For Whom the Bell Tolls Read online

  Private Tom Atkins of the Fusiliers

  By contrast, under rifle fire and mortar,

  Is in his second war zone in three years.

  His luxury – a bucket of clean water;

  Emergency – a Taliban attack

  Involving IEDs and casual slaughter;

  A fallen comrade – one who won’t unpack

  His kit when he’s repatriated back.

  Look at these two we pay our taxes for

  And work out which does less and which does more;

  Then ask, in terms of rates of pay and such,

  Why one should get so little, one so much.

  The Theatre of War

  Time was, the swordsman and the musketeer

  Were part of a stage army on parade;

  With wooden thrust and firework fusillade

  They re-enacted many a brave career;

  They fought through all the histories of Shakespeare,

  Hardly a duke or earl was left unplayed,

  ‘My kingdom for a horse!’ the villain said,

  We loved it and could scarce forbear to cheer

  Alarms, excursions and the whole charade.

  Especially when, at the close of play,

  The corpses all got up and walked away.

  Today a war can be fought on a fiction,

  And has been, yet is the authentic thing,

  Waged by elected leaders in our name,

  But with a call to arms that lacks conviction;

  Their Parliament’s a history free zone,

  Little is remembered, still less known,

  About the human costs of soldiering;

  The words are cheap, the blood price is the same,

  But still the lofty rhetoric takes wing;

  And on this stage of tragedy and sorrow,

  The dead won’t play the matinee tomorrow.

  Agincourt

  ‘If these men did not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it.’

  William Shakespeare, Henry V, Act IV, scene 1.

  Remember before Agincourt the thrust

  Of Private Williams’ royal questioning:

  That if the cause of conflict were not just,

  It would be a black matter for the king.

  So in our time the landscape’s dark and bleak

  Because the king’s successors made it so.

  We note that those who know tend not to speak,

  And those who speak invariably don’t know.

  With X Factor and Jungle escapades,

  And Strictly’s sequins sparkling in cascades,

  And TV personalities in spades,

  Disgraced MPs and other renegades,

  We’ve no one but celebrities to throw

  Into the breach where heroes used to go.

  Challenges and Issues

  The great George Orwell got it right: corruption

  Is broken language by another name;

  And darkness falls without an interruption

  Between the word and deed, one and the same;

  We cannot even glimpse realities

  Through such a cloud of euphemisms and tissues

  Of insubstantial words – our tragedies

  Arrive disguised as challenges and issues.

  When my computer says it has an issue,

  It doesn’t know the meaning of the noun.

  I answer it as Orwell might: ‘I wish you

  Would just admit you’ve bloody broken down!’

  For every issue there are now solutions;

  Which cliché is the worse? The point is moot,

  Except to speculate that dissolutions

  Are the solutions of the dissolute.

  DQF

  In March 2011 the BBC, which has a notorious talent for euphemism, announced a cost-cutting exercise under the title ‘Delivering Quality First’.

  George Orwell would have loved it. Where he worked,

  Within the shadows of BBC,

  Long after his departure there still lurked

  The same aversion to reality.

  Against the public interest, quite the worst

  Of hatchet jobs in all its history

  Was then dressed up in acronymity

  As DQF: Delivering Quality First.

  If in despair, just raise a glass and drink

  To the enduring power of doublethink.

  Class Warfare

  A replay of the politics of class

  Is something that I fear may come to pass.

  In Parliament, part tragedy part farce,

  The cross-party consensus lies in bits,

  As shattered as the windows of the Ritz.

  So Labour will campaign to be elected

  Upon the grievances of the rejected.

  The wealthier people and the jeunesse dorée

  Will be unanimous in voting Tory;

  The centre ground’s a no man’s land – and that’s

  Not good news for the Liberal Democrats.

  Politicians’ Call-up

  They’re partial to the martial metaphor,

  But hardly know what the Last Post is for;

  The only uniforms they ever wore

  Were pinstripes, yet they love the words of war.

  The original idea of a campaign

  Is military: ‘Let’s get up and at ’em!’

  And naval also, from the Spanish Main

  To Scapa Flow and Plymouth Hoe to Chatham.

  The opening salvo is the manifesto

  To bring opposing forces to a halt.

  The election date’s announced and then – hey presto!

  Their troops are ready for the main assault.

  Even the smaller parties can’t refrain

  From loosing off a policy barrage;

  So UKIP’s foot-soldiers wage their campaign

  Under the orders of General Farage.

  The Greens, being peaceful, cannot use bazookas

  With which to arm battalion and brigade,

  But still they have the firepower of Ms Lucas

  To lead their ecological crusade,

  And by a coup de main, one in a million,

  She’s now the Member for Brighton Pavilion.

  As for the BNP, here let me warn

  Nick Griffin’s strategy may lie in parking

  His tanks upon the other parties’ lawn,

  And ending up as the MP for Barking.

  And so the parties go on operations,

  Mail drops and phone banks are their siege machines,

  They call their canvassers to battle stations

  And politics is war by other means.

  Paddy Ashdown

  Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats, served in the Royal Marines from 1959 to 1972.

  He had all of the leadership ingredients

  Just as his Colonel Commandant decreed them:

  A knowledge of amphibious machines

  And courage short of bellicosity

  To be a Captain in the Queen’s Marines,

  Who followed him not from obedience

  They said, but curiosity

  To see where he would lead them.

  New Labour

  The times are sadly out of joint,

  We heard the old folk say,

  And though they sometimes had a point

  They missed the shades of grey:

  For governments will disappoint,

  But they should not betray.

  Co
alition (1)

  No love was lost ’twixt Liberals and Tories,

  One leader called the other one a joke;

  Each fired off cannonades of lurid stories

  Of campaign promises the other broke.

  They battled from Land’s End to John O’Groats,

  But still they didn’t win sufficient votes:

  The rising tide just failed to lift their boats.

  So then the Tory said to the Lib Dem,

  ‘It’s time we tried a different stratagem,

  Because of this electoral miscarriage

  Let’s coalesce and enter into marriage.’

  With that the fighting, feuding blues and yellows

  Became the very closest of bed-fellows.

  (Published in the Eastern Daily Press, 22 May 2010)

  Coalition (2)

  Gold-plated David Cameron,

  Smooth and urbane, a favoured son,

  A privileged and chosen one,

  Alumnus of the Bullingdon,

  Then had to deal, as leaders ought,

  With allies of the rougher sort,

  Who questioned the propriety

  And value of his Big Society.

  And wondered, in the way of a Lib Dem,

  What good the Coalition would do them.

  Coalition (3)

  Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, is Liberal Democrat MP for Sheffield (Hallam). Benghazi was the centre of Libyan opposition to Colonel Gaddafi.

  The watchword of the times is Coalition,

  A ramshackle arrangement, yours and mine,

  For bombing Libyan forces to perdition,

  Or managing a nation in decline.

  In war and peace these closest of allies,

  Once mortal foes in parliamentary trenches,

  Nod in approval at each other’s sallies

  Aimed at the dispossessed on Labour’s benches.

  Yet doubts and dangers stalk the enterprise

  And the Lib Dems, whose style is kamikaze,

  May hand their enemies a double prize,

  The loss of Sheffield (Hallam) and Benghazi.

  Cleggmania

  On one side stood the hammer and the sickle

  And on the other forces of reaction.

  But times were hard, allegiances were fickle

  And we disliked the politics of faction.

  So we triangulated. It seemed brainier

  To set the old divisiveness aside.

  Two parties wed, the smaller one the bride.

  The bliss was brief: Within a year Cleggmania

  Had turned to something nearer Cleggicide.

  Jerusalem

  We’ve Members we could do without

  Who had the nerve to stand again.

  We threw some of the villains out,

  But others creepily remain.

  We made one clean break with the past,

  A Coalition if you please,

  With Clegg in the supporting cast,

  And such a mass of new MPs

  We hardly can remember them.

  We’ve Cameron and Miliband

  On one hand: on the other hand,

  The budget cuts are painful and

  We’ve yet to build Jerusalem

  In England’s green and pleasant land.

  The Alternative Vote (1)

  In a referendum on 5 May 2011 the proposal to adopt a preferential voting system, the Alternative Vote, was defeated by a margin of more than three to one. I was a Vice Chair of the ‘Yes’ campaign.

  Our democratic record’s rather poor:

  Most MPs, lacking popular acclaim,

  Are representative only in name;

  More people vote against them than vote for.

  There was another system in the frame

  But, to adopt the racing metaphor,

  First past the post, a tired and lame old horse,

  Was still the bookies’ favourite on a course

  Which favoured merit less and habit more.

  Alas, our AV had so far to go

  To overtake the accursed status quo,

  It was the loser in a two-horse race

  To win the Democratic Steeplechase.

  The Alternative Vote (2)

  At first they tried to argue that AV

  Would help the extreme right, the BNP.

  But then they said the parties would grandstand

  To emphasise the centrist and the bland.

  But bland extremists? What a contradiction!

  Their case imploded as a work of fiction.

  Yet sadly that was not the end of it,

  For still they won the fateful plebiscite.

  The Alternative Vote (3)

  Swamping the airwaves with their lies,

  The Old Guard and their flacks prevailed;

  The democratic option failed,

  Torpedoed by mendacities.

  The epitaph of our campaign

  Was, ‘As things have been, things remain’.

  Odd People

  Kenneth Clarke MP, the Justice Secretary, warned that the introduction of the Alternative Vote could lead to the election of some ‘highly odd people’.

  It is a measure of our country’s health

  That it is teeming with the oddest men

  And women found in any commonwealth.

  Being so wayward, nothing should prevent them

  From having odd MPs to represent them.

  And since we’re talking of eccentrics, Ken,

  Could you hark back a bit and tell us when

  Were you considered so mainstream yourself?

  Rules of War

  There was a time, in the Staff College courses,

  They taught that men and arms, a zero sum

  Assessed as being the balance of two forces,

  Would guarantee the battlefield outcome.

  Not any more. You’d have to go back years,

  To contests of machine guns against spears,

  To bombers unopposed and zeppelins,

  To great tank battles fought in desert places

  And tests of range and blast in battle spaces.

  How much less certain is today’s warfare

  Where force evaporates into thin air,

  And front lines are not fixed but anywhere,

  A complex, contradictory affair:

  The winner loses and the loser wins.

  Consider Vietnam, the Tet Offensive:

  The Viet Cong’s destruction was complete,

  The Americans’ success was comprehensive,

  Yet still they met political defeat.

  Public opinion wouldn’t bear the cost

  When CBS declared the war was lost.

  That’s the decisive influence of news:

  The images of conflict will prevail

  And shape the outcomes; force alone will fail.

  These are the rules of post-industrial war;

  We pay the price and wonder what it’s for.

  Words are more powerful than shock and awe:

  In wars among the people less is more,

  And so can losers win and winners lose.

  Arab Spring

  Events are not free-standing any more,

  But cast long shadows over border fences.

  Through multiplying webs and blogs and lenses

  Autocracies are threatened by the law

  Of fierce and unintended consequences.

  The old facades of power fall and fold

  As tides of protest and r
evolt rise higher,

  Dictators flee and Presidents retire;

  Tunisia sneezes, Egypt catches cold,

  Damascus smoulders, Bahrain is on fire.

  And Libyans in their finest, darkest hour

  Rise up amid a multitude of dead,

  Killed by a madman, careless as they bled.

  His is the ultimate abuse of power,

  Who brings the temple down around his head.

  With so much revolution in the air,

  It seems that no one is untouched by it

  Except the cloistered, post-colonial Brit,

  Who settles back and has another beer.

  Osama Bin Laden

  Don’t mourn his death but mark it, understood

  As owed to those he murdered in cold blood.

  Hunted and killed, his body dumped at sea –

  Rough justice surely, but not symmetry,

  No, not a shadow of equivalence

  With his destruction of the innocents.

  In Northern Yemen

  Weapons of shock and awe fall from the skies

  And where they do not kill they traumatise.

  Wandering and alone her mother found her,

  Just nine years old: the war had raged around her.

  In all my life I never saw such eyes,

  The haunting, lasting emptiness

  Of shell shock, post-traumatic stress,

  And wondered, who on earth could be the enemy

  Of such a gentle, blameless little Yemeni?

  Black Swans

  There is a time for peace, a time for war,

  A time for rest, a time for being prepared;

  You know what I think this is a time for?

  It is a time for being really scared.

  Nuclear arsenals proliferate,

  Pirates and paramilitaries abound,

  Calamities of nature devastate,

  Once peaceful states become a killing ground.

  Jihadists take their own and others’ lives,