Poets

 

                                                                                                     Maple Dewleaf

When I was at college at sixteen

My favourite poet was Dryden

‘MacFlecknoe’ was rude

Johnny wasn’t a prude

Like that ‘Paradise Lost’ bloke, the blind one.

At eighteen I bought lots of records

Bob Dylan was my superhero

‘Hard Rain’ was a bastard

and that’s why it lasted

Those Faber fucks couldn’t come near-o.

Back then all the libraries had books in

Not playgrounds and tables for coffee

I found Allen and Jack

On a shelf at the back

And the last flakes of normal fell off me.

My reading, though, took me down alleys

That some of you good folk have questioned.

I liked Ezra Pound

Though his views were unsound

If not crazy (and that’s why the Section).

When the internet came I met writers

Who were working all over the planet

Wild Bill, Church and Speer

Weber, Baatz and Vermeer

(Yes, I threw in a painter to scan it.)

Their stuff told me how to dump caution

And be me with invention and guts

Once I knew about them

I wrote gem after gem

And our brittle Brit bull drove me nuts

Then I found myself back in a classroom

Learning writing to stay off the dole.

The professor was keen

That he ought to be seen

As eccentric, and acted the role.

His own poems were snoringly average

He never took risks and it showed

He was all surfaces

Like the middle class is

You were writing to lighten his load.

So you couldn’t be heavy or complex

Or he’d put you down there in the room

Then he’d give you a C

While your friend got a B

For a thing about dogs and balloons.

Round the corner from my house a bloke lives

He’s a poet, though he’d never say

He performs what he writes

On his Drum & Bass nights

And they rhyme, and they sound like today.

Snow and Bad Wind at the Guildhall: Bedroom Tax Demo, Yesterday.

“No attempt at ethical or social seduction can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party . . . So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin" - Aneurin Bevan.

The Bedroom Tax demonstration on the steps of the Guildhall in Northampton was like a Fellini-esque parade of political has-beens and hopefuls, main-chancers, radicals, honest testifiers and spectator freaks. I came away from it feeling naked and exposed because I wasn't any of those things; and more convinced than I'd been before I attended that we didn't have a hope in hell of opposing this tax or anything else, not in Northampton anyway.

Norman Adams, local organiser, local legend, was there. Paul Crofts was there too. In the Eighties Paul was the head of the Wellingborough Communists and an acquaintance of my mother's. I went to a party at the multi-cultural centre in town with Mum and the Communists once to celebrate the anniversary of the French Revolution. Won a Charles Aznavour album and a bottle of wine in a raffle and gave the Aznavour to a woman sitting in front of me; she thought I was very generous.

In addition to those guys I saw Dave Green, who chaired a union meeting I attended to listen to Dawn Primarolo's boy talk about setting up community groups affiliated to the union. Norman got the devil in him that night and slammed the guy about his mother's associations with Tony Blair. That got under his hundred and fifty quid suit.

At the demo there was Tony Clarke also, setting up behind a big Green Party banner with other local members, and people from the Socialist Workers, and at least one Labour councillor I identified, who I overheard saying, "If any member of the Liberal Democrats turns up for this today they have no shame, no shame." Sally Keeble, former Labour MP for Northampton, booted out by the electorate and now, inexplicably, selected to run again in 2015, was down on the pavement with a few young activists. I'd never seen her in the flesh before and I was surprised how short she was.

Norman told me he hadn't intended for the demo to turn into a party political affair. "It's about right and wrong, not party politics," he said. The others had blown that noble idea out of the water. It seemed like they saw it as a great chance to pick up a few stray votes and get their picture in the Chron. The political equivalent of going to the right nightclubs when you want to be famous.

But there was a lot of impassioned, if generally vague, talk about unity from the six or seven speechmakers who followed Norman, all of them  talking through a megaphone as the snow fell on our heads and the steady urban hum of cars and shoppers carried on around us. I realised when I came away, though, that nobody seemed to have agreed anything.

There had been talk, at the start, about taking names, direct action to stop bailiffs from evicting people who couldn't pay the tax, but there didn't seem to have been any specific agreement about how these things, as necessary as they are, would be organised. Maybe it's because almost everybody there knew each other already and the communication network is already in place. I hope so. But what about the folks who'd just come along, if there were any?

It didn't look like there were lots of newcomers, to be fair. Actually, the speechifiers and the photographers probably outnumbered those who'd just come along to shout and clap and show their dissatisfaction with the Borough Council. And sadly, that's usually the way. Most people only get mad enough to turn out in the cold if the policy being protested against affects them. Look at how "political" people were when the poll tax was foisted on the country. Where had most of them been in the preceding ten years?

Norman Adams really cares. That guy would lay down his life for something he believed in. I think Tony Clarke cares too. He will take his conviction back into the Guildhall and make a profound nuisance of himself, regardless of the consequences. But what will Labour do, held back by the lillywhite leadership of Ed Milliband? They were there yesterday, making fine speeches, but they can't really be counted on to oppose the tax in any meaningful way.

Will Milliband want his MPs linking arms with Socialist Workers or Occupiers  across the doorways of council houses to prevent meathead bailiffs from crossing them and dragging out the blind, the sick, the frail, the disabled, the scared, the poor? Do people attracted to the Labour Party these days even have the balls to put their bodies on the line? And, which is possibly more to the point, do I?

I want to think I do, but sometimes I suspect I'm all mouth. A political gobshite. A laptop Lenin. Do I have the guts actually to take a risk? I've thought about it, and I really don't know. When I saw the riot police coming at the student demo I went so quickly in the opposite direction any photograph taken would have shown just a blur. And I'm supposed to be one of the caring ones.

There are times - when the machinery of the State becomes truly wicked, as it is today - that peaceful civil disobedience is the only effective, honest way to do right. Everything else is just bad wind wafting around the ears of the dying. An exercise of conscience for the bathroom mirror.

History will judge, I suppose, whether we did any good by airing our principles like bedding on the line. In the meantime the evictions will begin next week.

You Keep Your Killers & Your Sterilisers Of Women, I'm Off

The fliers for the Chinese art exhibition are appearing all around Northampton University this morning. I saw one as soon as I walked in to start doing some research for the fourth chapter of my dissertation.

Well, fine. We all go to Hell our own way and they have made their choice. Collaboration with the bloody occupier of Tibet, whose murderous behaviour, and whose attempted erasure of Tibetan culture and religion, runs so far back in recent history it even predates the birth of this cranky grey-haired old blogger.

I would post stats around the building about the number of people who've died under Chinese occupation but the last time I did that someone ripped them down. They have shown clearly whose side they're on.

So I have made a decision, albeit a rather neutered one. I'm going to the toilet, putting my bag over my shoulder and I'm going home; and I'm not coming back while the exhibition runs, which is roughly for the rest of my time here.

I only have a week and a half of classes left anyway, so it's not such a big deal. I'll just worker harder at home. And if I can hold my nose tightly enough I will return, like a thief in the night, to do my presentation next week and sit my exams.

 But I refuse to be in this building, using their resources, when the hierarchy of the university is working hand-in-glove with the representatives of a government that kills, maims and sterilises to further its imperialist programme.

These Walls Run With The Blood Of Tibet (2)

Reproduction of my post at the Facebook page of the local newspaper, the Chronicle and Echo, shared here just in case they remove it. There goes the degree.

The exhibition at Northampton University this March and April of artworks by the Naxi people of China will undoubtedly be fascinating, but it raises ethical problems about engagement with countries whose human rights record has been condemned persisten...tly and comprehensively by international monitors. This is especially so in the case of the present exhibition because representatives of the Chi......nese government have been invited to attend. More than a hundred people have self-immolated in Tibet in recent years to protest the Chinese occupation of their country, in addition to the hundreds of thousands who have perished in uprisings in the six decades since China's invasion. Reports of forced sterilisation of Tibetan women also persist. It is true that His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government-in-Exile pursue a policy of constructive engagement with China, desiring only autonomy under Chinese rule, and consequently they probably wouldn't have a problem with the exhibition; but they are by no means reflective of the entire body of public opinion among the Tibetan people. The Tibetan Youth Congress and National Congress both want nothing less than full independence for their country, and many campaign groups call for a complete boycott of Chinese goods, businesses and cultural exchange. Whether this is or isn't reasonable depends on what a famous British politician once called your "moral compass" but I believe it's something that should be widely known at the very least. At the moment we only hear the voices of the coloniser and not the colonised. Perhaps the university, which has an exceptional postcolonial module for English students, will host an exhibition of Tibetan art or a human rights conference in the near future to redress the balance somewhat for this long-suffering, gentle people.

These Walls Run With The Blood Of Tibet

I just had an email from The University of Northampton:


C H I N A ’ S
F O R G O T T E N
K I N G D O M


The University of Northampton, School of The Arts are proud to be showcasing traditional and contemporary artworks of the Naxi, ethnic minority people of China.

This exhibition focuses on the visual identity of the Naxi ethnic minority people from Yunnan province in China. Through traditional processes; carving, painting and drawing we share an understanding of the historical value of promoting and preserving the Naxi culture with its unique pictograph based scripts.

The School of The Arts is working in conjunction with the Communication University of China and the Lijiang Government to raise awareness of this unique culture.  You may already have seen the coverage of this project on the ITV news, and the level of interest has resulted in the creation of a professional documentary covering the experiences of a team of staff and student from Northampton who visited Lijiang October 2012. 

We are now honoured to welcome as our guests the Naxi artists whose work we are hosting, together with representatives from the City of Lijiang, guests from the Chinese embassy, and representatives of the Chinese and UK media.

Northampton University really does like its pals in the merciless Chinese Communist dictatorship, doesn't it? My exasperated reply was:

Dear --------,

I hope while we are entertaining guests from the Chinese Embassy someone from the University of Northampton mentions China's appalling human rights record and raises at least a polite objection about its brutal sixty-year occupation of Tibet, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, the forced sterilisation of Tibetan women, the plunder of Tibet's natural resources and the attempted erasure of the Tibetan language and religion. These are matters of fact rather than opinion and I would find it extremely troubling if a university which instructs against the evils of colonialism and the oppression of women chose to ignore them.

Regards,

Bruce Hodder
BA English 3rd Year.

When I think about the naked tango Northampton has been doing with China since I got here (and probably long before), I feel like throwing my postcolonial dissertation in the river at the bottom of my road. Because the actions of the university grading my work render them completely unqualified to have an opinion on it.

Frantz Fanon would be turning in his grave.

Collaboration Cyber-Nation

Facebook continues to censor images of self-immolations in Tibet on the frankly ludicrous grounds that they are an incitement to self-harm. No, they are the only form of protest available to a gentle, peace-loving people who have lived under brutal Chinese occupation for sixty years and whom Western politicians, businesses, academic institutions and ordinary citizens have callously abandoned. Get real, Facebook, and stop doing the work of the murdering Chinese Government for them.

Polymorphously Perverse: Tangling with Dr. Freud

I'm currently working on an essay about psychoanalysis and lesbianism for the degree. And obviously, when you deal with psychoanalysis, you have to deal with Freud. That well-known genius, failed doctor, misogynist, cocaine addict, cigar smoker and/ or sex pervert (choose your myth according to your preference).

I described him on Facebook as resembling a blindfolded man with a bow and arrow. "With one shot he hits the bullseye," I wrote, "and with the next shot he kills your neighbour's dog."

There is a surprisingly wide range of views about his work in literary circles, thanks, it seems, to the development of his theories by French obscurantist Jacques Lacan. And some of it, to be fair, makes sense. There is still the thorny problem, however, of the other bits.

What Freud was concerned with was children’s responses to their discovery of physical differences between the sexes. Briefly, he argues that a boy, seeing that girls lack a penis, thinks they have been castrated and fears that this will happen to him as punishment for desiring his mother and his rivalry with his father. This leads him to resolve his oedipal complex (his desire for his mother and hatred of his father) by giving up his desire for his mother. A girl on the other hand, seeing the penis, is overcome with envy, feels she is castrated, blames her mother for this condition and therefore turns away from her mother towards her father - Stevi Jackson.

That isn't how it was at all, not for me anyway. I wasn't remotely convinced the first naked woman I saw had been castrated. I was smarter than that even before I began to talk. What I recall was an interest from a very early age in the mysteries of what the girl or woman concealed. The space between the the legs of the female was something compelling and interesting because I didn't know what was there.

I was never afraid of being castrated either. How could somebody who has never had any experience of violence conceive of the forced removal of his genitals?

It's just nonsense. Complete and utter. I don't know how anybody could ever have been dumb enough to believe it. But hey, what do I know? I'm just an invisible, penniless blogger whose work will be forgotten by the few people who were ever aware of it. Freud changed the world.

Hiding the Bodies: Facebook Plays Footsie with China

Sorry to harp on about this Tibetan business. I know most of you are busy frying other fish and there's nothing more boring than someone else's politics. It's just that to me this isn't politics at all. This is about humanity, suffering humanity. People are burning themselves to death on a weekly basis in Tibet because they reject military occupation by an economic superpower we in the West routinely trade with. To me it just doesn't seem right, and when something doesn't seem right I was brought up to think that it's my responsibility, as much as anyone's, to fix it.

Something else about the occupation isn't right. It's Facebook's censorship of aspects of the campaign against the Chinese presence. Dossier Tibet, the Facebook sister page of the website of the same name (http://www.dossiertibet.it ) has been locked by FB, which means that the account holder can't access it, and photographs of self-immolations that it posted have been removed. On what grounds could they do such a thing in the supposedly democratic world of the internet? (Of course, we know it's not that anymore. Hasn't been for a long time.)

We can only presume it was because of the graphic nature of the images. Anyone stumbling across them might find the sight of a burning body upsetting, even offensive. Yes, me too. But it's more offensive, much more offensive, that this boy or that old man had to set fire to himself because a foreign army is occupying his country, sterilising his women, destroying his language and religion, arresting and torturing dissenters, turning neighbour against neighbour. And I would go so far as to say that it's even more offensive than all of that to see the United Kingdom and the U.S.A., both cradles of freedom and democracy, trading so scurrilously with the nation guilty of all these horrendous crimes.

We citizens of the windy, self-righteous West need to know what's happening out there. The immoral things being done by our leaders in the name of traditions and principles that demand for them to do the very opposite.

It is an insult to the monks and lay people who have sacrificed their lives for Tibetan freedom to conceal the horror of their last moments from those whose conscience it was intended to arouse.


If you agree with this, why not drop an email Lord Allan of Hallam, who is the Facebook Director of Policy in Europe? He can be located at: allanr@parliament.uk

Tibet: Rangzen Or The Middle Way

 For many years I have said that only Tibetan independence can serve as a safeguard for the preservation of our heritage, culture and national identity. Talk of “autonomy” masks a sad defeatism and an acceptance of the inevitability of China swallowing our country; it is unworthy of the descendants of the great Emperors (tsenpo) who made Tibet a powerful and enlightened state. I call on all Tibetans to join us and our brothers and sisters in Tibet, in the pure and sacred struggle to free our country -

Thubten Jigme Norbu / Taktser Tulku
Former Abbot, Kumbum Monastery
Professor Emeritus, Indiana University, USA
23 November 2001

The annual raising of the Tibetan flag over the Guildhall in Northampton is due to take place in March. Every year, in a ceremony organised by local people and attended by the Mayor, speeches are made about the continuing horror unfolding in Tibet; songs are sung, and then the Tibetan flag is raised outside the nineteenth century Gothic-style building. The local paper takes pictures. The people in attendance wave miniature Tibetan flags.

It's a nice ceremony, and you feel good attending it - especially because you know you wouldn't be able to do the same thing in Chinese-occupied Tibet. The question is, does it help? or is it just, as Bob Dylan once said about protest music, a personal (and rather self-righteous) act of disassociation?

I went last year. You can probably read about it in the Suffolk Punch archives, if you have nothing better to do. Then, fired up by the spectacle of the Tibetan flag flapping high up in the wind over a busy street as it should do in Tibet, I formed a Tibet group on Facebook, which most of the people who came to the Guildhall joined.

Unfortunately, joining a Facebook group was all most of them were prepared to do. Assuming, naively, they would be behind me, I wrote a manifesto for the group promising non-violent action against politicians, businesses and institutions (like Northampton University) who maintained close associations with China when people were dying in Tibet. I said we would embarrass them publically. Bombard them with emails. Protest outside their buildings.

And within hours the people in the Facebook group began quitting in their droves.

I don't doubt that the majority of those people earnestly want to end the suffering in Tibet. The problem, as I have since realised, is that the power behind the annual ceremony is an uncritical follower of His Holiness The Dalai Lama, whose strategy of patience, of attrition, of good faith in the ultimate kindness and wisdom of the Chinese Communists, has helped to perpetuate the holocaust in his country. The Dalai Lama doesn't even seek independence from China. Speaking on behalf of his people on his own website, he calls the imagined national disinterest in this "a historical fact". Despite the colonisation of Tibet, the arrests, the torture, the forced sterilisations, the self-immolations, the stripping of Tibet's natural resources, His Holiness persists in the belief that his people can live autonomously under the Chinese.

As I have said before (and as a Buddhist I take no pleasure in thinking it) that view is either naive or stupid. But the organiser of the Guildhall ceremony and the many people who cluster around her are ardent admirers of the Dalai Lama like almost everybody in the West. He is a charming, intelligent man and to some extent he meets our Orientalising need for a quirky little Eastern guru to replace our discredited Popes and Archbishops.

What they are about, the Guildhall people, is seeking solutions that satisfy all. Asking our politicians to talk to their party leaders who in turn gently persuade the Chinese to change. They are about the right prevailing because it is right and everybody being good deep down. They don't want action. They don't want antagonism. Which is all very well when you live a comfortable middle class life in England. Or a comfortable 'simple' monk's life in India.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Surprisingly, the Guildhall ceremony organiser has invited me back this year with a note that says, "Sorry about the misunderstanding." But the misunderstanding was on my part, not hers. I didn't have as clear a picture then of where the fault lines lie in the Free Tibet movement. They are prepared to wait another sixty years for it, so it seems, while weeping big salty tears over the names of the dead, and I'm not.

So I won't be going to the flag raising, although I hope they have a nice day. Frankly, I'd do just as much good for the people of Tibet by staying in bed. Not that my own more direct and cantankerous action in the past year has helped a hell of a lot. They're still burning their own bodies to get someone to listen. And universities are still making big sums of money by nestling down in the lap of the Communist killers.

Tibet: The Honour Roll That Shames

Just saw the Northampton University Vice-Chancellor in the building. A rare sighting. Characteristically, he was showing around someone in a suit. Here's a message for him.

Self-Immolations in Tibet Since 2009
Last Updated: February 17, 2013, 15:06 EST

NamlhaTsering
Drugpa Khar
Lobsang Namgyal
Konchok Kyab
Tsering
Tsering Tashi
Wangchen Kyi
Kunchok Pelgye
Pema Dorjee
Lobsang Geleg
Sungdue Kyab
Kunchok Kyab
Tsering Namgyal
Wande Khar
Sanggye Tashi
Kelsang Kyab
Gonpo Tsering
Kunchok Tsering
Wangyal
Sangay Dolma
Tamdrin Kyab
Tamdrin Dorjee
Lubhum Gyal
Tsering Dundrup
Wangchen Norbu
Sangdag Tsering
Chagmo Kyi
Khabum Gyal
Tenzin Dolma
Nyangchag Bum
Nyangkar Tashi
Gonpo Tsering
Jinpa Gyatso
Dorjee
Samdrup
Dorjee Kyab
Tamding Tso
Tsegyal
Dorjee Lhundrup
Tsewang Kyab
Lhamo Tseten
Tsepo
Tenzin
Dorje Rinchen
Dhondup
Lhamo Kyab
Tamdin Dorje
Sangay Gyatso
Gudrub
Yangdang
Passang Lhamo
Lobsang Damchoe
Lobsang Kelsang
Lungtok
Tashi
Chopa
Dolkar Tso
Lobsang Tsultrim
Losang Lozin
Tsewang Dorjee
Dickyi Choezom
Ngawang Norphel
Tenzin Khedup
Tamdin Thar
Rikyo
Dargye
Dorje Tseten
Choepak Kyap
Sonam
Chimey Palden
Tenpa Darjey
Lobsang Sherab
Sonam Dargye
Lobsang Tsultrim
Jamyang Palden
Gepey
Dorjee
Rinchen
Tsering Kyi
Nangdrol
Damchoe Sangpo
Lobsang Gyatso
Tenzin Choedron
Sonam Rabyang
Rinzin Dorje
Losang Jamyang
Sonam Wangyal
Tsultrim
Tennyi
Tenzin Phuntsog
Palden Choetso
Dawa Tsering
Tenzin Wangmo
Norbu Damdrul
Choepel
Kayang
Kelsang Wangchuk
Lobsang Kelsang
Lobsang Kunchok
Tsewang Norbu
Phuntsog
Tapey

courtesy of Save Tibet dot org.

Stalker

I just heard two girls at the university talking about their stalkers. I would never wish to undermine the seriousness of stalking when it happens - it must be terrifying - but for the young and beautiful these days a stalker seems to be almost a fashion accessory. Anyone whose gestures of friendship are unwelcome is a stalker. Everyone who smiles at you in the street more than once wants to fuck you. That is the presumption. It is casual, cruel and extremely arrogant.

I was accused of stalking once myself, by a woman who I thought was my friend. A serial fantasist, she told everyone I knew stories about me hanging around on street corners or hiding behind hedges waiting for her, and watching. None of which ever happened; we didn't even live in the same bloody town. But nothing I can ever say or do will take the seed of doubt out of the minds of people who heard those stories. Who saw those texts. So I don't even try.

I did make a pass at her once. I was sad and lonely; I needed a little more than friendship. I didn't think she'd say yes, but I had a go anyway. Even the embarrassment of being turned down would be better than the in-between space my life was occupying at the time. I've never denied that I made a move on her. I wish I hadn't, but I did. In some ways I think I was supposed to, so she could feel better about herself with her husband gone.

If it was a trap I walked into it. If it wasn't a trap I did it anyway. But I didn't stalk her. I've never thought highly enough of any woman I knew to stalk her. The only woman I like enough to stalk is the woman I am with, and I don't have stalk to her.

So please, get over yourselves and be careful how you use that word. You may be wrongly labelling somebody just to feed your own ego. And you risk debasing the word so that when somebody really is being stalked, the people who can help keep her safe don't believe her.

Do we want a world, anyway, of such snobbery and spite? where if you're not "in" you're a freak to be debased and insulted? Where if you misread the social cues in a world full of falsehood you're immediately suspected of being a rapist-in-the-making? I know I don't. I'll leave you to think for yourselves.

BING!

I'm putting the finishing touches at the moment to an essay on William Blake. Four poems about childhood from Songs of Innocence and Experience. It's a topic I'd be happy to write about usually, maybe for a book or a poetry magazine, but because it's for my Romanticism module at the uni the bloody thing is driving me mad.

At the start of the year the lecturer Jon Mackley gave us a list of the tenets of Romanticism. I think there were seven, although there may have been four, or sixteen. I've no idea where the notebook is that I wrote them all down in.

Anyway, ever since that first lecture the idea has been that when we analyse a poem in the class or write an essay we're supposed to identify these tenets of Romanticism in the text we're considering. At first Mackley would even say a chirpy BING! and raise a finger in the air every time we named one. Thankfully, he's cut that out now.

I didn't name any of the Romantic tenets in my last essay. I still got a B+ but he said, "Your writing was excellent. It broke my heart not to give you an A." I can't say it broke my heart, Jon, although it did annoy me. I didn't come to university to learn how to parrot other people's words back at them.

Of course, I didn't really come to uni to learn either. I came to get off the dole and put a bit of money in the bank without working. I was too burned out to work, after the ugliness of my last fight with Cruela and the Forces of Mammon.

Now I'm here again, as I say, sitting in an overheated I.T. room with another Romantic essay that has to be submitted by tomorrow. It's written, but I'm having to bend my fine words into contortions to get these goddamn tenets in (the ones I can remember). And my essay will be uglier for their presence, not their absence.

This is education? Afraid so. Like I wrote somewhere, "Monkey do what monkey see, monkey get a nice degree." Which doesn't suit my curmudgeonly, stick-in-the-mud, anti-authoritarian style one bit.

Calling for a New Coalition of Interests

Oliver Twist asking for more in the workhouse.

In two years there will be a General Election, and it may be more significant than any since Margaret Thatcher's first two victories. If the Conservative Party win an outright majority it could signal the death knell of the NHS and any recognisable (and fair) form of Welfare State. Don't even mention what is left of workers' rights, which isn't a heck of a lot. Employees are already working twelve hour shifts without sick pay and getting fired on the whims of their bosses.

The Tories, if they win, will be dragging the country back to a pre-1945, maybe even pre-1845, darkness in which poverty is equated with moral weakness, a good man is expected to know his place and the rich dance on the bodies of the dead. I fully expect the return of the workhouses too, although naturally they won't call them that. They'll be rebranded, a "PLUS" will be affixed to whatever anodyne name they're given, and the poor and the sick will be pushed into them like cattle.

In the light of that, I feel, it's time we formed a coalition of interests to stop them. Most people don't vote because there's "no point" and then complain on their fag breaks because they're on six pounds an hour. And since the Iraq invasion at least - although for some it happened long before that - people on the Left have refused to vote Labour because they cut loose the unions and look after the middle class instead of the poor.

It's a valid point, as far as I'm concerned. Labour isn't "the party of the people" anymore. Not entirely. You could argue that it hasn't been since 1945. I have been disappointed by Labour too many times since I first started voting in the early 80s. But as much as I don't feel they represent me or my interests anymore, they are not the Tories. They are men of good conscience and good instincts, broadly, who have been corrupted by their own idealism as much as their personal ambition. I believe Ed Milliband wants to make Britain a better place, for everybody. Aneurin Bevan cared more about fixing things for his own.

Labour hurt people when it turned away from its roots. When it abandoned specificity to be a party for all. But do we go on nursing our hurt and resentment of the hijacking of our beautiful vehicle while the Tories dismantle the last remnants of it? Do we stand back in splendid purity, showing those posh Labour bastards, while the Tories fuck Britain all the way back to the workhouse?

I say no. Let's get behind Labour, even if we don't fully support them, and give the Tories the biggest hiding they've had since 1997. Let's do it for the poor. Do it for the disabled. Do it for the NHS and the shade of Aneurin Bevan. A Labour victory won't fix everything; there will still be injustice. But at least we'll be fighting back with food in our bellies.

By not voting all we do is empower the Tories. And that's a high cost to pay for self-righteousness, comrades.