A Slip of the Tongue

by Jim Mainland

Forgive me, but I rarely listen to
the flagging-ship Today programme these days.
However, a nonagenarian
acquaintance of mine who ‘takes’, as you chaps say,
the hard-right organs The Telegraph,
Spectator and Mail – these days your target
demographic, it would seem – alerted me
to the fact that during his interview
with congenial John McDonnell, Nick Robinson
made a chilling reference to something
called a Momentum ‘cabal’.

According
to my friend, who was almost incoherent
with terror, this evil entity is
abroad in the land dictating Labour
Party policy and perhaps soon that
of the entire nation.
To calm him down,
I promised to do some research and was soon
able to reassure him that Momentum
is not a small, dangerous, secretive,
manipulative cult, as Mr Robinson’s
unfortunate choice of word might lead you
to believe, but an open, democratic
organisation with a large membership
of decent, tolerant individuals
who happen to want a fairer, more equal society.

I wonder if this was a slip of the tongue
on Mr Robinson’s part; perhaps he was
really thinking of the ERG,
or the CBI,
or the Taxpayers’ Alliance,
or the Dominic Cummings Experience
when he used the word ‘cabal’.
I’m sure, given Mr Robinson’s love
of the rhetorical flourish, he must have
referred to those aforementioned groupings
in such a way at some point in the past?
Oh, he hasn’t.
How remiss of him!

In the interests of scrupulous impartiality,
may we expect to hear Mr Robinson using
the ‘c’ word to describe them in future?
I would like that very much.
On a lighter note, the lack of political diversity
within your news production and presentation
teams undermines your much-vaunted claims
to impartiality and ‘balance’.
How about you give over the Today programme,
or any of its satellites, to Momentum to edit
and present for a week? I reckon they would
make a pretty good job of it,
and would probably be happy to do it for nothing.
Think of the savings!

The poet has sent this poem to the BBC as a complaint on the biased use of language on the Today programme.

The Voices

by Jim Mainland, with images by Peter Long

The voices arrived every morning.

In fact, I often seemed to wake to their jibber-jabber. They weren’t the voices of anyone I knew, despite the intimacy they assumed. They weren’t people who would normally have anything to do with the likes of me.

The way I heard it, there were about four or five of them, in rotation. There was one male voice which harrumphed the whole way through. Harrumphed. I can’t think of any other way to put it. He was very self-important. They all were in their different ways, but him especially. He liked inviting other voices into the discussion and then interrupting them. Sometimes they didn’t get a chance to say much. Occasionally, though, there were people that he did seem to approve of because he would let them talk to their heart’s content and even chuckle along with them.

Pretty soon his voice became intolerable to me.

Then there was a posh-sounding woman’s voice. Well, there were two, actually, but one wasn’t quite so posh. They both sounded very similar, though, and sometimes I had difficulty deciding which one of them was talking at me. There was also a man who was quite posh. This voice spoke in blandishments. The other voice – also belonging to a man – was very chirpy and bumptious. He was very confident in what he spouted every time he opened his mouth. As if that made it alright.

These voices all sounded very knowledgeable about the world and well furnished with opinions. They were always well pleased with themselves. I got the impression they didn’t have to take things too seriously because whatever they had decided to talk about wasn’t likely to have much effect on them personally. It was all a bit of a laugh. If you got too serious about things, well, that was a bit off, really. However, there was one emotion they very much approved of, but it wasn’t available to everyone, just a select few. This was the emotion which was intrinsic in the act of one being ‘moved’ by something. There seemed to be an unspoken consensus as to what merited this accolade. If something was deemed to be ‘moving’ then it was highly acceptable and much sought-after, but not discernible by the multitude.

I soon got the impression that they presumed that I automatically shared their view of the world.

It was very difficult to ignore these voices. I could only train myself to nullify them. I noticed that if I listened closely, then what they were saying was utterly vacuous. They simply repeated the same things, in tired and unimaginative language, in worn-out tropes and with wearying platitudes. If they accidentally hit upon a concept that was new to them, they were flummoxed. So they made sure they never did. Anything that existed of outside their own narrow understanding of the world, as it had been handed down to them, was treated with mockery – a defence mechanism, I suspected, which was employed to cover their own bafflement. Frequently they changed topic after every few minutes, as if suffering from some kind of hyperactive affliction. No attempt was ever made to respond in any depth to anything. Perhaps they feared that I would no longer listen to them if they didn’t keep skipping from one superficiality to the next, or maybe the voices worried that if they dwelt too long on anything it might expose their ignorance.

Yet even when I managed to stop hearing them I kept hearing them in a way because at other times it was terribly easy to tune into the same kind of things being said again and again in slightly different but eerily similar voices.

And so it happened that I found myself pitying their brittle egos. Their forced smiles. Their ersatz bonhomie. Those awkward times when they tried to ‘get down with the kids’.                                                                                                                                          

And I was suddenly suffused with despair, realising that I could never help these plaintive, disembodied voices, these hopeless, hapless burblings of a decaying class trapped in some endless theatre of the absurd of their own making.

Happy Brexmas

by Jim Mainland

The turkey’s chlorine-washed

                                             bish-boshed

                                                           well and truly stuffed

and there’s no room

at the Wetherspoon’s  

         so go give birth in a foodbank,

             you citizen of nowhere,

                                                   you queue-jumper

     you plank!

And goodbye wise-guy Magi

                   (we’ve had enough of experts)

and, Oi, shepherds, watch your backs

                                                             (how come your sheep

       do nothing but bleat?)

because we want no stranger danger

                                         in that manger    

no swaddling, molly-coddling

       benefits cheat.

But we have had a whip-round for the Boy

           gift-cobbled together some of our best ye olde –

Terry’s All Golde,

   Brut (ya beaut!)

                         and Omo,    

to speed you on your way, bro,

to soften your Windrush

                     bumsrush

because it’s hostile, it’s a jungle out there, so I’m told...

And us?

We’ll follow the felt-collared spiv,

            wrap our minds

in the flag of St George  

          and set to sea in a sieve.

For Folk’s Sake 

by Jim Mainland

The will of the people!

The people’s vote!

The enemies of the people!

The people’s princess!

The People’s Friend!

The Wee Arra People!

Q: Quantify the value of p

where b[ollocks] is constant.