comrade osborne and the little red book

The chancellor’s autumn statement
and McDonnell’s quoting Mao!
It’s a joke. A jest. A jolly jape
to illustrate just how
George is selling off our assets
to global profiteers
and the Chinese state is buying up
the things which we hold dear
while the media says... nothing
a conspiracy of silence
on illiterate economics
and structural state violence
against the vulnerable and needy
the sick, the weak, the poor
while under Georgie-boy’s agenda
those who have will get still more.

So, a quote from Mao. It’s theatre.
Or is it thoughtcrime? Watch the spin
from a free press owned by powerful men
who say the sky is falling in
and the world is surely ending
and the only thing it took
was to point at a pantomime villain
and quote from Chairman Mao’s little red book.
Because the Mail has wet its knickers
The Sun’s gone apoplectic
they see the thin end of a fat red wedge
of Marxist dialectic.
There’s communists in Westminster!
The left are going loony!
Corbyn causes cancer!
He’s a Trotskyist! A Moonie!
He hates you and your children!
He’s dangerous, and weird!
If Labour get their hands on power
they’ll make you all grow beards
and call your children Karl and Castro,
Leon, Che, and Vladimir,
while your hope dies in collectives
and your lives are lived in fear!

Hysteria and hyperbole
employed with one sole aim
to solidify the status quo
fix the rules, and rig the game
while the ground is sold beneath our feet
our future swept away
and airstrip one is put in hock
while capital makes hay.
And when your children ask who did this?
and when, and why, and how
remember the chancellor’s autumn statement
and McDonnell, quoting Mao.