Whose Side Are We On, And Who Is 'We'?

Today is the day the English celebrate
'failed democratic reform day', when in 1605
a Catholic 'terrorist gang' led by an English mercenary
who had been fighting the (Catholic) Spanish
planted explosives in the cellars of the House of Commons.

The English being the hypocrites they are
they don't know what they are 'celebrating'
that the gunpowder was put under Parliament
or that it was discovered and the plotters arrested
before the reforms it would start could take place.   

The English, who like letting off fireworks
whatever the cause. or lack of it,
use this date to 'entertain children'
with bonfires, simple food, and fireworks
neglect their history as if dates and sides,
and old laws and old prejudices, no longer mattered.

Representative democracy is a recent invention
that only arrived with the full franchise in 1928,
and when for the first time MP's were paid a wage in 1937,
thus allowing poorer candidates to stand.

But already the idea was being prepared to be lost
in an amnesiac media where what the news said yesterday
was being prepared to be forgotten by tomorrow.