Height: 21 cm 

Width: 24.8 cm

Polychromos pencils and fine-liner pen on white card

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A Post-Election Coat Of Arms, December 2019.

I started this piece the day after the January election, when the UK voted in Boris Johnson as prime minister, AKA, the no-deal Brexit, openly racist and sexist, poor people hating and NHS-privatising british Trump. He’s been backed by the right-wing media whipping the nation up into a xenophobic frenzy, namely The Daily Mail and The Sun. 

It’s taken me a long time to finish it because I felt sad and angry working on it. I still don’t like to think about how right-wing my country has become. 

Anyway, as I tried to gather my thoughts for what to write about this illustration, I decided to do so as a poem:

I grew up with a notion of my country,
for which I am now in mourning.
I am staggered by the apathy
by the suspicion and the selfishness. 
Maybe my notion was always wrong,
maybe the way I perceived my country was always incorrect.
Was hope
and was compassion
ever here? Does it remain?
Or has it been bleached by The Sun
and deafened by the war-cry,
by the incoherent hollerings,
of billionaires baying for blood.