Another Imperial Day

(album: Carnival - 2005)

You could be there on a dark October night
Waiting for the moment to be swimming across the freezing river
Holding a plastic bag of belongings just out of the water
Climbing up the banks on the other side, hiding in the trees
So cold that you hardly show as a target
On the heat seeking gear of the Border Control
But you made it, you're another one over
Sleeping on a bench in a railway station in the heart of Europe
Haven't eaten anything for two days straight
But where there's a will, there's always going to be a way

And every door is guarded and every guard costs money
So the women are bought and kept and raped and sold as slaves
Because the family borrowed from The Man
And The Man has always got to be repaid
For the deals of the borders and the fake IDs
And the stolen passports all locked away
While the women are working and gagging down on their knees
And somewhere in the back of Terminal Three
In the clogged-up corridors of the Immigration Authorities
Whole families with the wrong bits of paper
Are waiting to be sent back to where they came from
Escorted by officials out across the tarmac
With their wrists bound tight with cable-ties behind their backs

It's dawn and there's fog in Rotterdam harbour
And the guard's on his break and the dogs are chained by the wire
Three figures come out from behind the cranes
And make it across the train tracks
Clamber aboard a Panamanian freighter headed for the Isle of Grain
Find a place to hide in a stack of containers another payload of World Trade
Because goods are free to move but not people
Oil is free to move but not people
Jobs are free to move but not people
Money is free to move but not people
And today they got a man hauled off a truck in the Port of Calais
We watch them in silence as they lead him away clutching his battered suitcase
But his face betrays him lost and scared and defeated
Sitting in the back of the white Port Authority van
Well, where do any of us come from? It's pretty hard to say
While high in the sky above us tonight
The bombers are heading the other way south and east
Into the blood red crimson sunrise of another Imperial day