Sleaze, March 1997

I bought you an offshore company
I bought you the national lottery

I bought you a low-wage economy
I bought you sex with the DPP

I bought the man who gave your MP
Three nights in the Dorchester, for free

I bought you a job from the Japanese
And as well as obtaining these

I bought you a top notch education
Behind the closed down railway station

I bought you the right to work till you drop
In a metal hanger called a shop

I bought you the right to lie on a trolley
And to buy a clapped out flat with your lolly

I bought you the right to be repossessed
And to meet the bailiffs in your vest

But as if, my friend, that wasn't enough
To show that I am really tough

I bought the police's overtime
To smash your skull on the picket line

I bought a new plutonium tank
I bought a dodgy foreign bank

I bought you a prison in the sticks
And a nice new home for MI6

I bought you a hideout in the trees
I bought you a deadly brain disease

I bought electricity and water
And sold them back to you, my daughter

I bought some planes for foreign capers
And Winston Churchill's private papers

I bought the civil service too
And placed a toll gate in the zoo

I bought you satellite TV
And as for the judiciary

I bought some judges to condemn
Those nasty, foreign sounding men

I bought your taxes and gave them away
To Fergie, for a rainy day

But please contain your gratitude
Do not donate your children's food

I bought your right to vote for me
By abolishing democracy.

Lottery UK

Softly, in the darkening town
The people flock to Mammon's shrine
Each evening at about this time –
The newsagent at number nine.

The vacant shoppers stand and wait
As bland as politicians' lies
Where “squeegee merchants” congregate
With fantasies behind their eyes.

They do not queue for soup or bread
A poverty afflicts their soul
Imagining their OK spread
Dreaming of their swimming pool.

Later, like paper parachutes
The wreckage of a million dreams
Spirals, slowly, to the floor
Trickling down like urine streams.

Carpeting the town with hope
Forgotten paper in the streets
Blows up and down the thoroughfares
In crumpled drifts, like soiled sheets.