Author’s Note: British Immigration Officials are being rewarded with gift vouchers for ensuring 70% of failed asylum seekers lose their tribunal appeals and so are sent home to possible torture or even death.
*****
“This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.” ((“King Richard II”, Act 2 scene 1. W. Shakespeare.))
This soiled latrine that stinks, this septic isle,
This dearth of sympathy, that bleats and jars;
This den, this old fool’s paradise of bile,
This fortress built by Whitehall that debars. ((Whitehall: London street housing Government offices.))
The mean Orwellian state of the mind,
That makes a game of human life or death;
These bureaucrats might be of humankind,
But Homo Sapiens don’t hold your breath.
Of course they’re just obeying those on high,
Those governments, who eying up their votes;
And who’ve set out to slur and vilify,
Whilst cutting corners and thereby some throats.
Why don’t officials get themselves a gun,
Or put a chitty in for Zyklon ‘B’? ((Cyanide-based poison used in the gas chambers of Nazi extermination camps during the Holocaust.))
If they can’t shoot the poor sods one by one,
Then organise the task industrially.
These apparatchiks and their politics,
Could function with their folders and their phials;
And concentrate on their statistics fix,
Whilst practicing in secret their ‘Seig Heils’.
And all for what? Their shameful, sorry plight?
So readers of the Mail and Telegraph; ((Right-wing Tory newspapers.))
Sleep easy in their beds night after night,
And wake in Airport One for a good laugh. ((Airport One: George Orwell’s ‘1984’ name for Britain.))