What is England? A land of fossils?
Buckingham Palace, Stratford, the Lakes?
Tourists clog up the cosy deadlands -
But still, in the hinterland, there wakes

A thoroughly bourgeois English blackbird
In green English trees after English rain!
Loudly he sings his property rights
And the bonussed bankers join the refrain.

Land of the Angles, Somalis and Jews,
Roast beef, spaghetti, and sweet and sour;
A girl in a veil now cuts my toenails
And New Etonians flaunt their power.

Half of us knackered and half of us scrapped,
We cough in the ash clouds of crime and dope,
But when we switch on the Royal Wedding,
We know that, while there’s life, there’s soap!