Oppositional Poetry Prose Polemic

...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)

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 (1970)

War on Welfare Petition

WHAT A GRAYWASH!

The Sue Gray Report into 'Partygate', in spite of many damning revelations, has proven to be just another whitewash -or Graywash- following the Met's toothless 'investigation' resulting in no more fines for Boris Johnson in spite of photographic evidence that he was at the parties he denied took place, was in fact hosting them, and so has lied to Parliament and to the public several times... Now Johnson has just rewritten the ministerial code to remove a clause which stated ministers must resign if they are found to have breached it - this is his attempt to preclude his obligation to resign when the committee tasked to investigate whether he knowingly misled Parliament, finds him guilty... He has also, with such symbolic blatancy, removed all references to integrity, objectivity, accountability, transparency, honesty and leadership in the public interest from the code, almost as if retrospectively writing his own job description as he clearly sees it: to have no integrity, to not be accountable or transparent or honest etc... This is the behaviour of a tinpot despot, this man is a disgrace to his office and a menace to our democracy, he must be thrown out of Downing Street NOW!

Now archived by the

British Library

'Controlling Our Borders' Is Blurring Our Moral Boundaries

Boris Johnson's deplorable attempts to have vulnerable refugees deported to Rwanda is a sure sign of this nation's current descent into a form of fascism which more and more blatantly discriminates against minorities. Johnson, Truss and Patel should be hanging their heads in shame, but instead they continue to bang the table of border-controlling bigotry. Such is their hubris they even bat away the opposition of princes and Archbishops--the Church of England and the Monarchy, once cornerstones of the Tory creed. The protestors at the airport are examples to us all. Why shouldn't the UK welcome refugees from Albania, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Eritrea, just as it does Ukrainians? Answering that question might bring a deeply uncomfortable answer about the abject moral state of our nation. The European Court of Human Rights has managed to stop this first deportation flight at the eleventh hour. Now all eyes will be on Johnson's deeply disturbing hint today that his Rogue Government might try and pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights in order to more easily deport refugees. We must all make a stand against this nascent fascism...