For the past 84 days I’ve been co-editing with Andy Jackson a post-election blog called ‘New Boots and Pantisocracies’, publishing each day a new poem by a different poet exploring the different political landscape we seem to have entered. Perhaps it’s time now to review where we’ve got to.
By way of proper introduction, the blog’s name is a portmanteau term combining the title of Ian Dury’s marvellous debut 1977 album with the name given in the 1790s by the young Romantic poets, Samuel Coleridge and Robert Southey to their utopian scheme to set up what we would think of as a socialist society in America, a project reimagined by Paul Muldoon in his 1990 poem, Madoc: A Mystery. The intro to ‘New Boots’ is as follows:

‘The 2015 General Election has made manifest the great sea-change that has been occurring in UK politics over the last fifteen to…