What if the shaman-shooting, pygmy-robbing,
Irishman-selling, continent-carving,
child-hanging, Brahmin-flogging,
farmhand-conscripting, peasant-starving,
chimneysweep-buggering empire
could redeem itself
by stopping a jackboot-
and-toothbrush-moustache-wearing fellow-Saxon
who drowns nations in gunfire –
with no help,
no over-saluted Mason-Dixon
apple-pie-chompers around for two years
to (what’s that, Jim-Bob?) “bail it out” –
from chalking his blue-eyed battering ram
and, as Lenin’s cue-ball head careers clattering
to the ground, rolling over the blood-stained carpet
and under the Nazi fruit-machine (lemon, lemon,
Göring’s face), smacking into the pocket
like a goose-stepping Steve Davis Omsk, Irkutsk, Petropavlovsk,
Anchorage, Seattle, Chicago,
Washington, and rescuing every human
on this raison-d’être-starved husk
of a planet from a lederhosen-fetishist’s ego,
stopping the world from turning into a concentration camp
(which is another great English invention),
wouldn’t that be cause for pride and pomp?
Not really, because by burning cherub-ringed treble-cleffed Dresden
to a skeletal necropolis England did
nothing to put out the bonfire
that it and its rivals and friends had lit
in the first place, that every empire-
fondling, dreadnought-dreaming, lambchop-
sideburned chimneysweep-fucker in Europe
had stoked, carving a bombshelled barbwired scar
through poppy-fields and young men’s
heads, all in the dirty double-barrelled name of bourgeois-
democracy, then swiping cabbage
from German mouths, spectacles from German eyes,
fabric from German society, sweeping their own cultures
into the star-and-striped petrodollared garbage-
pail of goddam history. So, sorry, girls and boys,
but the Englishness of those peace-pipe-smashing land-filchers
is no food for pride. But,
Englishness is no food for shame, not
for my people, who marched level-eyed with bold Gurkhas,
noble turbaned sepoys and loyal African lions
who squashed the swastika. Brave British workers.
Just as my people marched, clad in irons,
blanketed in mud and cholera and mustard gas
and took sword-gashes, gunfire, spears and arrows
for them, not for us,
dancing for centuries a chained one-legged tango,
all the while thinking, “This is not my empire,
hii si himaya yangu, a maro
samrajya nathi, ini bukan
empayar saya, nid yw hyn yn fy ymerodraeth!”
Society, you still owe my people our land
fit for heroes. Society, you owe the working class
everything. But instead
we pull levers, carry barrels, stack shelves, kiss
arses, get ignored and mocked and branded brainless bigots,
sell our souls along with our labour for a loaf of bread
and pint of beer an hour to Churchills behind desks
like we’ve done for centuries, while at Eton and Harrow
and every other plummy-voiced bumming-parlour
chaps learn to play the violin, design mosques
or bomb them, biographise Emperor Nero,
speak Greek, use the right spoon, disarm Wat Tyler,
just like when they sat sipping Chablis
while Private Thompson saved their empire
with blood gushing from his throat.
Society, with your single-glazed ideals and wobbly
morality, you owe the working class
everything. The working class does not
owe anybody anything, no matter what
you whining, white-male-demonising,
gobshite-studying, groupthinking, self-hating,
negro-pitying, Pakistani-patronising,
guilt-assuaging, morally masturbating,
identity-political,
Mummy-and-Daddy-funded, champagne-gulping,
wrist-slashingly hypocritical,
coalminer-ignoring, bricklayer-insulting,
monochrome-spectacled,
monocultural-suburban-white-hometowned,
holier-than-thou, cleverer-than-thou, more-popular-than-thou,
more-acceptable-than-thou,
more-conventional-than-thou,
self-rewarding,
self-applauding,
liberal-fascist, ethnomasochist scum
whose idea of intelligent debate is “Disembowel
Enoch Powell! Disembowel Enoch Powell!”
or “shut up you stupid stupid racist knuckle-dragging stupid racist
I’m not listening la la la you’re just wrong la la la shut up
shut up shut up” blather at us. Do you understand?
We wipe our proletarian proudly-British bums
on your abject vainglories.
Your imperial-guilt-crammed robot programs don’t apply
to us, and why?
Because of the lines of cloth caps, shovels and typhoid bugs
along the mud-tracks to Westminster,
because of spinning jennies, nine-tailed cats
and soot-blackened children carrying canaries.
Because we are the natives, we are the colonised,
we are the slaves, we are the Niggers of this land.
Do you understand?
Your right right right right right right right
left left left left left left left
left right left right left right left right
all-trampling automaton army of imagination-dead professors
of “white male privilege” sheep-noise
turns the oppressed into an oppressor,
rips our class into scraps for the jackals,
rips man from woman, black from white, worker from worker
with your inverse-racist, inverse-sexist,
woolly, bleated, smug heckle,
shovelling lecture-halls of fuel
into the government’s furnace of divide and rule.
What do you swaggering grovelling cock-suckers
know about being leftists?
What do you Guardian-reading, bruschetta-brained, rotten-
souled, morally-swivelling fakes know about frustration
or resentment or feeling forgotten,
you snivelling, privileged, civilisation-
shrivelling drivel-machines?
Squelching toadying liberal slugs, you owe the working class
everything. You ought
to offer us every last sauce in the pantry,
lick the backs of our knees, teach us the cello,
pay us before you even consider
paying anyone else. Until you do,
if we want to shout and swear and billow
clouds of class war fury and make you shudder,
then we have that right,
if we want to sing and bellow and march for our country
or tattoo bulldogs and Union Jacks across our faces,
then we have that right,
if we want to hurl a concrete slab through
a bank window, throw a general strike,
sign on the dole, sabotage the stock
exchange, burgle a tax-dodging millionaire,
bludgeon the Bullingdon Club into microscopic pieces
or set fire to Anjem Choudhary’s beard and stick bacon up his nose,
then we have that right
and it’s got nothing to do with you.
We don’t have to hand hot water bottles
and fluffy slippers
and our pubs and seaside piers and bingo-halls,
our cobbled streets and lampposts
to a homosexual-hanging,
rape-victim-stoning
virus,
this is Europe.
This is our continent.
Do you understand?
Do you understand,
you snooty, snotty, slimy,
pack-thinking,
dissent-gagging,
indoctrinated yuppie mouthwankers?
