We are very pleased to announce that thanks to support from Newcastle Trades Union Council, the seventh Bread and Roses Poetry Award is now open until the end of September for entries.

Our mission is to promote cultural democracy in all the arts and other cultural activities. We have been running the Bread and Roses Poetry Awards to create opportunities for working people to write poetry, and to encourage poets to focus on themes which are meaningful to working-class communities.

The background this year is a continuing cost-of-living crisis – rising prices for food, fuel and energy, with the value of benefits going down, and increased pressure on jobseekers. We’ll see an increase in poverty in many areas of the country and amongst many communities. Homelessness and poor health are still major threats to working people, including mental health problems. Meanwhile environmental degradation in the UK continues apace, including the extinction of wildlife.

Trade unions have been in the forefront of action to protect working people, through waves of strike actions across the whole economy. They have widespread support, but still face hostility from the Tories and the media generally, and indifferent leadership from the party founded to advance the interests ogf working people, the Labour Party.

As in previous years, there will be 5 prizes of £100 for the best poems, and the judge will be Andy Croft, poet and publisher of Smokestack Books, the best poetry publisher in the UK.

Submission Rules and Guidelines 

1. You may enter one or two original, previously unpublished (in print) poems in English, each no more than 50 lines long.

2. You must be resident in the United Kingdom or Republic of Ireland.

3. Entry is free and there will be five prizes of £100 each for the best poems.

4. Entries should broadly deal with themes relevant to working-class life, politics, communities and culture in 2023.

5. Entries should be sent to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by midnight on 30th September 2023. No entries will be accepted after that date.

6. Please include the poem(s) and your name, address, and email contact details in the body of the email.

7. All entries remain the copyright of the author but Culture Matters will have the right to publish them online and in print.

8. By entering the Award, entrants agree to accept and be bound by the rules of the Award and the decisions of the judges. We are unable to respond individually to submissions.

We will publish an anthology of selected poems, and send free copies to all the poets included. Below is the pdf of last year's book, The Shouting Tories. You're welcome to download it and we hope you enjoy reading it. You're also welcome to make a donation here if you can afford it.

We're very sad to hear of the death of Kevin Higgins, one of our most regular contributors since Culture Matters began. Our deepest sympathies go to his widow, Susan. Below is his last poem, with thanks to the Galway Advertiser for  permission to publish the poem and the image above.

I Always Thought I’d Live

By Kevin Higgins

I always thought I’d live to learn how to swim
do the backward butterfly to Olympic standard
and see trickle-down economics deliver
at least one albeit slightly polluted drop.
I always thought I’d live to learn how to drive,
win at least one Grand Prix motor racing championship
and see the Democrats legislate for free
universal health care.
I always thought I’d live to tidy
the books off the study floor
and see fascists give up
stabbing black boys at bus stops
because peaceful protests
have eloquently made them
see the error of their ways.
But the books that made me
still decorate the study floor
and I don’t have the oxygen to shift them.
My consultants are unanimous
my days marching to places like Welling
and Trafalgar Square are over.
The risk of getting tossed into the back of a police van
by over enthusiastic members of the constabulary
is a luxury my lungs can no longer afford.
Even holding a placard in my wheelchair
would soon have me gasping for breath.
And I thought I’d always live.

The Haunting: Deleted Scenes is a free downloadable pdf from Culture Matters, available below. 

It's an unsettling poetic riff on the 1963 film The Haunting, and the book that inspired it, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, McCann’s poems traffic in the uncanny and the unsaid, merging moments from across the house’s long and morbid history into a single, though unstable, present. Just as Jackson’s novel is a story of frustrated passions and repressed pain, McCann’s poems also deal in the missing, the buried, the deliberately obscured. 

A donation towards the costs of production would be welcome and will help us produce more free downloadable pamphlets. You can make a donation here.

This book is now available as a pamphlet, ISBN 978-1-912710-58-4, £5 plus £3 p. and p. Pay here using the Donate button, and send your name and address to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Brett Gregory was recently interviewed about Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist, a self-funded film that has won a host of international awards. Starring David Howell (Brassic), Reuben Clarke (Peaky Blinders) and Wendy Patterson (Spencer), it's a thought-provoking and powerful working-class feature film exploring solitude, sanity and suffering under the British state. It's loosely based on Hieronymus Bosch's 'The Garden of Earthly Delights', John Bunyan's 'A Pilgrim's Progress' and Albert Camus' 'The Myth of Sisyphus'.

The interview is also available in audiovisual form at the end of this article and here.

CM: You wrote and directed this film, which is is available to watch on Amazon Prime. What’s it about?

BG: The film is about class and morality, about how those in power treat us and about how we treat each other. It’s also about abandonment, loneliness, mental health and a breakdown in communication between the working and middle classes. In turn, always in the background, is the North/South divide – how this is continually reinforced by right-wing ideological forces in order to distract and weaken any serious collective opposition to the systematic asset-stripping of what remains of the United Kingdom.

In terms of plot, it starts with Old Jack in his gloomy flat in Hulme in 2020 under Boris Johnson’s rule as he appears to wake from a fever dream about sex and murder in Manchester, overshadowed by the city’s Gothic architecture, civic statues and towering skyscrapers. He reads an old text from the wife of a good friend who informs him that her husband is on a ventilator with COVID and that she is struggling to breathe herself. He also discovers that he has an unwelcome voicemail on his phone from his long-lost grandmother in Oxford who wishes to secretly meet up with him after four decades, before she dies. All of this proves too much for him however, and he takes a fistful of anti-depressants and washes them down with a mug of vodka.

Thus begins his descent into his own private rabbit-hole, where he meets himself as a young boy in 1984, living on a rundown council estate under Margaret Thatcher during the Miners’ Strike, and fantasising about escaping into a world of fiction and illusion.

He is then later confronted by himself as a university student in 1992 during John Major’s tenure, riddled with Class A drugs, alienated from his peers and his studies, and questioning his purpose and sanity in violent messianic outbursts. These psychotic visitations are intercut with imagined, Brechtian interviews with a number of women from Old Jack’s past who seem to appear not only as witnesses, but also as judge and jury: his half-sister, his old English teacher, his former college manager, his ex-girlfriend’s Christian mother, and his nervous next-door neighbour.

Overcome by the weight of his own history in a country where he doesn’t believe he belongs, Old Jack finally embarks on a pilgrimage to the historical Stoodley Pike monument in West Yorkshire, on the outskirts of society, to find some sort of answer which will put an end to his misery.

What were you aiming for with the film, and what were the reactions to the film from critics and from working-class people?

A crucial aim of the film was to represent the Northern working class on screen with intelligence, authenticity and dignity, in direct opposition to the demeaning stereotypes and caricatures which are regularly churned out by the corporate mainstream media based in London.

Such a genuinely independent, counter-cultural creative decision directly challenges the status quo currently being maintained by the ideological state apparatus in the cultural industries and so, of course, we received no funding or investment or support from any public or private organisation.

As a result, what changed was not only the timescale of the production from one year to six and half years, but also my personal finances. Even though every one of the cast and crew members committed their time and talents for free – a testament to the ongoing industriousness and inventiveness of Greater Manchester by the way – the production still left me around £36,000 in debt by way of personal loans, two credit cards and two overdrafts.

Since its release on Amazon Prime in May 2022 we have won over 50 international film festival awards and nominations, and received over 100 informed and passionate reviews on IMDb, Letterboxd and various culture websites. In the main these reviews praise the film’s anger, insight and originality, its production values, its performances and its soundtrack, comparing it to the works of Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Alan Clarke and even Theodor Dreyer.

Standout quotes such as ‘a searing portrait of modern Britain’ are incredibly validating and prove that a large international audience – who are also going through their own individual horrors under globalised capitalism – need authentic stories like this to remind them that they’re not alone and they’re not going mad.

We hosted a free screening of the film on a working-class Manchester housing estate in Moston, for instance, and many of the attendees recognised the role poverty, alcoholism, drug use and domestic abuse have played in their day-to-day lives. A few also said that cinema should be ‘entertaining’ and ‘escapist’, and commented on the complex plot and timeshifts in the film

How do you respond to comments on indie and arthouse films, that they're too complicated and hard to understand?

Years ago I used to teach A level Cultural Studies, and whenever a new cohort of 16 year olds would arrive in the classroom in September I’d introduce the subject to them as a brand new way of looking at the world and everything in it. Naturally, the students who could be bothered to glance up from their phones would just pull a face at me.

So I’d start telling them a story about Picasso, the ‘weird’ famous painter who they’d hopefully heard about at school and, on the SMART board, I’d pull up a copy of his 1937 portrait called ‘The Weeping Woman’. The story may or may not be true, but it sounds true and that’s the point.

So it’s 1937 and Picasso is at this big party celebrating the completion of his latest masterpiece, ‘The Weeping Woman’, a study in female suffering. While he’s standing next to his painting, sipping a glass of champagne, a wealthy businessman steps over to speak with him.

‘Picasso,’ he says, ‘your new painting doesn’t make any sense to me at all. It’s called ‘The Weeping Woman’ but it doesn’t look anything like a woman.’

‘What do you mean exactly?’ Picasso asks.

‘Well, she’s all broken up into triangles for starters. And both of her eyes are on the same side of her face!’ he exclaims. ‘It’s ridiculous. She looks like a child’s unfinished jigsaw puzzle.’

‘But, Señor,’ replies Picasso, ‘this is a portrait of my lover who I care about very deeply. And whenever she’s crying, and there’s nothing I can do about it, this is how she appears to me: broken and in pieces.’

On a good day, after I’ve finished telling this story, most of the students who’d been looking down at their phones would now be looking up at Picasso’s painting with a smile on their faces, their eyes illuminated. A female student, usually, would suddenly announce: ‘Ooo … I really like that story!’

So that's why I decided to direct and edit ‘Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist’ from a similar perspective - because, during the actual process of creation, that's how grief appeared to me. That's how abandonment appeared to me, and how my country appeared to me: broken and in pieces.

What do you think of British cinema and the role it plays in our society?

The history of British cinema can primarily be understood in terms of the way it portrays class and the class divisions which flow from the hierarchical nature of the United Kingdom’s social system and which create advantages and disadvantages for different social groups in different parts of the country.

Many of us alive today first learned of the existence and influence of the rules and rewards of social class as children while watching, for instance, David Lean’s ‘Great Expectations’ (1946), Carol Reed’s ‘Oliver!’ (1968) or Richard Fleischer’s ‘The Prince and The Pauper’ (1977).

Repeated screenings of these movies usually took place in a school assembly or in the family living room over the Christmas period and, I would argue, such public exhibitions contributed to a cultural normalisation of social prejudice, inequality and exclusion by disguising these conditions as simply an inevitable part of British history and tradition.

While the 1960s’ new wave ‘Angry Young Man’ arrived and blew a plume of cigarette smoke in the face of authority, articulating alternative expectations and aspirations for white working-class British males, such insubordination was given short shrift.

Despite dynamic and memorable performances from Richard Burton in ‘Look Back in Anger’ (1959), Albert Finney in ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ (1960) and Richard Harris in ‘This Sporting Life’ (1963), it is telling that their character arcs always concluded with them being either abandoned or emasculated as punishment for not knowing their place.

Against the cartoonish backdrop of the ‘Carry On’ franchise and its production line of pathetic proletariats, the trajectory of Michael Caine’s filmography throughout the 1970s provides an interesting counterpoint in that his commercial success rested largely upon the re-appropriation of his Cockney origins, persona and on-screen roles.

For example, only five or so years after the incendiary, anti-establishment release of ‘Get Carter’ (1971), he was suddenly battling on behalf of Queen and Country in ‘The Eagle Has Landed’ (1975) and ‘A Bridge Too Far’ (1976). So it is no surprise that when he left to further pursue the capitalist dream of Hollywood fame and fortune later in the decade, he was more or less deified by the country’s mainstream media.

Of course, everything exploded when Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 and cultural war was openly declared on the men and women of the labour movement and their representation across Britain’s sterling silver screens. In the blue corner were David Puttnam, Richard Attenborough and Merchant-Ivory, and in the red corner were Mike Leigh, Dennis Potter and Alan Clarke.

Noticeably, state school kids were far too busy reciting profanities in the playground from ‘Scum’ (1979) or ‘Made in Britain’ (1982) to give a toss about the posh swag bag of Academy Awards accrued by state-supported nostalgia narratives such as ‘Chariots of Fire’ (1981) or ‘Gandhi’ (1982). I should note here that Michael Caine did go some way to redeem himself in this decade by supporting Julie Walters’ wonderful working-class lead in Willy Russell’s intellectually aspirational ‘Educating Rita’ in 1983.

Under the tenures of John Major and Tony Blair in the 1990s the changing of the guard necessarily took place, and Richard Curtis and Kenneth Branagh dutifully took up their well-financed positions with ‘Four Weddings and A Funeral’ (1994) and ‘Notting Hill’ (1999), ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ (1993) and ‘Hamlet’ (1996). Meanwhile, as a reflection of the ongoing embourgeoisement of mainstream British culture and society, authentic working-class cinema not only had to search for its roots and values in the iconography of the underclass or ‘poverty porn’, it had to also search for its funding abroad.

Films such as Mike Leigh’s ‘Naked’ (1993), Danny Boyle’s ‘Trainspotting’ (1996), Gary Oldman’s ‘Nil by Mouth’ (1997) and Ken Loach’s ‘My Name is Joe’ (1998) highlighted that the remnants of working-class togetherness and community could now only subsist on the margins by way of the narrative ritualisation of petty crime, drugs or alcohol.

During the 21^st century, as the British Empire suffers its death throes and the country’s post-Elizabethan standing on the world stage rapidly dwindles away, the Establishment in its attempt to remain in power has in general reacted by re-asserting outmoded notions of cinematic representation that are increasingly reductive, intolerant and undemocratic.

While commercially successful film franchises like ‘James Bond’, ‘Harry Potter’, ‘Downton Abbey’ and ‘The Crown’ continue to suffocate the growing diversity and demands of our shared culture, the mediated elevation of privately educated white male screen actors such as Benedict Cumberbatch, Eddie Redmayne and Tom Hiddleston has seemingly transported us back to the post-war performances of Lawrence Olivier, Alec Guinness and David Niven.

To end, it is no coincidence that the working-class white male protagonist in my film has no community around him: he sleeps alone, he drinks alone and he weeps alone. He lives in a society that disrespects, mocks and ignores working people’s invaluable economic and cultural contributions to the nation. He feels that nobody loves him, and he doesn’t deserve to exist.

How could trade unions and activists get involved with the film, and films generally?

A first step would be for trade unions to show active support for ‘Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist’ by directly recommending it to their members, their friends and their families. The film explicitly explores in detail issues that are close to working-class experience – the human consequences of redundancy, unemployment and the debilitating process of claiming Universal Credit, for example.

If there are activists who have access to screening facilities, I’ll be more than happy to send them a free copy of the film for exhibition, my email is This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. And if anyone is in the Greater Manchester region in January, we are holding an exclusive free screening at the Leigh Film Factory in Wigan on the 20^th January, from 7pm onwards.

Finally, you can always watch the film right now on Amazon Prime for around £4.

Such a public display of support from the trade unions would alert other working-class filmmakers and documentarians up and down the country that there exists a real-world authoritative alternative to the ‘colour-by-numbers’ period dramas, CGI extravaganzas and quirky lifestyle stories plopped out by the BBC, Sky, Channel 4 and the British Film Institute. It will inspire them to work with trade unions to create challenging and humane narratives from a non-corporate perspective so the effects of, say, austerity cuts, COVID corruption and the cost-of-living crisis can be rigorously and memorably explored as we continue to suffer under this nice and shiny neoliberal kleptocracy of ours.

Just look at the ruckus RMT leader, Mick Lynch, has been causing on a weekly basis on inane television programmes like ITV’s ‘This Morning’ or ‘BBC Breakfast’, and the real hope this has inspired in ordinary people sitting at home.

Just think about what else we could do – about how much further we could go to bring back honour, dignity, fairness and intelligence back to the British Isles.

The soundtrack to the film is on Spotify. 

and below is the audivisual version of the interview.

Some snowmen had topknots. Some wore football scarves and skull caps. Some had veils over their faces. One had fairy wings. They all began to sing......

Snowfall, friendship and feelings combine in this heartfelt and celebratory story about coming together. There's a relatable and joyous sense of wonder as the snow starts and as the friends pull together to build their snowman. Filled with heart, hope and humanity, it is easy to imagine The Sikh Snowman becoming a firm favourite. - Jake Hope, Youth Libraries Group

The Sikh Snowman, by Owen Gallagher with artwork by Fiona Stewart, ISBN 978-1-912710-29-4. Price: £9 plus £3 p. and p.

Every year for the past six years, Culture Matters has run the Bread and Roses Poetry Award. The competition is free to enter and is aimed at supporting and encouraging poetry with a broadly social and political content, written by and for working people.

The Shouting Tories is an anthology of some of the poems submitted, including the five winners of the Award. The poems have been selected to showcase the range of topics and poetic skills of entrants to the Bread and Roses Award. Unsurprisingly, there are many poems about ‘the shouting Tories’, expressing the sadness, anger, contempt and revulsion felt by working people towards the shameful personal behaviours and deliberate oppression of the poor by Tory politicians.

W.H. Auden once said that it is the responsibility of poets ‘to defend language from corruption… When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear.’

In the first quarter of the twenty-first century, it is hard to hear anything against the continuous white noise and shouting of barefaced political lies – especially from the Tories – through PR, advertising and social media. There are so many words saying nothing, and too many contemporary poets add to this white noise, writing about themselves and their private dramas.

The poets in The Shouting Tories are doing their best to defend the language. This is public art, arguments about society and politics made with clarity, force and precision. These writers avoid sentimentality and rhetoric – they say what they mean and mean what they say.

- Andy Croft, poet and publisher of Smokestack Books

 The Shouting Tories, 56 pps., ISBN 978-1-912710-50-8, available for £9 inc. p. and p. 

Every year for the past six years, Culture Matters has run the Bread and Roses Poetry Award. The competition is free to enter and is aimed at supporting and encouraging poetry with a broadly social and political content, written by and for working people.

The Shouting Tories is an anthology of some of the poems submitted, including the five winners of the Award. The poems have been selected to showcase the range of topics and poetic skills of entrants to the Bread and Roses Award. Unsurprisingly, there are many poems about ‘the shouting Tories’, expressing the sadness, anger, contempt and revulsion felt by working people towards the shameful personal behaviours and deliberate oppression of the poor by Tory politicians.

W.H. Auden once said that it is the responsibility of poets ‘to defend language from corruption… When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear.’

In the first quarter of the twenty-first century, it is hard to hear anything against the continuous white noise and shouting of barefaced political lies – especially from the Tories – through PR, advertising and social media. There are so many words saying nothing, and too many contemporary poets add to this white noise, writing about themselves and their private dramas.

The poets in The Shouting Tories are doing their best to defend the language. This is public art, arguments about society and politics made with clarity, force and precision. These writers avoid sentimentality and rhetoric – they say what they mean and mean what they say.

- Andy Croft, poet and publisher of Smokestack Books

 The Shouting Tories, 56 pps., ISBN 978-1-912710-50-8, available for £9 inc. p. and p. 

Andy Croft of Smokestack Books has picked the following five winners for 2022:

Jennifer Johnson        Uprising
Steven Taylor             The Red Wall
David Williams          Closed
Nick Allen                   After the Conference
Tracey Pearson          Somewhere a Tory Flaps its Wings

The following entrants have been selected for this year's anthology:

Jennifer Johnson          Uprising
John D. Kelly               The Rainless Moon
Mark Cassidy               Fear of the Unfinished
Keith Hill                     Democratic Deficit
Antony Owen              Our Street of Ghosts
Bob Beagrie                 The Gresham Angels
John F. Keane              Hey You There!
Liam O’Neill               Mr Cameron’s Foodbank
Ciarán O'Rourke          Concerning the Condition of the Working Poor
Ian Parks                      Marston Moor
Steven Taylor               The Red Wall
David Williams            Closed
Emma Purshouse         Unsuitable Places
Nick Allen                   After the Conference
Gillian Mellor             Entitlement
Oz Hardwick              Ceasefire
John Ling                    Boiler Suit
Steve Pottinger            (Don’t) Read All About It!
Ruth Aylett                  Obituary
Julie Easley                 Resist
Alan Morrison             The Shouting Tories
Moira Garland              Wash Your Mouth Out
Jenny Mitchell             Levelling Up
Tracey Pearson            Somewhere a Tory Flaps its Wings
Simon Tindale             Working-class Blues
Martin Hayes               What Resistance Means
Holly Bars                    Arsehole
Joe Williams                Jacob Marley’s Ghost
Rob Walton                 The Magic of Other Bruces

Congratulations to the five winners and thanks to all those who entered. The anthology, entitled The Shouting Tories, will be available to buy soon. If you wish to order copies in advance please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The poems have been selected to showcase the range of topics and poetic skills of entrants to the Bread and Roses Award. Unsurprisingly, there are many poems about ‘the shouting Tories’, expressing the sadness, anger, contempt and revulsion felt by working people towards the shameful personal behaviours and deliberate oppression of the poor by Tory politicians.

Here are the judge's comments on this year's entries:

W.H. Auden once said that it is the responsibility of poets ‘to defend language from corruption… When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear.’

In the first quarter of the twenty-first century, it is hard to hear anything against the continuous white noise and shouting of barefaced political lies – especially from the Tories – through PR, advertising and social media. There are so many words saying nothing, and too many contemporary poets add to this white noise, writing about themselves and their private dramas.

The poets in The Shouting Tories are doing their best to defend the language. This is public art, arguments about society and politics made with clarity, force and precision. These writers avoid sentimentality and rhetoric – they say what they mean and mean what they say.

Here is one of the winning poems: 

Somewhere a Tory Flaps its Wings

by Tracey Pearson

a foodbank volunteer     pretends not to know
her neighbour   adds an extra packet of biscuits

a child eats cereal for breakfast    dinner
and tea   now poverty's on the menu

a veteran sleeps in a tent     under a bridge
waits for the day     the bombs stop

a mental health support worker   pops
an antidepressant   prays for a quiet day

a young man   drives his van   through
every page of the A-Z     making Amazon drops

a widow   remembers her wedding day
as she fills in  the Bereavement Support form

a striker raises a banner   explains again
about fair pay   job cuts   security   rights for all

a single mother    goes to the Job Centre   knowing
the job she wants    doesn't want the likes of her

an old man kisses his pint     leans into
the bar for comfort     misses his shipyard

an interviewer asks the Westminster liar     if he cares
he ruffles his hair    smirks    answers a different question

somewhere    Love flaps its wings    the tired people
begin to believe     rise up       and sing