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Margaret Thatcher

POETRY

THE ENEMY WITHIN

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read699 views

‘But they will not dream of us poor lads,
    Left in the ground.’

MINERS, Wilfred Owen

 

Of course she would win: Snatcher Thatcher; The Iron

Lady; She of the Marilyn Monroe Hair

and the Caligula Eyes; Scourge of the Argies!

It was the conflict and the outcome of her dreams –

the opportunity to destroy

the National Union of Mineworkers,

and the Labour-voting pithead villages,

and make Britain great for greed again!

 

The comrades, the brothers and the sisters,

were too certain of the power of the rubric

of rule books, rhetorical abstractions

like ‘solidarity’ and ‘community’,

too sentimental, too innocent

to take note of the mounting stockpiles of coal

at the coking plants, and the lines of police

waiting with their horses in the woods.

 

 

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POETRY

RETURN OF THE NATIVE

David Selzer By David Selzer7 Comments2 min read1.1K views

The Conservative and Unionist Party

of Great Britain – aka The Tories,

from the Irish for ‘robbers’, ‘marauders’ –

is the longest surviving political

organisation in the known world.

It not only parks its tanks on its

opponents’ lawns, but commandeers

the greensward and the house it belongs to.

It reinvents itself by reversing

policies without embarrassment – viz.

welcoming East African Asian

refugees, hoping to send (mostly Muslim)

refugees to Rwanda; selling off

council houses under Margaret Thatcher,

homes that were built under Winston Churchill.

 

And Churchill is perhaps their greatest hero,

and an icon for all seasons – a romantic,

soldier, writer, painter, orator,

brick-layer, alcoholic, racist –

whose views and traits have been edited.

It was he who described Hindus as ‘foul’,

and Muslims as ‘warriors’, and predicted

that if the British ever left India

the Muslims would take over the Raj, and run it

as if the British had never gone home.

 

So what would he have made of a Hindu,

and a teetotaller, at the dispatch box,

albeit a babu, a Wykehamist,

an Oxford man, a multi-millionaire?

What would he, as the Home Secretary

overseeing the so-called Battle

for Stepney, the Siege of Sydney Street –

that shoot-out with Russian émigrés –

have made of the occupation of so much

of Belgravia by Russian oligarchs?

As one of the Council of Europe’s

begetters, and its human rights convention,

what would he have made of the Tories’

long suicide note called Brexit, and their

obsession with rigid inflatables

steering for Dover, with fascist scapegoats?

 

Perhaps nativism would triumph –

that, whatever your colour, as long as

you are born here, and speak the lingo

with more or less the right accent, and have

a hierarchy of people to despise,

then you are one of them?

 

 

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POETRY

THE FOURTH ANGLO-AFGHAN WAR

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments2 min read772 views

‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive’,

observed Holmes to the astounded Watson,

having noted that the doctor’s face spoke

‘of hardship and sickness’. He had seen action

in the Second Anglo-Afghan War, which,

like the First was all about The Great Game

and Russia, and both, like the Third, all

about the British Raj, that Jewel in the Crown,

and Afghan monarchs that might be cajoled

with sufficient treasure or sufficient blood,

while the true rulers, the tribal elders

of the ethnic groups, parleyed with all sides.

 

The Great Game continues, and with new players:

America, China, Iran, Pakistan,

Saudi Arabia. Are Taliban –

who, as some predicted never went away,

but fought a twenty year insurgency –

aka Mujahideen aka

‘freedom fighters’ (to quote Margaret Thatcher),

and the well-funded, so-called Islamic State –

that movable terror, that mobile nihilism –

pawns in the new game,

useful idiots in the exploitation

of the country’s many mineral fields?

 

Those who brought Enduring Freedom chose

not to eradicate polio

but supplied electricity throughout

enabling scenes of havoc and mayhem

to be broadcast on WhatsApp and Instagram.

So, record the lies about Afghanistan –

hypocritical, self-serving untruths,

which ignore the torture at Bagram Air Base,

which prioritise the lives of dogs. Record

that the liars are mostly privileged,

sanctimonious, nostalgic, white

imperialists, some moonlighting as hacks.

 

The Fourth war has masqueraded under

two different euphemisms,

Operation Herrick and then Toral,

and been fought with allies – with Nato,

and the erstwhile Afghan Army and Police –

and achieved no discernible victories,

no battle honours only body bags,

only more of the maimed and the desperate,

only incompetence and abandonment –

against lightly-armed zealots on Chinese-made

Honda motor bikes with a seemingly

endless supply of imported fuel

financed by hectares of exported drugs,

and for whom aspects of criminality,

particularly towards women and girls,

appear a brutal and sacred duty,

in a poor country corrupted with money,

a Ponzi scheme for foreign consultants.

 

Although its capital city, Kabul,

remains the only one in the world

without a railway station, the trade

in opium and hashish has blossomed,

Afghanistan becoming the world leader –

which might have rendered even Holmes speechless.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

PASTORALE

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read526 views

From the west front of this Restoration house –

built a century before the demand

for coal brought, in hearing of the brocaded

drawing room, the daily clank and hiss

of the pit head winding gear and the pumps

keeping the seams dry, and, in direct

line of sight of the spacious steps, the slagheap’s

incremental growth on land previously

considered worthless so not purchased –

was a view, across the shallow valley

and extensive pasture land, of benign hills.

 

The slagheap was treed post-Aberfan,

the pit closed under Thatcher, and the headgear

retained, like the stately home, a monument

to that other country. Under cropped fields

where lambs suckle this February day,

abandoned, expensive machinery

rusts in fallen, inundated seams.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE FIVE GIANTS

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments2 min read873 views

Walking down Renshaw Street from ‘Rumpelstiltskin’

at the Unity then along Bold Street,

with its strolling crowds and varied eateries,

to Central Station, thinking of spinning gold

from straw, we pass beggars in doorways.

‘What are they doing?’ our granddaughter asks.

We explain. ‘Why don’t they get jobs?’ We explain.

 

My mother would tell me how, when she moved

to London before the war to be a nurse,

she was appalled by the rough sleepers

on the benches along the Thames Embankment.

In the depressed provinces presumably

there were enough workhouses to hide them.

There being no workhouses under Thatcher

and too few shelters they were everywhere

from twilight onwards, androgynous bundles

in the world’s fifth largest economy.

Now they have returned exactly like

their forebears in the largest empire since Rome’s.

They are dragon’s teeth. Where is our shame, our fear?

 

The gusts of wind, that fling the scattered rain

against the panes and flail the apple tree –

which jerks as if a frantic, shaken doll –

are lowing in the chimney like an owl.

I draw the blinds as the twilight goes,

switch on the laptop and begin to write,

thinking of those who are without – homeless,

hungry, thirsty – no more than a mile

let alone a continent away.

 

Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, Idleness –

Beveridge’s gargantua – are alive,

well, and stalking in our city centres,

in run down estates with abandoned gardens,

in bed-and-breakfasts in cul-de-sac towns

with shut-up shops and rusting factories.

Spin as we may, stamp as we might, marvels

and wonders outsmart facts. ‘The needy

and the poor have only themselves to blame,’

say the sassy and the rich. Our consciences

have fallen among thieves.

 

 

 

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