odourofdevonviolet.com
The Scent That Captures That "1930s Moment"!
All material copyrighted to odourofdevonviolet.com © 2014
or to the various credited sources © 2014
...Then, by the equally integritous George Lansbury, son
Of a Suffolk railway worker –who’d laboured as an emigrant
Journeyman in Australia between punishing periods
Of unemployment, then, as a timberer back in London;
Who rose up through the ranks of the Social Democratic
Federation, and then through the Independent Labour Party –
Stood for election unsuccessfully as socialist candidate
For Middlesbrough, then for Labour in Bow and Bromley
Where, on his second attempt, he made it into Parliament
In the 1910 election –led the party from 1932-
35, during which period he found time to pen and publish
Two polemical volumes, My England (Selwyn & Blount,
1934) –a treatise depicting a future socialist state built on
Revolutionary and evolutionary foundations– and Looking
Backwards and Forwards (Blackie & Son, 1935),
Before passing on the baton to slit-eyed Clement Attlee
Who turned out far greater than the middle-class gradualist
Manager he was purported to be (such promising glimmers
Already on display in his eloquent polemic parcelled
In Victor Gollancz’ Left Book Club scarlet card covers –
Today, mostly all shelf-paled to coral pink– The Labour
Party In Perspective, published in 1937, only two
Years into his leadership)… Both Henderson and Lansbury
Had been two of nine Cabinet Ministers in MacDonald’s
First Government to reject cuts to unemployment benefit
Proposed through expediency by Chancellor Philip Snowden
And his May Committee as a means to tackle the deficit –
The Labour Party promptly expelled MacDonald and his
Jackalish acolytes: decapitation of a Hydra-headed
Leadership, Henderson replacing J.R.M. as the leader
Of a Labour Opposition; but the beleaguered MacDonald kept
His grip on the premiership sans his party with the proposition
Of a National Government –the sprawling corpus of which
Would be composed mostly of Tory major organ donors,
Splenetic by degrees, and some Liberals’ woolly entrails –
With himself still at the helm, all under his “Doctor’s Mandate”
To find a ‘cure’ for the crippled economy… And the Public
Patient seemed to like this etherised prescription, supported it
At the ballot box in October 1931, returning MacDonald’s
Amalgamated Medicines Incorporated with a huge
Majority –a landslide which would tip Blighty into stagflation,
Chronic underconsumption and peaking unemployment…
LXVIII
Radical Anglican Clergy of England aside, over in Rome
Pope Francis –Argentina-born Jorge Mario Bergoglio–
Calls for the Catholic Church to put the poor first (cue
Much mute applause from the tea-cup-clasping laps of The Tablet),
A compassionate edict directly going against the grain
Of oligarchic governments and hedge-hegemonies
Of the Plutocratic Occident, whose Troika-caked decrees
Are uniformly geared towards arraigning the indigent,
Rhetorically re-pinning the ‘P’ for ‘Poor Relief’ back on
The worsted shirts of the twenty-first century’s epidemic
Crop of leper-spurned peasants and lumpenproletarians
(Modern compatriots of van Gogh’s muddy-coloured
‘Potato-Eaters’: urban labour surpluses who sup
On tinned pasta –tasteless as wallpaper-paste– for nightly
Repasts), although for their kind there’s precious little ‘Relief’
Left these days, save for workfare, vouchers, food banks
And alfresco soup kitchens –so the countervailing
Cloth can only be cut so far in this post-industrial loom
Of patched polemic, where there’s no room for compassion
Or empathic counter-patterns; guillotining tongues
Are portcullis-sharp at cost-cutting –and cheesewire-
Precise when it comes to circumscribing Swiss loopholes–
And being economic with the salami-sliced truth; and
Prevailing narratives stitch up the dialectical tryptich
Of thesis, antithesis and synthesis together in one
Knitting basket of intransigent stigmas (and often the only
Ones groping around for those slippery needles of elusive
Verity are more the woollier …); thus, in times of scarcity,
The Czars and Captains of society have a ball blaming
The poor and meek for their municipally apportioned lots
To take the knocks in red-top-pelted public stocks –in such
A punishing climate, all such churchly beseeches fall
Among the stones and thorns; conscience-pricking echoes
Which are –at least in England– so much water trickling
Off a duck-house roof, or frogspawn scooped up from a sludge-
Bloomed moat to the champagne-fluted, nickel-biting, liquid-
Lunching antinomians in suits, those pinstriped number-
Crunchers who play pinball with our rapidly depleting public
Services, punch holes in our communities from Whitehall…
