Cultured Cops And New Labour Rot

Cultured coppers promote poetry.

Rancid Milburn to stand down at next election. Good bloody riddance.

Labour ready to abandon Tony Blair's public service targets (and Gordon Brown's as well). After 12 years they realise it's been a fuck-up and still think they should be re-elected! The stench of desperation is in the air. Matthew Taylor, arch-New-Labourite, pursues the party line justification that it's time for change because the strategy has basically worked: "if a policy succeeds, the problem it was designed to address has, by definition, diminished."

The rot that set in as New Labour took root (Philip Johnston):

Combined with a predisposition to micro-manage individual behaviour and ride roughshod over ancient liberties, it is hardly surprising that democracy and freedom are once again subjects to be tackled by political writers. It is a debate we have had before and presumed settled; but we reckoned without the damage it was possible to cause in just a dozen years.

Policing Poetry For Correctness

Not that many people will find this of interest...a short while ago I found myself in a classroom looking through a copy of the Folens GCSE English for AQA/A textbook. As a poet, I was interested to see what poems and poets were being studied. Here are the featured poets:

Grace Nichols
Imtiaz Dharker
Sujata Bhatt
John Agard
Derek Walcott
Niyi Osundari
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Denise Levertov
Tom Leonard.

Any comment I could make would be construed as racist but I do not believe that anyone can look at that list and not see an immense (and unjustifiable) imbalance. They're not all good poems, either.