Toxic Times
By
Opher Goodwin
Foreword
It is March 2022 and I’m sitting in my study writing this. We are two years into the Covid Pandemic, over two years into Brexit and a couple of weeks into Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine. We have a useless self-serving clown in charge of a crime syndicate that is presently running the country.
It appears that the Russians have orchestrated the Brexit referendum vote as well as the election of Trump and Johnson. They are financing the Tory Party.
Incompetence, corruption and sleaze are the hallmarks of this greedy bunch of nationalist extremists who masquerade as Tories but are nothing more that self-serving populists.
Brexit is an utter mess. (Just as predicted and labelled ‘Project Fear’) it is fuelling the break-up of the UK and costing us around £32 billion a year. Pretty catastrophic. Worse than that it has replaced cooperation with competition, replaced freedom with red-tape and removed a raft of rights and freedoms.
Wresting back control has put power in the hands of a bunch of arrogant Eton schoolboys! They are giving billions away to their chums while slashing public services and hammering the poor. They call it levelling up. The up refers to the direction the cash is flowing.
The inept way this bunch of idiots has handled covid is responsible for tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths coupled with a massive hit to the economy. Their friends have made billions out of this catastrophe.
On top of that we have double jobs, double standards, law-breaking, illegal lobbying, lies and cynical control of the media. The level of sleaze and corruption has reached unprecedented levels.
The BBC is under threat, the NHS privatised by stealth, all public services cut to the bone, the police and military run into the ground, education made into an exam factory and the public duped and lied to.
Opposition to this bunch of profiteers will soon be illegal.
Leadership is invisible. When not hiding in fridges it is dressing up in some silly cos-drama coupled with selected soundbites, or rare readings from autocues. All scrutiny is removed. All accountability avoided.
Everything is brushed under the carpet.
We have silly lying platitudes handed out – ‘Got Brexit done!’ and ‘Got Covid done!’ as if these were triumphs instead of disasters. It’s all very Orwellian – yet a segment of the population are gullible enough to fall for these lies.
Then we have the war!! NATO is threatening to move to the borders of Russia and Putin wants to rebuild the USSR. The horrendous invasion of Ukraine is a diabolical work of madness.
We are threatened with war throughout Europe. The spectre of nuclear holocaust is waved before our eyes. The Ukraine is to be sacrificed as the sacrificial lamb but weapons are being poured in to fuel a proxy war that will deplete the Russian economy and morale.
This cold war is heading for a culmination.
Hundreds of billions of pounds is wasted blowing cities into rubble and killing helpless citizens. New generations are traumatised as minds and bodies are blown apart.
Will Putin survive? Will Russia survive?
The world changed.
Global warming is causing floods, droughts, extreme weather and environmental disaster. It threatens mass migration, starvation and huge global changes – an existential threat that is beyond anything we have yet envisaged.
Then we have the fascism of Trump, conspiracy and QAnon, ignorance, populism, stupidity, threat of civil war, hatred, fear and political extremes.
Welcome to the 21st Century. This is the backdrop to this collection of ‘Poems’.
I hope you ‘enjoy’ them.
Opher – 5.3.2022