the
Latest Editorial Addendum Corbyn As Symbol/ Green Labour?/21st Century Socialism
The New Five Evils/ Left-Behind Britain/ Labour's Nervous Breakdown
Satire Response to the DWP's ‘Modest Proposal...'
Obituary Gareth Thomas (actor)
Obituary Alan Morrison Pays Tribute to Brenda Williams (10 Dec 1948-19 July 2015)
Obituary Alan Morrison Pays Tribute to Reginald Perrin Creator David Nobbs R.I.P.
New Reviews Kevin Saving on new books on Geoffrey Chaucer and Ted Hughes
Kevin Saving on Clive James' Poetry Notebook/ Sentenced To Life (Picador)
A Bumper Smokestack Review Part 1: Alan Morrison on Clare Saponia
and John Berger/ Part 2: Alan Morrison on Jo Colley and Gordon Hodgeon
Alan Morrison on Barry Tebb's Cut Flowers – Selected Poems 1964-2015 (Sixties Press)
Alan Morrison on Jack Lindsay's Who are the English?
Jaydeep Sarangi on Nathalie Buckland's Shards & Figments
R.G. Foster on Martin Espada's The Meaning of the Shovel and
Judith Kazantzis' Sister Invention (Smokestack)
Reviews Alan Morrison on Two Greece-Related Smokestacks: Yiannis Ritsos'
Romiosini and Crisis – 30 Greek Poets on the Crisis (Smokestack)
Reviews Dave Russell on Anthony James' Amputated Souls,
Polemic Geoffrey Heptonstall Psst. Have You Heard About..?
Rostrum David Kessel on Schizo Care
Reviews Alan Morrison on Keith Howden's Jolly Roger & Steve Ely's Oswald's
Book of Hours
New Poems Brenda Williams, Barry Tebb, Alan Morrison, Frank Praeger, Sam Silva,
Keith Armstrong, John Porter, Amir Darwish, J.P. Celia, Donal Mahoney, Jim Morris,
James B. Nicola, Ray Miller, Thomas Ország-Land, C.B. Anderson, Sarah Gonnet,
Dah Helmer, Alan Dunnett, Vladislav Martynovitch, Antony Johae, Phil Wood,
Chris Vaillancourt, Neil Fawcett, Tom Kelly, Peter Branson, David Kessel, Olfa Drid,
Poetic Prose Sarah Gonnet, Ron Singer, Alan Price, Sean J Mahoney, Christopher Allen
Prose Peter Street's Memoir of a Gravedigger (Chapter 1) and Charlie Grey
it is wrong ... to imagine that the currently fashionable and approved constitutes the work of permanent importance Alan Bold (1970)
Modern English polite society...
seems to me as corrupt as consciousness of culture and absence of honesty can make it. A canting, lie-loving, fact-hating, scribbling, chattering, wealth-hunting, pleasure-hunting, celebrity-hunting mob
George Bernard Shaw
An Unsocial Socialist (1883)
The want of poetical power is the impelling force in the case of most versifiers. They would fain be poets, and imagine that the best way is to try to write poetry and to publish what they write. They will never see their mistake.
Equus asinus still believes that the possession of an organ of noise is sufficient, with a little practice, to enable him to sing like a nightingale.
John Davidson (1857 – 1909)
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oppositional poetry, prose, polemic
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Recusant
It is necessary for the socialist poet to have
more impressive technical equipment than his
apolitical contemporaries because his task is that much more important. Alan Bold
AXIS OF SHAME
Corbyn and McDonnell redefine Beveridge's
Five Giant Evils for the present day
"We have helped change the debate on welfare … no frontbench politician is now using disgraceful, divisive terms like ‘scrounger’, ‘shirker’ or ‘skiver’. They have been shamed by the reality of life … for millions of our people in left-behind Britain...
The injustices that scar society today are not those of 1945 … Want, Squalor, Idleness, Disease and Ignorance… And they have changed since I first entered Parliament in 1983… Today what is holding people back above all are … Inequality … Neglect … Insecurity … Prejudice … and Discrimination…"
Jeremy Corbyn during his re-election campaign speech
I do not want to live in a country where there are people sleeping in the streets while the mansions are empty - Corbyn
And neither do we at The Recusant, which is why we are still behind Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell to continue leading the Labour Party in the face of mass mutiny from the Shadow Cabinet. Those stirring words cited above from Corbyn speaking at a rally of over 2,000 of his supporters in Parliament Square today -while the PLP was close by plotting a 'no confidence' motion in a leader with the biggest mandate of any of his predecessors- sums up perfectly why he and his politics are what is needed in the UK and never more so than at such a despairing time as post-Brexit. Corbyn's Labour is an anti-austerity Opposition, therefore a true Opposition to the remorseless cuts to public services inflicted by the Tories. This is why we need Corbyn and McDonnell to stand firm in post, especially at this hour, as the Tories are in turmoil. For a largely Blairite-leaning cadre of MPs from the Shadow Cabinet to dessert their leader on the ostensible premise that he wasn't robust enough in campaigning for Remain when in actual fact it's simply because he's too 'left-wing' for their liking (which is precisely what Labour was always supposed to be!), is not only deeply reprehensible but it also constitutes the most glaring own goal any political party has ever scored, since what should have been a media focus on a split in the governing Tory party has now been turned onto its Opposition's internecine conflict instead! If there is to be a 'snap general election', then what, prey, has happened to the five year lock for Parliaments brought in under the Coalition...? Excuse the football metaphor above, but it's difficult not see something very karmic in England's defeat by Iceland in the Euro Cup only a couple of days after it votes to exit the EU...
THE DIVIDED KINGDOM
THE BEGINNING OF THE END FOR ANY HOPE OF A PROGRESSIVE FUTURE FOR THIS NATION, OR FOR EUROPE, WHICH BRITAIN HAS BETRAYED
This is not a good day for British democracy, it is a very dark day for British democracy, darker still for any sense of solidarity with our European compatriots; it is only a good day for British political ignorance, prejudice, xenophobia and backwardness.
We will also likely see the unravelling of the EU altogether, with further national referendums already mooted, all of which will fall into the laps of Far Right
parties across the Continent, such as Front Nationale (France), Golde Dawn (Greece), and Jobbik (Hungary). We can now look forward to a fractious and fractured Europe in the years ahead after over 70 years of peace which too many have apparently taken for granted.
MILITANT
LOOK LEFT, LEVELLERS
Standing for the Common Good
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