Change

by Steven Taylor

This time tomorrow, next week
or yesterday, at the latest (it’s hard
to tell the difference)

Sir Keir Starmer

will be the new Prime Minister. My parents

if they’d survived this long, would have been
alive to see it, still in low paid jobs, a textile
cutter and a machinist. Shockingly insecure,
unprotected from the pleasures of the market.

The global fluctuations in the price of fuel and
raw materials, the cheaper labour found elsewhere,
in particular, where the previous PM originated.

Because Capital provides for irony.

They would have voted (Labour, not
Conservative) but expected nothing.

The mills have closed and factories finished.

Britain’s future lies in banking, the growth
of tumours. Armaments and poverty. Change

is what’s left over
when you’ve paid your bills
and done your Saturday shopping. Bought

yourselves an icing bun.

The Buttering of the Bread

by Rob Walton, with image by Martin Gollan

Just because I changed to the Tories
people tell me I don't know
which side my bread is buttered
when in actual fact
and no word of a lie
the smiling Mr Johnson
buttered both sides.

He covered one side in our beloved Brexit
so we won't be bothered by the French
and the Germans and all them eastern Europeans.
Then on the other he spread a better NHS
and tax cuts and more or less more police.

And if he put a little bit of ground glass in the butter
that's a small price to pay
and besides I'll get treated for free
in one of the forty new hospitals.