliament is the correct and sovereign place for consideration of the complexities of this matter and for the taking of a final decision.

    But if recent precedent and the political situation direct us to another referendum, then the campaign conducted beforehand must not be allowed in any way to be a repeat of the dance of the billionaire hoodlums that took place in 2016. We need a proper sheriff on the streets for this High Noon. We need some effective law in town to counter the lie.

     

     

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  • The Tory Family Row

    The Tory ex-minister Nicky Morgan recently described the Tory party as being like her family. Presumably she meant that, for her, the party is more than just “work,” or even just “politics” : her fellow-Tories are people of her own kind and she feels at home among them and perhaps spends most of her time with them. They are people who share her belief-system, her life-style, her “faith”.

    But Morgan’s use of the family image reminds one that Europe and the idea of leaving it has been a Tory obsession and faultline and “family” argument for years. Ideologues on the right of her “family” have made it their life’s work to campaign against the EU to the extent that, a whole ten years ago, Prime Minister John Major was calling them “bastards” and still and long afterwards, in his early days as Tory Leader, David Cameron expressed a similar frustration with them, though in terms slightly more polite. He said that he wished the Tories would stop “banging on about Europe”. Then UKIP emerged and, for a short and inglorious while, banged on even more furiously, briefly panicking the Tory “family”.

    And in 2016 came our EU referendum, that stunningly irresponsible and incompetent Cameron family ploy, which blew up in his face and split a nation in two.

    Away staggered Cameron stage right and still the bastards are banging on – now wanting a “hard Brexit,” even a “no deal Brexit”.

    So what’s up with this problem family ? we might ask. For they have inflicted their divisions onto a whole nation, even a continent, encouraging loutishness all over the place. It is like the spreading of a plague. For everyone’s sake, even their own sakes, should we not be insisting that the UK Tory party head out of town as a matter of dire emergency for a long dose of family therapy, in strict isolation ?  Our nation cannot afford a moment more of their incompetent and dysfunctional acting out.

     

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  • I Send Greetings from this Place

    Image result for st aldhelm's chapel

     

    I send greetings from this place

    to my neighbours across the water

    I bid them welcome to my mind

    I bid them welcome to our future

     

    and I grieve that in the present

    some people on this small island

    have been bewildered and ill-led

    into thinking water can be wall

     

    and a little and invented “we”

    can be a separate, better home

    than true connection, I to thee,

    each frail on a cliff-edge, sharing the sea.

     

    Rogan Wolf

     

     

     

     

     

    Posted: