British Labourite poet banned by Blairites for satiric Blair poems

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This video from Ireland says about itself:

Kevin Higgins – An Introduction with two poems from Revival

Launch of the Revival Poetry Journal issue 7, recorded in The Whitehouse, O’Connell St., Limerick, on Wednesday the 9th April 2008.

By Steve Sweeney in Britain, Tuesday, January 2, 2018:

Calls grow for Kevin Higgins to be reinstated into the Labour Party

A letter signed by over 30 people in today’s Star brands the poet’s 18 month suspension ‘absurd’

POET Kevin Higgins remains suspended by the Labour Party 18 months after writing a satire about critics of party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

A letter printed in today’s Morning Star, signed by more than 30 people, has called on Labour to reinstate Mr Higgins’s membership, branding his continued suspension from the party “absurd.”

Mr Higgins was one of the many to receive letters from Labour’s compliance unit suspending him from the party after the Labour right organised a failed attempt to dislodge Mr Corbyn as leader in the fallout of the EU referendum vote in 2016.

Included in the list of accusations against Mr Higgins was that he had refashioned German writer Bertolt Brecht’s poem Ballad of the Soldier’s Wife as a satire about Tony and Cherie Blair.

The poet lives in Ireland but campaigned for Labour during a visit to Britain and has continued to pay his membership fee as an overseas member.

He has been a member of the party since the age of 15 and was active in the anti-poll tax movement.

In 2015 he wrote the satirical poem Blair’s Advice on hearing that the former prime minister had written a column in the Observer saying Labour would only be successful by occupying the “centre ground”.

He tweeted at the time: “Tony Blair needs to just go away. I hear he has an article in today’s Observer. I’d rather make love to John Prescott than read it.”

Mr Higgins’s supporters wrote: “We think it absurd that someone can remain suspended from the UK Labour Party for 18 months for the supposed crime of writing satirical poems.”

They called on the party to “immediately clarify this situation.”

Here is the 2015 poem about the failed Blairite coup attempt:

BLAIR’S ADVICE (On hearing tell of his column in Sunday’s Observer)

Easy to say,
you’d rather make loud love
to Lord Prescott, or have
your face smashed between
Sir Cyril Smith’s quivering cheeks
than read Tony Blair on how
the motorway to the mountaintop
he envisages lies
through the centre ground;
when you know neither
gentleman’s available, right
here right now, to take you.
We need to make voting Labour
as pleasurable
for call centre managers and
estate agents of a certain age
as lowering their roasting
menopausal testicles
into a nice cold bath.

To this end, we need a leader
with ideas thrilling as a dripping cistern,
a man (or woman) likely conceived during a Conservative Association dinner
somewhere in darkest Buckinghamshire;
who, while his or her fellow students
were thoughtlessly dancing the blues,
bravely danced the beige;
a person of exemplary character apart
from that one conviction for stealing
the brass handles off
their own father’s coffin.
We must offer hope
to those who aspire to shop
for gourmet sausage meat
at Waitrose, and not
waste time on people who perspire
as they rifle through packets
of past-their-use-by-date
picnic ham at Aldi.

KEVIN HIGGINS

– Kevin Higgins’s poetry features in the generation-defining anthology Identity Parade — New British and Irish Poets (Ed. Roddy Lumsden, Bloodaxe, 2010) and in the recent anthology The Hundred Years’ War: Modern War Poems (Ed. Neil Astley, Bloodaxe, 2014). The Ghost In The Lobby (Salmon, 2014) is Kevin’s fourth collection of poems. His
blog is at mentioningthewar.blogspot.com.

This video from the USA says about itself:

New Report Finds Tony Blair Schemed With Bush To Invade Iraq

8 July 2016

An official investigation known as The Chilcot Report into how Tony Blair led Great Britain into war reveals that he and George W Bush conspired to bring their countries to a war of aggression based on faulty intelligence, lies and assumptions. Blair sent Bush a note promising loyalty.

And here is Kevin Higgins poem on Tony and Cherie Blair, based on Brecht’s Ballad of the soldier’s wife:

And what did she get, the girlfriend,
from the student union meeting
at which he rose to his feet
and realised he could speak?
From that meeting she got
the Snickers bar he forgot to eat
so busy was he watching them listen;
and that speech, unabridged,
every other night for thirty five years.

And what did she get, his new wife,
from the time he first used a party
conference microphone to agree with both sides?
Those okay with the Moslems/Mexicans/Gypsies being here,
and those who want them kept over there.
From that microphone she took away their
invitation to dine with the Deputy Mayor
and his not new wife.

And what did she get, his no longer new wife,
when, at the second attempt,
he won that seat on the City Council?
From his election she got to drink Pinot Noir
and go swimming in their private club
with the not-so-new wives
of those who got the contracts
to make the paving stones and install
the pay-and-display ticket machines
during his years as Chairman
of the relevant committee.

And what did she get, his well-maintained wife,
the night he was elected to the big shiny
parliament? From that night she took away
an architect to re-design their new three storey pad
in the priciest possible part of the capital,
and an article about herself
in the Daily Express lifestyle pages.

And what did she get, the no longer new MP’s
no longer new wife, the morning
they made him Minister?
That morning she got to go horse riding
with the Leader of the House of Lords’
fourth (or fifth) wife.

And what did she get, the no longer new
Cabinet Minister’s wife, the night the landslide
made him Prime Minister? That night
she got to hold to her breast
invitations to break foie gras
with the Sultan of Brunei, the President of China;
and the chance to write husband’s speech
announcing the crackdown on beggars
who accost hard working
families who stop to ask for directions
en route to the nearest funeral parlour

And what did she get, the ex-Prime Minister’s
no longer new wife, from all the depleted uranium shells
he had dropped during the Battle of Basra, all the soldiers
he sent to meet improvised explosive
devices in far Mesopotamia in the hope
of getting rid of something bigger
than the beggars and prostitutes
at Kings Cross. For these she got
white night terrors
of him on trial for all their crimes,
and the desire to never again
look out the front window of their fine
Connaught Square house
at the tree from which, it’s said,
they used to once string
traitors.

While the Blairite Labour party bureaucrats keep banning Kevin Higgins for poetry, they apparently never even thought of banning Tony Blair for war crimes, torture, money grabbing or his expressed preference for the Conservative party over the Labour party.

Mr Wolff also claims in Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House that Mr Blair tried to land a role as a Middle East adviser to Mr Trump: here.

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