We thought you might like a little political controversy this Monday morning. Kevin Higgins takes a provocative look at the United Left Alliance.

Against Togetherness

for Kevin McLoughlin, Kieran Allen and the boys and girls
of the United Left on the occasion of their temporary political marriage

Tolerable
to meet one of them
in an elevator and make polite
meaningless eye contact
on your way
to not the same floor; okay
to make miniscule
talk with one
about promised weather
(which, of course, he’s against)
as you sit either side of
the giant pink lampshade
in the brothel waiting room.

But gather them together in conference
or for Christmas dinner, they become
devils with a theory grown
in a rancid tea cup; devils
each with a photo
of his or her own private Kronstadt
massacre of the inconvenient
in their hip pockets; devils
who roll ‘poverty’,
‘debt’ and ‘future generations’
around on their tongues
like boiled sweets.

They demand the truth
so they can put it in a jar
and spend their whole lives
avoiding it; devils I’ll make no pact with,
though the country’s begging for change
with a small foam cup
and the cancer’s in five different places.

Kevin writes:  “Though I only wrote it this year, this poem already has a fairly colourful history.  In it I take a contrary view of The United Left Alliance. Having been a member of Militant for twelve years in my teens and twenties, both in Ireland and the UK, and seen how that organisation’s high sounding talk about world revolution ended in the ridiculous joke that was the Tommy Sheridan libel case and subsequent perjury trial, the idea that that organisation (now The Socialist Party) could be any part of the solution was laughable enough. The idea that them getting together in an alliance with The Socialist Workers Party, an organisation whose opportunism is such that they would likely, as a friend of mine once put it, ‘be prepared to sodomise their own dead grandparents live on national TV if they thought it would buy them some short term political advantage’, could make the situation any better was, well, hilarious. It is a difficult poem for me because there are some in The Socialist Party, such as Clare Daly who was elected a TD in Dublin North, who I would still consider a friend and who I know from experience to be a person of great integrity. Generally, though, the organisations that make up the United Left are probably somewhat less democratic than the Catholic Church and could teach Michael Lowry a thing or two about manoeuvring. The poem was published on The Irish Left Review website, but then the editor got cold feet and took it down. It was then published on the UK based site Harry’s Place.”