We have the largest peace time budget deficit since the War –

(Tumpty-tum!); we were bankrupt then, now we’re asset-rich

But cash-poor (tumpety-tum-tum-tum!); but this Coalition Gove-

-rnment will use fiscal methods more akin to the scorched-earth

Economics of the decade before, the Thirties’ cusp, to be precise,

When slums and Hoovervilles rolled out like urban sprawls

Over citizens, while greenback bills were hoovered up by Wall

Street’s bottom-feeding speculators who’d tipped the Western World

Into Depression in the first place –but we’ll use the rhetoric

Of post-war Labour’s caps and rations, market mass attrition

Of the poorest in the kinder diction of Attleean Austerity

(When we really were “all in it together”), crank up scapegoating

Of the mythological “Scrounger” –And so say all of us!– turn

The dictionary on its head, call ‘persecution’ “compassion”;

Call ‘stigmatisation’, “justice”; call ‘theft’, “trustification”;

Call ‘eviction’, “decanting”, ‘street-homelessness’, “rustication”;

Call ‘social cleansing’, “gentrification”, call ‘fiscal fascism’,

“Book-balancing”, or “fairness”, or anything else but what

It actually is; couch eugenics lexicon in euphemistic Press

Release-ese, but indulge in Malthusian dysphemisms

To play to the gore-hungry galleries, whip up public contempt

For the sponging unemployed, the malingering sick and disabled –

Get up Lazarus, we’ve kicked away your sticks! Get down to

Atos, if you’re fit enough to resurrect you’re fit enough to work!–

Stigmatise drug abusers, gypsies, travellers, the mentally ill,

Immigrants, Roma, WRAGs, NEETS, CHAVS, ASBOs, LTBs

(De-abbreviated to “Lazy Thieving Bastards” by Jobcentre-

Plus employees (all human puss is the same to us) beset by

Compassion fatigue –though strictly For Internal Use Only)

And –so say all of us– lump the lumpenproletariat all in together,

And all other non-contributory “social problem groups” who

Don’t quite fit into the tightly budgeted ‘Brig Society’ –a badge

For each angle of scapegoating, insignia for stigmatisation,

What better shape than a triangle, equilateral naturally,

Inverted or pointing upwards, thrusting, or turned down,

Depending on gradations of degradations and choicest indigences,

Some even crossed both ways against one another to form stars,

And all chromatically coded depending on degrees of undesirability,

The particular tilt of state-burdonesomeness and taxpayer liability…