Get Real!

GET REAL!

On 12th May 2010, six days after the British general election had resulted in no party having an overall majority, David Cameron and Nick Clegg, leaders respectively of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties, agreed to form a  coalition Government.  The coalition immediately proposed a massive programme of cuts in government spending, unforeseen in its extent in either of the two parties’ manifestos.  To their critics this was motivated more by an ideological desire to roll back the frontiers of the state than by fiscal prudence.

On 9th December 2010 the coalition Government, following proposals from Lord Browne, former chief executive of BP which was responsible for the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, agreed to allow student tuition fees to be increased to £9000 a year, in spite of Liberal Democrat election candidates having signed public pledges never to agree to the existing cap on fees being removed. As a result, large and sometimes violent student protests erupted in central London towards the end of 2010.

These events are the background to this scathing verse broadside against the coalition Government.

‘It is the wit that does the real damage in this bravura display of finely controlled outrage’ – Times Literary Supplement