Re-post of 2025 version with slight edits.

And did Old England once, play by the rules,

That nation of shopkeepers, honest folk,

Who shunned smooth-talking charlatans and fools?

Once, solidarity broke tyrants’ yolk,

When Yeomens’ sabres slashed at Peterloo,

When Murder wore the Mask of Anarchy,

When on Cable Street, at th...

Read and leave comments (0)

The 1st stanza asks a question to which the answer is, of course, “No”. John Milton wrote Areopagitica, an argument against censorship.

Sadly, in the Britain of 2025, poets, artists, journalists, religious leaders and The Man on the Clapham Omnibus now face routine harrassment by the UK Government and the police, enduring arrest and imprisonment without charge or trial: and for what? for oppos...

Read and leave comments (4)

N.B. I suppose I should make allowances for the Tommy Ten Names of this world, and admit that in the white heat of fascistic fervour, it is possible to confuse hamas with hummus…and gooodness knows what horrors might be inflicted by a beardy, muesli- eating sandal-wearing, Guardian-reading pacifist waving a bread stick around!

The Arabic يُكافِح means to struggle, and حُمُّص means hummus - not ...

Read and leave comments (1)

On Cable Street in ‘thirty-six

they said ¡No Pasarán! keeping Fascists at bay

with chamber-pots pouring, with fists kicks and bricks.

But on that hypocrites’s watch, in ‘twenty-three,

they said “¡Pasarán! it’s the Fascists field day”,

Spanish Nazis and Blackshirt admirers roamed free

on Preston’s streets, decency slayed;  

our ex-home secretary now protests for genocide,

...

Read and leave comments (1)