Release the Sausages: Poems for Keir Starmer
Ed. Andy Croft, Culture Matters, £5/free download

MANY progressive political leaders have written poetry — Che Guevara, Angela Davis, Mao Zedong, Ernesto Cardenal, Ho Chi Minh, Jeremy Cronin, Agostinho Neto, Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama.

It is not known if the Right Honourable Sir Keir Starmer KCB KC MP has ever written poetry, but perhaps his strange, strangulated, Beckett-like speeches represent a kind of robot-poetry for the AI age.

Following in the tradition of well-loved poetry anthologies in honour of Nelson Mandela, Lenin, Jeremy Corbyn, Martin Luther King and Che, Release the Sausages! is an anthology of poems celebrating the first 12 months of Starmer’s government — from the heroic refusal to scrap the two-child benefit cap, cuts to the Winter Fuel Allowance, disability benefits and overseas aid, to televised deportations, undeclared “gifts,” drilling for oil, appeasing Trump, attacks on the right to protest, airport expansions, increased defence spending, and Gaza, Gaza, Gaza.

The many and spectacular disasters of this government’s first 12 months have hardly been a surprise. These people never disappoint you. In the absence of any apparent ambition other than to be in office, without any real popular support, with no allies, and lacking what Dennis Healy called “hinterland,” sooner or later Starmer was always going to embrace the default right-leaning political loyalties of every British government since Thatcher.

However, the speed with which they have thrown away the opportunity afforded by the collapse of the Tories at the last general election is still something of a shock. We tend to assume that our enemies are serious professionals, that they are knaves rather than fools.

But if we are governed by a fool, we have to laugh at him.

Appropriately then, for a political leader whose speeches leave everyone speechless, Release the Sausages! contains no poems at all, by over 50 poets who have nothing to say about a man who has nothing to say, including Anthony Anaxagorou, Malika Booker, Amir Darwish, Claudia Daventry, Jonathan Davidson, Imtiaz Dharker, Steve Ely, W.N. Herbert, Kaycee Hill, Khadijah Ibrahim, Mike Jenkins, Fran Lock, Adam Lowe, Michael Rosen, Martin Rowson, Joelle Taylor and Sarah Wimbush.

Almost everyone I approached about the project was keen not to write a poem about Starmer. Alan Morrison said he was: “Gripped by a sudden outpouring of empty page space.” Publisher Mike Quille says he wanted to put the joke into print “to help publicise the disappointment, anger and contempt that so many of us in the creative and cultural industries feel towards Keir Starmer's empty, spineless, vision-less leadership of the Labour Party.”

There were a few poets didn’t want to be involved. One thought the idea sounded cruel; another that it seemed sectarian. Some thought that it would be more effective to fill a book with poems criticising Starmer. But how do you “speak truth to power” when nobody in power is listening?

“Those who prefer to watch others drown now run the world and want to silence me,” says Darlington poet Jo Colley. “I resist being silenced with silence — I have no words for what is happening now, and find the current Orwellian narratives unbearable. Nothing makes sense, so why engage? But alternatives can be constructed in the silence.”

Release the Sausages; Poems for Keir Starmer is an empty and spineless book for an empty and spineless politician. The silence of the iambs. Words fail us.

Free download from culturematters.org.uk 
A round-table discussion about the role of poets in the Age of Starmer, Farage and Trump will be held at the Newcastle Lit & Phil, on Wednesday 30 July, 7pm, featuring some of the poets who are not in the book, including W.N. Herbert, Bob Beagrie, Tom Kelly and Jo Colley.