Driving through Keynsham.

 This Morning in Keynsham Highstreet

Friends... My premiership of Keynsham has been short but glorious. What started as a crazy dream just  a few short weeks ago has now become history. Right now I cower in the peoples palace, while those outside, whipped up by CIA propaganda and pro-capitalist lies, beat their fists on the gates of freedom.

I ask you now Keynsham, when all is said and done and I hang from the gallows like a common criminal, what victory will you have you won? Another second rate retail outlet, another Starbucks? Even now the top brass meet to discuss how to rebuild what we have torn down and planted over, but to them ‘rebuild’ is simply a euphemism for carve up and destroy. Will they focus on the people? No, will they fight the ignorance and apathy that characterised the time before my coming?  No. Will they line their pockets with dirty money and the sweat from your  backs? Yes, yes they will.

Watch them chew up your green belt and pleasant land and with frightening logic, build-up there, their shopping malls and stadia.

There will be those that ask why we did what we did. There will be those who wonder what it was all about. So let me tell you now.




People of Keysham, I came to shake you, to invigorate your spirit and make you beautiful and wonderful again. But you have defeated me, and your reward is this. You shall have the chance to piss your lives away in a succession of meaningless futureless jobs. You and you progeny shall be never more than content,  neither rich nor poor, cultured nor cool they shall populate the half-way point between Bristol and Bath, until such time as you are swallowed and forgotten by the sub-urban sprawl.

We had the chance for one fleeting moment to make the word revolution mean more than a circuit of the Hicksgate roundabout.

No doubt the powers that be will tear down the tollgates there if they have not done so already.

No doubt they will tear down all the others as well. No doubt they shall remove the mounted guns and the heads on spikes and reclaim the coins and Sat Nav’s we took and no doubt they shall call it a victory for convenience and freedom. But it shall not be one for independence.

I said to you that we would have to make sacrifices, and we have. Many of you have paid the ultimate price, many of you have lost loved ones. I can see why you might be angry.

The gods are meant to reward sacrifice, and you feel that they have turned against you because those rewards were not forthcoming. We did not get bigger and brighter televisions. We did not get warmer homes and softer beds. We actually lost things... We lost broadband, we lost free view, we lost non-seasonal vegetables, fast-food meals and exotic-meats. We lost petrol and telephones and electricity but stop and think for a moment what we gained.

Who can forget the crops that we harvested together and how good it felt to see them safely stored in the new barn. Who can forget the waves of tangible solidarity that swept through us as we manned the guns for the first wave of government troops that snaked it’s way like column of dragons along the A4. Who can forget the joy as they turned their tails and fled dragging dead and wounded as they went.

When this is reported, the story will be told of a mad man. A mad man and a community of deluded followers, led to their own destruction. They will call us a cancer, they will call us an abomination. But Keysham, beautiful Keynsham… I weep for you. For I believe that we really had something special, something undeniably pure. Our stand together, though violent, was as a rare flower bursting into life. A desert poppy blooming in the wilderness now drowned in rivers of blood.