XLVI

So the Punch and Juda Show trips on to titillate its audience

Thirsting for certain social problem groups to blame for austerity

And its’ limiting of their spending power to afford the latest

Means of escape, newest motorised commodities, disingenuous

Gadgets designed for undurability, or new additions to

Their property portfolios –Mr Punch will slap a stigma

On Jude for them, under the new sobriquet of “Scrounger”,

Thus distracting the punters from MPs’ filched expenses,

Property-flipping, tax-‘relocation’, and other acceptable

Peccadiloes of bourgeois bling –lenient sentences for sons

And daughters of capitalist excess caught with their hands

In public coffers, in spite of their riches, simply because

The opportunities arose and they just couldn’t resist them

(O the magnetic pull of those expense-sparing temptations),

But with good solicitors they’ll get off lightly with slapped wrists,

Be effortlessly pardoned, then make the next year’s Honours Lists

(If they’ve not been stripped of their Honours already) once

They’ve refunded their frauds –but no such lenience for

Pauperised “spongers”, even once they’ve coughed back up

Their desparately needed scraps –they must be made

Examples of: “tougher sentences” for those unfeelingly

Defined as “benefit cheats” for “fiddling” claims or dabbling

A bit on the side, simply to get by, make ends meet, avoid

Ending up on the street: apparently these ‘dole-fiends’ have

Had it so good for so long, only being publicly “named

And shamed” –for their entrepreneurial spirit when seriously

Up against it– on the front of red-tops, pilloried for ‘crimes’

Of cutting corners that would otherwise cut them, just to

Continue existing in straitened times, through a smoke-and-

Mirrors social security labyrinth, a fire and brimstone pit

Of homeiletic protocols sculpted in tablets of compliances

Via a Department of Whiphands and Punishments, which

Disenfranchises, penalises, impoverishes at every twist

And turn of tortuous protocols; encourages stigmatisation

And neighbourly espionage against its own “customers”;

Obfuscates statistics; hypberolises “benefit fraud” to

Epidemics, rumour-mongering IDS-spun “Idleness”

Diseases –so rhetoric cranks up some notches more, now

Out of the mouths of multi-propertied metropolitan lawyers:

The so-called “fraud” of the poor will be punished identically

To that of corporates, the affluent and super-rich (so much

For moral relativism –it’s a funny old kind of “fairness”!)…

But in spite of this, there are those who proselytise the warped

Religion of “tough love” and soft hate tactics of inquisition,

Who think those previous ten month prison sentences

Were too wishy-washy for the waifish likes of “welfare fiddlers”

(Even if their microscopic ‘pilgering’ is fuelled on pure

Financial desperation due to caps to their benefits, “spare”...