Sonnets on the subject of “Spring” may be submitted via the comments. I want proper rhyme, none of yer bleeding assonance.
Alternatively, you may just have time to follow the CBBC website lesson plan “Fair trade, fairer world poetry”
Students write a poem about a fairer future for Africa and enter them into a competition judged by Children’s Laureate Jacqueline Wilson.
The competition that this BBC lesson plan promotes is sponsored by Divine Chocolate and Christian Aid. Some political and commercial sponsorship in the classroom is OK, then. And it’s good to see them dropping all that overdone paranoia about sweets and junk food. Anyway, you’ll be wanting to get started:
Read out the following explanation of fair trade to the class:
It is part of the Newsround guide to trade. Click on the link in the blue box for the full guide.
What is fair trade?
Fair trade is about making sure farmers get the best price for their crops in the poorer parts of the world.
Many organisations that do this are allowed to print the FAIRTRADE Mark on their products.
Sometimes the sense of dèjá vu I get from writing these posts is spooky. Blue box … Guide to trade … I have been … here … before. I have wondered what on earth the BBC was doing providing lesson plans before. I have wondered at the way the external links all push the same agenda before. In some past life, just as I did today, I have run a search of the CBBC website for the word “trade” and found an overwhelming assumption that buying and selling was something akin to injecting yourself with dangerous drugs, a basically harmful activity only to be done in dire need and with six carers and two policemen standing by.
Well, at least something has changed since my last visit. The “Guide to trade” now contains a new article: What are ‘sweatshop’ goods?
A sweatshop is a factory where the workers do long hours for low pay, they may have to work in uncomfortable or dangerous conditions.
In richer countries like the UK there are rules that protect workers from being treated badly or paid too little, but this is not the case in many of the countries we trade with.
Never mind that applicants queue up for prized factory jobs in Third World countries, because the people there rightly see them as a route out of poverty and vastly preferable to the quaint but miserable life of a subsistence farmer. Never mind that the economist Paul Krugman, scarcely a right-winger, has said that forcing Third World economies to pay Western wages and operate to Western environmental standards is a policy for good jobs in theory and no jobs in practice. The passage finishes with a statement that in its innocent ignorance would amaze me, only I am living my life in a BBC-induced time loop and don’t do amazement any more.
Lots of cheap clothing that’s sold in the UK is a good deal for the customers here, because making it was a bad deal for workers in the third world.
No, sweetie, not because. Every economist for the last three centuries might as well never have been born.
How about a similar deconstruction of the way the BBC is funded?
Wheres the Fairtrade for prosecuted welfare mothers?
What about “good deal for the BBC bad deal for its customers”?
Some questions for the BBC:
How is it ‘fair’ to force people to pay a licensing fee to an institution against their will? To remove the option of free choice from someone?
Is that ‘fairer’, or less ‘fair’, than a system that strikes a price between a buyer and a seller, both making free choices, in an imperfect world?
A citizen in a third world country gets a job, an above average wage and works in above average conditions. As this is so much better than the alternative, he isn’t surprised that the job he got is in huge demand. How exactly is this person being treated unfairly?
Look at first world nations that were third world not so long ago, in historical terms – USA, Australia, Canada. Look at China and India. Their success has been and is being built on the choices and self made wealth of the citizen mentioned above. It is not built on handouts.
Perhaps the BBC might focus kids attention on how fortunate they are not to live in a country where the currency of exchange is not a gun, but money. Perhaps an analysis might be useful on how it is might be a GOOD and healthy thing for people in poor countries to hitch themselves to the same currency of exchange, and to ditch the barter/ guns model.
Dumb and dumber. I could be spending that £120 on my kids, not on some bimbo media outlet.
Biased BBC announces: Why can’t sweat shop workers just be grateful?
I suspect this site is run by a mutton chopped mill owner from 1850 who cryogenically froze himself and has just come out of hibernation.
Incidentally, of course a good deal on cheap clothing for us is a bad deal for THEM (workers who produce it in the third world)
If it was a good deal for them (comparible wages as those seen in the Western World) it would no longer be a good for us.
Of course, I’m a materialist who happily pays for that cheap clothing, and hopes to continue doing that, so I’m no better, but at least I’m not condescendingly and arrogantly proud of the standard of living I was lucky enough to be born into, merely grateful.
Which goes back to the original message, so typical of this mean-spirited hive of paranoid right-wing elitists: Sweat shop workers should be grateful they have a back-breaking job that earns them a pittance and that they’re not toiling in a field or scavenging for rubbish.
Anyone who even shows sympathy for them is just a silly little bleeding heart lefty who doesn’t understand the way of the world.
Oh, show some compassion, it won’t hurt.
False Spring.
The morning mist of early spring is shimmering and purple-green.
The newborn daffodils begin a vernal dance:
A pristine scintillating scene.
Winter had gone, life’s aims reviewed.
The force of Nature spurs us on
To fresh adventures, hopes renewed
For the coming yearlong marathon.
Then April fools us all
As East winds pierce, icy and fierce,
And sleet, then snow begin to fall.
The daffodils and tulips droop
Beneath the weight of winter’s cloak.
And chirping hatchlings from the coop
Fell silent ‘neath the dripping oak.
This is OT and I’ve emailed Natalie separately, but here goes anyway:
The BBC is currently broadcasting what looks like insurgent propaganda video as part of a segment claiming the US military is losing control of western Iraqi towns.
Details here:
http://sirhumphreys.blogspot.com/2005/10/bbc-uses-propaganda-video-to-claim.html
And the original post which started it off:
http://sirhumphreys.blogspot.com/2005/10/ap-and-reuters-photographer-bilal.html
Hank
Thanks for the meaningless rant. Two points:
1 You’re wrong. A good deal for us is also a good deal for them.
2 Sweat shop workers should be grateful they have a job that permits them to earn an above average income in their country. That rule applies in any market to any worker, as it permits that worker to enjoy a higher standard of living. Are you honestly arguing that they should be deprived of this?
Hank, Australians currently work harder but earn far less, in relative terms, than people in the UK. So do Kiwis, Indians, Chinese, Americans and pretty much any other country you might care to mention. Out of interest, would you also argue that this is unfair and needs to be changed? Should the Aussie working hard be given sterling currency for his or her salary?
Hank, what would you say to a 3rd world worker who could not get a sweatshop job? Would you argue that the workers who do have the sweatshop jobs have an unfair advantage?
Africa grows cocoa
But adding value is a no-no
CAP’s barriers to trade
Means no chocolate may be made
And wealth is kept from the Congo
Hank, see Cockney’s posts for examples of how to engage those with whom you disagree without being a twat.
Hank,
When the writer Johan Norberg surveyed Vietnamese workers at a Nike plant, the number one wish expressed by the workers was that Nike would open more plants in Vietnam so that their relatives could get jobs with Nike too.
45 years ago you could have been talking about poverty stricken Japanese factory workers. I am actually old enough to remember when Japan exported the same kind of cheap dime-store gew-gaws that China now produces. When I was a child, “Made in Japan” was actually an oft-used synonym for cheap dime-store crap.
35 years ago, South Korean factory workers.
75 years ago, American factory workers.
It takes time for an agrarian country to industrialize and get wealthy — 2 or three generations. But they always do seem to get wealthy, don’t they, historically speaking?
If they’re capitalist, that is. Industrialization didn’t seem to have done much for the socialist countries. They stay poor.
Ships on the seeeeeeee
Bringing T-shirts to meeeeee –
For summer.
Susan,
It’s not an either-or.
Just because someone is willing to be exploited does not make it any better that sweatshops pay pittance, have gruelling, repetitious work that is dangerous and often causes long term damage. Why should company ethics go out of the window because someone is too dirt poor to turn down work?
Using that logic, as long as willing supply existed and I was willing to pay for it, I could demand all manner of dangerous and unethical services that would be categorically in my own country.
A similar kind of logic applied to the guy who made “Bumfights”.
Differences in the cost of living and expectations of affluence are one thing – and clearly companies should be free to source abroad appropriately.
But exploitation is another entirely. Most defences of sweatshops point to jobs lost when protesters highlight conditions, conveniently ignoring that they aren’t “lost” in any true sense. They are transferred elsewhere with less regulation or negative PR.
The situation is not an either-or, sweatshops vs no jobs. Companies can still invest ethically and have a significantly lower cost base than in their traditional manufacturing sites.
Anonymous, (I presume you are Hank)
The situation is not an either-or, sweatshops vs no jobs. Companies can still invest ethically and have a significantly lower cost base than in their traditional manufacturing sites.
I don’t see anybody here arguing any differently. But you contended that companies should pay equally in the developing world with Western workers which would retard their economic growth.
I also suspect that a lot of the “Fair Trade” hoo-haw in the West is really just a smokescreen for First Worlders trying to keep more competitive products out of their countries.
How “fair” is it of them to go around bragging about how “moral” they are when all they are really trying to do is protect their jobs and living standards from developing countries’ competition? I for one find it very hard to believe that the fat rich socialists sucking from the public trough over at al-Beeb care one twit for poor Third World workers.
The left Dont REALLY care about anyone apart from themselves.
ITS ALL just a stance.
They just USE the poor to advance their own moral grandstanding.
Remember leftism is a mental illness. Their attacks on the right are normally just a projection of their their repressed/hidden thoughts.
OT
Someone blew himself up 100 yards from a stadium full of people watching a ball game in Oklahoma City over the weekend. There is evidence to suggest that the man had connections with Islamic extremism.
A potential botched suicide bombing in the heart of the United States AND I HAD TO FIND OUT ABOUT IT ON THE BLOGOSPHERE!!!!!
Why on earth have the BBC failed to cover this story?????
Another post from Natalie
Your poetry is requested
Make sure you rhyme it properly
As assonance will be rejected
Its National Poetry day you see
Fair trade and spring the topic
It involves our friends the BBC
So the bias will be something toxic.
To the beeb it is simple, the yanks are to blame
And that is why Africans suffer
The Israelis will get some more of the same
But it’s really Bush the old duffer.
It’s clear that Africa is very poor
Fairer prices are whats needed
The EU cap is at the core
And should be superseded
Anonymous, (I presume you are Hank)
I’m not.
“I also suspect that a lot of the “Fair Trade” hoo-haw in the West is really just a smokescreen for First Worlders trying to keep more competitive products out of their countries.”
Possibly, but no worse than US or European farmers, manufacturing and airlines demanding protection and subsidies to maintain competitiveness.
Fat-rich capitalists clamour to demand protections where they don’t or can’t up and move their businesses somewhere cheaper. White collar workers don’t go a bundle on having their jobs outsourced to India either.
And furthermore, one of the reasons why agrarian 3rd world economies struggle so much is because of protectionist policies from supposed free-trade and socialist governments alike.
I still maintain that people paid above average wages for services delivered, in any country, cannot call themselves ‘exploited’. In that sense I am exploited because I am being underpaid for the services I deliver. Ultimately dead end socialism argues precisely that : we are all exploited; therefore return the means of production to the people. It’s a nonsense argument.
Sweatshop workers in Asia, for instance, are exploited more by their government than by any foreign corporation.
And furthermore, one of the reasons why agrarian 3rd world economies struggle so much is because of protectionist policies from supposed free-trade and socialist governments alike.
Anonymous, I don’t think you will find many people on this blog who support protection subsidies for First World farmers, manufacturers or CAFs. You certainly don’t know your audience if you think that!
White collar workers don’t go a bundle on having their jobs outsourced to India either.
I can’t say it’s a possibility that I would welcome personally, but in the end I know that eventually what goes out to India will come back to the First World in the form of greater demand for our products and greater investment in our industries. Plus, a rich country is a country that doesn’t have time for civil wars, warlords, and other wealth-killing tomfoolery. Fewer civil wars, warlords, ethnic cleansing etc. means less expenditures for me, as a taxpayer who helps finance the world’s main globo-cop.
Further thoughts on “Fair Trade” —
The Left can’t afford to have more South Koreas and Japans and Taiwans arise from Third World poverty, because it would put them out of business. Leftism is after all akin to a religion, and religions are a business. So they agitate for all their worth against “globalization.” It’s really a form of self-preservation, smokescreened by self-righteous piety and moralizing that sometimes becomes rather sickening.
I recommend you read John Norberg’s “Defense of Global Capitalism.”
Anonymous / Hank
Get someone to read this book to you
http://store.cumberlandbooks.com/economicsinonelesson.html
O/T: more Newsround spin.
This is another Newsround nexus that merits close scrutiny methinks. I suspect that it contains not not a single word of criticism of Islam, and therefore amounts to Islamic propaganda, with added sugar just for the kids.
John – It’s a foretaste of BBC’s ‘Tomorrows World’ 🙂
I haven’t noticed Fair Trade coffe being any cheaper than proprietary brands,so either some third world coffee growers are getting paid first world prices or some bugger has found a nice little earner.
Hank says, “of course a good deal on cheap clothing for us is a bad deal for THEM (workers who produce it in the third world)”.
Hank, the belief you are implicitly supporting has a name: mercantilism. Mercantilists believe that trade is a zero sum game; that in every interaction there is a winner and a loser.
The good news is that this rather paranoid belief is wrong. Trade is a win-win game.
In your own life, if you make a swap or sell something to a friend, you only do it if *both* of you think you will get a benefit from the deal, right?
I don’t have a telepathy machine so I won’t start a never-to-be-settled argument as to who is the most compassionate. But it’s usually a mistake to assume, as you do, that someone who has different views as to what works therefore wants bad ends.
I assume you want, as I do, all the world to leave behind the lives of poverty, back-breaking toil and disease that have been the lot of most humans throughout history but which has been largely left behind by the developed world. Great. So don’t deny them the system that worked for us; the only system that has ever actually done the trick.
You say that we think, “Sweat shop workers should be grateful they have a back-breaking job that earns them a pittance and that they’re not toiling in a field or scavenging for rubbish.”
Grateful? Many report that they are. Some may not be. It’s not my business. All I really need to assume about sweatshop workers is that they are rational people who are, on average, better judges of their own best interests than their would-be “protectors” in the First World.
There’s nothing wrong with sympathy, but they haven’t particularly asked for mine. They have asked for my custom. I’m delighted to oblige – not out of charity (except in the sense of general goodwill) but because they are selling stuff I want to buy.
When I was a left winger I waited and waited and waited for poverty to end in all the African and Asian countries that practised the sort of managed economy Christian Aid et al advocate. Never happened. They went backwards. Yet in my lifetime, as Susan and others have also argued, perhaps a billion people, particularly in China and India, have lifted themselves out of dire poverty through capitalism.
I was not so busy ranting that I forgot to admire the wonderful poems. Frank P’s was so poignant that I am not sure it isn’t an ironic quotation of a piece by a well known poet that I am just too ignorant to recognize.
Bravo Natalie. Socialists always assume that we pro-capitalist types are just heartless old skinflints. They never consider that we’ve been around the block a few times and have seen a few things that contradict their ivory-tower world view. They never consider that we’re pro-capitalist because we think it is a better system for ending poverty and ignorance in the world, simple as that.
I think Leftism/socialism would largely disappear if all the teachers, TV broadcasters, journalists, writers and Monbiots of the world were forced to actually get a job in the private sector for a few years and learn how to create a product, make a sale, service a customer, and balance a P&L statement etc.
>…I am not sure it isn’t an ironic quotation of a piece by a well known poet that I am just too ignorant to recognize.< Oh Natalie, you sure know how to wound a man! ‘Plagiarism’ is as cruel as you can get. No - ‘twas just the puny effort of a loyal fan To best fulfil the little task you set; To play the game, to honour Poets’ Day Though poet I would not ever claim to be. Hardly in the class of ‘Darling buds of May’ Not even as ‘ironic parody’. 🙂 I know ... Enough! (As you would say)
Hank`s been at the Cafedirect espresso again.
Al-Beeb says “In richer countries like the UK there are rules that protect workers from being treated badly or paid too little…”
Ah yes. Well let me tell you something, I am an accountant, working for small businesses in my locality, and I have actually seen people lose their jobs because of the Mininum Wage, as small cash-tight businesses are forced to lay off workers who they simply cannot afford to employ under neo-communist terms and conditions.
I could (if it did not go against client confidentiality) back this up with the names of actual companies, who, after I did my duty and informed them of the new regulations, the directors sighed and said “Right then. We have to lose him, him, her, and him”. F*****g EU.
(A disclaimer): I (the Tom wot wrote the previous comment) am not the Tom that wrote that great poem some 10 or so comments above this one.
Apologies (and well done) to that Tom, I wouldn’t want to claim credit for myself.
“I can’t say it’s a possibility that I would welcome personally, but in the end I know that eventually what goes out to India will come back to the First World”
Sure, like most things for most people. Acceptable in the abstract, but hugely inconvenient when it affects you directly.
“The Left can’t afford to have more South Koreas and Japans and Taiwans arise from Third World poverty”
Why is this a problem of the left specifically? HaOr are you suggesting that anyone pushing for/permitting protectionism and subsidies – including George Bush, US airline CEOs, midwest farmers, US steelworks etc – are “the Left”.
As for your other comment:
“I think Leftism/socialism would largely disappear if all the teachers, TV broadcasters, journalists, writers and Monbiots of the world were forced to actually get a job in the private sector”
It would certainly be an interesting experiment. I’d like to run it in parallel with all CEOs doing their lowest paid worker’s job for six months, all politicians forced to live on the breadline a la Barbara Ehrenreich for six months.
Anonymous
Most CEO’s,if they’re any good, probably have started working in the lowly paid jobs you describe. Many have come from relatively poor or working class backgrounds. Wherever they are from, the market dictates if they stay in the job or not. It’s not a job many people would want as you can be fired far more easily than any other worker.
Natalie
I know Poets’ day is over but please indulge me as I let my rabid doggerel out of the kennel for one last time:
Senile Dementia
Old Auntie Beeb has flipped her lid.
She’s acting like a spoiled kid
By biting at the hand that daily feeds her.
She’s gone all leftoid agitprop.
We just can’t seem to make her stop,
So some now shout, “Old Beeb: who bloody needs her?”
There’s ITV and Sky TV
Plus lots of other choice that’s free;
Then what about the Internet?
It hasn’t reached its Apex yet.
So why should we cough up a tax
For Auntie Beeb’s fallacious ‘facts’?
Let’s tell her, “Auntie Beeb • now hush!
Or change your name to Anti Bush.”
Bloggers of the world, unite!
Let’s put an end to Auntie’s shite.
Sorry – the last word should have ‘spite’ – a Freudian typo!
“Most CEO’s,if they’re any good, probably have started working in the lowly paid jobs you describe”
Untrue. The exceptions tend to be ones that get specific press attention like the McDonalds chap who really did start out on the shop floor.
Most now have a university or similar education and have come in through the management route.
I’d be interested if you could substantiate the % of, for example, FTSE 100 CEOs that had not come in at the shop floor level.
It’s hard enough
To write this stuff
But what’s really tough
Is that you called my bluff…
Enough, I beg, enough!
I believe you Frank. Sometimes, as President Clinton is reputed to have said, a cigar is just a cigar.
Anonymous,
Sure, like most things for most people. Acceptable in the abstract, but hugely inconvenient when it affects you directly.
Sure, it would be hugely inconvenient, and I have a lot of sympathy for people in that situation. But as I said, it’s eventually a gain for everyone, so we pick ourselves up, meet the challenge, start all over again, get stronger and richer in the process.
It has been ever thus. Only socialists believe in the zero sum game. Only socialists believe because someone else gets rich, it automatically means someone else gets poor.
Why is this a problem of the left specifically?
Because it would put them out of business. You notice how little they care about the working class of the West anymore — because the working class of the West is too comfy and too rich today to want anything to do with the Left and its infantile idiocies. The Third World is the left’s big growth area — they can’t afford to let that get rich and comfy too, then they’d be out of business. The Left thrives on misery — it can’t survive in happiness.
It would certainly be an interesting experiment. I’d like to run it in parallel with all CEOs doing their lowest paid worker’s job for six months, all politicians forced to live on the breadline a la Barbara Ehrenreich for six months.
Why the vociferous class hatred? I never understand this European class hatred — is it because you were all living under Dukes and Earls for a thousand years as serfs? Well we Americans never had any Dukes and Earls and we don’t share your contempt and hatred for successful people.
But anyways, the point I was trying to make, is that you have alot of people in positions of influence — like the BBC, like al-Guardian, like the Labour Party – who are making policies about things they don’t know anything about.
A CEO can certainly learn something useful by doing a low-paid worker’s job, but it’s not likely to change the way a company has to function in order to make money and survive.
Meanwhile your average Monbiot, BBC reporter, doesn’t have to actually create anything that works but can just continue to publish crap books and opine about things he doesn’t know anything about, without any penalty. They can feed comfortably off of capitalism’s largesse because of the work of the people they despise.
Are you my same old nasty friend Anonymous who likes to attack me all the time? I never did understand why you preferred to hide behind that cheap and cowardly device of “Anonymous.”
Susan
>Why the vociferous class hatred? I never understand this European class hatred — is it because you were all living under Dukes and Earls for a thousand years as serfs? … Well we Americans never had any Dukes and Earls and we don’t share your contempt and hatred for successful people< It's not general here either Susan. A very, very small percentage of people in Britain remain leftist once they have left the idealistic and rarified atmosphere of the Gramscian halls of academia and enter the real world. Only the ones who failed to get laid while they were there; or the ones who are just plain physically ugly remain envious enough to want to hold every else back from initiative and enterprise for the sake of egalitarianism. From what I have observed they exist, pro rata, in the US as well. It's the ones in the liberal media who want to take over the world for modified Marxism(and probably already have) that you need to watch, not the whingers, w*****s and wooly peaceniks. The ones who don't show out are the more dangerous.
We must have a special link to the collected poetic works of Frank P!
May I indulge:
An Ode to Justin Webb
They call our dear Webb Mr. “Cob”
Because his brains are full of ’em
As gray whisps float instead of thoughts
Our Webb is forever dull an’ dim.
(Okay I realize “full of ’em” and “dull an’ dim” don’t quite rhyme perfectly, but they sort of do in Yankspeak, where the vowels in “them” and “dim” are pronounced approximately the same.)
Can’t leave Orla out:
An Ode to Orla Goering
Our charming Ms. Orla
Is something quite bore-la
As she twitters about
With the same old pout:
“Arabs are just ducky
But Jews are quite yucky!”
Ode to Auntie
As her licence fee gets ever dearer
So her bias gets worse – you should hear her!
Am I watching the news,
Or some communist’s views?
What channel IS this – Al Jazeera?
The BBC’s able propagandists
Have velvet gloves on their iron fists
They’ll ply you with lies
And the truth in disguise
Till you’ve all become good little communists!
The BBC’s able propagandists
Have velvet gloves on their iron fists
They’ll ply you with lies
And the truth in disguise
Till you’ve all become good little communists!
I would have said “And the truth they despise”. They don’t really disguise it as it doesn’t feature unless it’s not affecting their greater agenda.
Well, I guess it would also be accurate to say, “The truth they mutilate,” since they lop large pieces off any truth till it conforms to their bias.
But of course “mutilate” would neither rhyme nor scan properly.
The problem with “The truth they despise” is that, taken together with the preceding line, it doesn’t make sense:
They’ll ply you with lies
And the truth they despise
Perhaps this would work:
The BBC’s fine propagandists
Have velvet gloves on their iron fists
They’ll ply you with lies
(For the truth they despise)
Till you’ve all become good little communists!
Note the substitution of “fine” for “able”. It scans better and works better with the rhyme scheme of “iron”, “ply”, “lies” and “despise”.
End of poetry workshop.
I like this one, posted by ‘Anonymous’:
Ode to Auntie
As her licence fee gets ever dearer
So her bias gets worse – you should hear her!
Am I watching the news,
Or some communist’s views?
What channel IS this – Al Jazeera?
One tiny quibble: stricly speaking it ain’t an ode, it’s a limerick – but I’m sure that the poet knows that and anyway it’s well within the bounds of poetic license to give your limerick the title of an ode.
Hank Scorpio – Something tells me you have never actually seen Third World children and women trawling through vast, steaming rubbish tips. They are steaming because the vegetable matter discarded forms a vast compost heap, but other rubbish is thrown away on the same mountain – like old saucepans, say, which may fetch one or two ringgit – so they dig through the compost.
Workers who queued up all night for an interview, turned up wearing their freshly laundered clothes, showered (no deodorant because they can’t afford it), hair clean and tidy, hoping against hope to get a job in a well-ventilated factory, possibly with a free lunch provided and probably with a free company doctor would kill you with their bare hands for wanting to take such opportunities from them.
As well as the above, they get a regular, guaranteed salary. You may be surprised how frugal these people can be because they want to save money so their children don’t have to join the labour force at age 10. So their children climb one step out of dire poverty and may even get a job in the same factory. That would be two family members earning a good and secure local salary, meaning they may be able to finance a family member through college.
How dare you disapprove of such aspirations and such industry? How bloody dare you?
“I like this one, posted by ‘Anonymous’:
Ode to Auntie
As her licence fee gets ever dearer
So her bias gets worse – you should hear her!
Am I watching the news,
Or some communist’s views?
What channel IS this – Al Jazeera?”
-Oops, forgot to sign myself – that was by me (The Tom who DIDN’T write the other poem by Tom, as explained further up the thread)!
So now we have Tom, Tom and TomL, all in one thread.
Maybe you should change your name to TomP3 as the third Tom who was inspired to poetic expression on this thread?!
There are more Toms on this thread than there used to be in Bayswater Road on a Saturday night before the Sexual Offences Act of 1959.
As /I’m rapidly becoming known on the blogosphere as “Oh, THAT Tom…the t**t”, I’ll change my moniker to “otttt” from now on.