Thursday 9 June 2016

The sound of poor people blaming poor people

[this should have 'irony alert' at the beginning in case anyone thinks I mean it as it sounds]

As our leaders contemplate which of two options
will secure their position,
can we please have hours and hours and hours
of people who say that migrants have made them poor?
Can we please have hours and hours and hours
of them never mentioning the banks crash of 2008
which, in one Tory minister's words 'caused misery to millions';
can we have hours and hours of them never mentioning the austerity imposed by a government which knowingly and publicly cut wages;
can we have hours and hours of them never mentioning the billions sitting in tax havens;
can we have hours and hours of them never mentioning the cost of wars that achieve nothing other than causing millions of people to become migrants?
Can we please have media people justifying this sort of stuff
by saying, 'This is what people think' as if there are no
other people who think anything different,
as if they, the media people, have no access to any other forms of information
which might reveal how we fail to share out the world's resources
in anything like an equitable way,
so that such radio and TV programmes just relay over and over again
the sound of poor people blaming poor people
over and over and over again.
It's vital that no one ever talks about eyewateringly rich people
divvying up the world's resources for their own benefit.