Publications
Selections from A Political Rakes Progress
IPA REVIEW ARTICLE
Constituents
Make yourself seen by knocking every door.
Reject that offer of a paramour.
Well, press their interests in the Parliament
And never ever cross the folk you represent.
For so say they: so says your party too.
Both claim your re-election's really up to you.
And so my Leader Great and Glorious
Whose love of numbers was notorious,
Who urged us to speak and vote our party's call
Not thinking for the nation or ourselves at all,
Allowed us modest measures of dissent
When pressed by citizens we represent.
Most folk of decency and common sense,
Would disregard political pretence.
The few who blustered with a prejudice,
Demanded favour for their avarice
Or begged to jump an immigration queue
Had little ken how little I could do.
The better Ministers refused, I'm sure,
To basely undermine the rule of law.
Their minions drafted letters to explain
My fervent pleading was alas in vain,
But did that ploy allay the discontent
Or fool the folk I claimed to represent.
Utopians
Penned while reading Whittaker Chambers' Witness
There is a class of men, who being sure
They know what is to know of life's true way,
Pronounce, that others follow and obey.
Who does not want less poverty, less war
More liberty, a life beyond life's shore?
Respect the men who join those bold crusades
And forfeit life upon the barricades
Of gallant hopes of bliss from better law.
But do not praise them, nor their cause.
Of gulag, guillotine and shot beware.
Beware a Stalin or a Robespierre.
Of plans to force a better world give pause.
Coerced Utopias deny men's liberty
And turn once selfless zeal to tyranny.
The Greens
The false alarm's an art of politics
Where most hobgoblins are but tricks
To keep us in such dire alarm
We vote for promises to stop their harm.
They say we'll boil. They said we'd freeze.
From Anti-Christ to loss of trees
Apocalypse has been in calm remand,
But Greens assure us crisis is at hand.