by Martin Bell
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,