With hardly noticed irony EUDCE announced that it would save the people of Europe from starvation (a problem caused almost entirely by the EU’s policies) by introducing a strict rationing policy, and by issuing food coupons to ensure the fair distribution of supplies. Naturally, the food coupons were issued in large quantities to the sprouts and in very small quantities to the suspects.
It wasn’t just food supplies that were severely constrained. Nonfood purchases had to be made from charity shops (pretty much the only shops available) the majority of which received their stock in shipments from a number of Asian countries, mainly the two richest nations: China and India.
Shortages and rationing applied only to suspects. Sprouts were allowed to shop at special stores where food was available in unlimited quantities at token prices. For suspects, all foods were strictly rationed and shoppers had to accept whatever they were given when they got to the front of the relevant queue, even though the vegetables they were given might be bruised and half-rotten. Attempts to cheat the system and avoid queues by forming syndicates to buy food were regarded as a serious offence. Offenders who were caught were treated as guilty, because it was quicker and generally considered better all round for the community, and summarily deported without a trial.
There were street protests, of course. But, thanks to the mass of wide-ranging and oppressive anti-terror legislation introduced by the EU and by Labour Party in the late 1990’s and the early part of the 21st century, these were quickly crushed.
There was much mumbling and complaining but those who mumbled were fearful and most of their complaining was done behind closed doors. Doing the right thing, and expecting others to do it, was regarded as eccentric, childlike, naive and, most importantly, entirely futile. Originality, unpredictability and inconsistency were all regarded as ‘bad’. And as people grew to expect corruption and oppression so their moral compasses became distorted and then stopped working completely. People wearily accepted the way things had become as the way things had to be.
As the world’s supplies of oil and gas shrank, and as the United Kingdom’s situation grew daily more precarious, the number of people leaving the country grew to unprecedented proportions. Many of the migrants who had come to the UK in response to the promises of free money, free health care and free everything else, headed back to where they’d come from. As the infrastructure crumbled so the population shrank and the country became increasingly weak and unable to defend itself. National Health Service hospitals, top heavy with expensive bureaucracy, closed in many parts of the country, leaving millions with no formal health care. The British Government’s gilts were formally given junk bond status. British manufacturing industry had long ago died. Now it was the turn of the service industries. Most were driven to bankruptcy by EUDCE red tape, massively high energy costs and the inability to compete with competing service industries in Asia, South America and the eastern reaches of the new European Superstate; the United States of Europe. Only those providing services which could not readily be outsourced (plumbers, hairdressers, dentists) survived.
Thanks to the peculiar greed of its bankers and politicians the UK was the worst affected of any of the world’s nations. The consistent failure of successive governments to devise an energy policy exacerbated the nation’s problems. Not that the UK was the only country in Europe to fall into deep trouble. As China, India, Russia, Brazil and other rapidly developing countries expanded and grew richer so European countries became increasingly unable to afford commodities.
The Chinese stockpiled everything worth having (oil, steel, uranium, gold and copper) leaving the USA and EUDCE to cope as best as they could without. Those countries such as Australia and Canada which were rich in natural resources prospered but the Eastern European countries and Ireland, Italy, Spain and Greece had tumbled into an ever-tightening circle of depression and despair. Eventually, even France and Germany were dragged down.
When what was then still the European Union offered loans and subsidies (more of the former than the latter) the money was accepted with alacrity. There were strings galore, of course, but neither desperate politicians nor what was left of the Bank of England had the inclination or the strength to take too much notice of them. The EU already had much power in Britain, of course. At the end of the 20th century, and in the early years of the 21st century, a series of British Prime Ministers had signed away more and more of the nation’s diminishing independence. When Gordon Brown signed the Lisbon Treaty he was willingly handing over the final shreds of sovereignty to the commissioners and commissars in Brussels. Since that signing the European Union had taken over completely. The Government had obediently done everything it was told to do. It had destroyed rural communities by closing down local hospitals and small post offices. It had made it impossible for the children of poor families to rise in the world by introducing increasingly onerous student loans.
The Government had replaced freedom and democracy with statism and centralised power; the malevolent consequence of a potent mixture of communism, socialism, fascism and paternalism; the identical quadruplets who tear away responsibility, accountability, integrity and identity and replace them with rules, regulations and unfettered, unquestioned, unquestionable authority.
Like the governments of other signatory nations the British Government had privatised the post offices, police forces, bureaucratic institutions and armed forces. And then the EU had closed the British Parliament and transferred every scrap of power to Brussels and to the Regional Authorities. And then EUDCE was born. The devil child of the devil parent.
The new Europe was by then already more statist than Russia or China had been back in the 1970’s. What had once been Britain had become a statist subunit of the new EUDCE; a world in which central planning was run by a series of fat controllers who decided how much corn should be grown, how much bread should be baked and how much of what the fat controllers hadn’t eaten should be consumed by the proletariat, and how much should be sold to underdeveloped countries to make sure that their farmers didn’t make a living and put the agricultural export business on the slide. The world of EUDCE was a world with as much charm and flexibility as a painting by numbers kit. (The fact that central planning had failed dismally in China and the USSR did not discourage the supporters of EUDCE from giving it a go.)
And then, when people no longer had any money with which to buy all the stuff the Chinese were churning out (flat screen television sets, complicated motor cars for which there was no petrol and gym shoes costing as much as a good suit with hand stitched lapels and four horn buttons on each cuff) China suddenly found itself with stockpiles of these things. And so Chinese entrepreneurs, who were just beginning to enjoy their taste of capitalism, went bust and the financial merry-go-round stopped turning and suddenly there wasn’t enough money to pay people who were sick or retired and only enough to pay people who worked for EUDCE, the only layer of political authority which had the power to lay its fat, white hands on what little money was left.
Since EUDCE’s regional parliaments, and their administrative substructures, had completely replaced individual sovereign parliaments, and inevitably their civil service administrations, those who had previously worked for individual governments or local bodies had all been made redundant, given resettlement gratuities in lieu of pensions and invited to apply for posts within EUDCE. The lucky ones, the chosen ones, the ones with contacts and relatives already working within the European Union, had been given EUDCE employment status. When an internal survey showed that 98% of new hirings were related to, or closely linked to, existing employees the response of those who commissioned the survey was to ask just why the other 2% had been hired. Jobs had been allocated according to a Positive Reformation Preferential System designed to ensure that the most important posts were allocated to citizens from the three selected nations: France, Germany and Turkey. The unlucky ones, the majority, had been demoted to habitant or suspect status and employed on short-term contra
cts with no security, no pensions, no status and no rights. The Turks got what they thought were the best jobs, of course, though the French managed to keep many of the really powerful jobs for themselves. The French had made a move for control of EUDCE when Turkey’s membership had weakened Britain and Germany (alone among the main countries that made up EUDCE the French had refused to allow the Turks entry to their country). German politicians threatened to take their region out of EUDCE (‘we were never really in’, they claimed). French became EUDCE’s second official language and even the lowest sprouts now tried to speak it. (The former British citizens, having an inborn inability to speak foreign languages, spoke something referred to as pidgin franglais.) Turkish had, of course, become the official language of EUDCE though no one but the Turks spoke or understood much of that.
Colourless, unimaginative bureaucrats, uninspired and uninspiring, appointed en masse by power hungry commissars, spread tanker loads of public money to enrich their relatives and to purchase loyalty. The commissars knew that, like dogs obedient to their masters, those they empowered would support to the death those who gave them their fat salaries, their index-linked pensions and, most of all, their authority (none of which they could have ever hoped to acquire fairly, decently or justly). Empowered by a state bureaucracy and enriched and ever more emboldened by their new status, officials who had been merely relentlessly rude, deliberately obstructive and unendingly officious rose to new heights in all these areas. It was, for them, The Time and they much enjoyed it.
None of the bureaucrats had any experience of the world that you cannot get sitting in a first class train seat paid for by the taxpayers or eating in five star hotel restaurants (while attending conferences paid for by taxpayers). They had no experience at all of real life, and they wanted none. Their predecessors had at least taken holidays with those of the real world. No more did they do this. The EU bureaucrats back in the early years of the 21st century had to queue in NHS hospitals like real people. The NHS staff had to queue at the airport just like ordinary people. But no more. The sprouts had acquired, been given, taken, privileges. They lived exceptional lives, protected at all costs from the vagaries of the real world. Sprouts never had to apologise. They were never disciplined. The system existed for them. They were the lords of all.
It took a time for suspects to realise that things had changed.
For a while, some people continued to assume that sprouts were there to serve; to make things better for the community, for ‘ordinary’ working people, to fight for a better society. The more uppity suspects liked to think that the sharp-tongued, rude, aggressive civil servants who worked at airports and railway stations and hospitals were an exception, rather than the rule; rule-happy, uniformed bullies who simply enjoyed the authority they’d taken and found that they rather liked.
But gradually it became clear that the bureaucrats had become officious, overbearing and arrogant by default. They weren’t there to serve the community. They worked, they existed, with one purpose in mind: to further their own ends, to extend their power and their status and their wealth. The suspects were the drones. The sprouts were the queens. It took the people some time to realise this. But it was the way. It was the truth.
The new EUDCE offered aid and assistance to the regions. But EUDCE’s assistance, which included financial support and access to EUDCE’s own centrally managed stocks and supplies of oil, gas, coal, uranium and other essential commodities was, inevitably, conditional. The result was that EUDCE, which already had complete power in principle had, for the first time, complete power in practice.
Advice and financial support from the International Monetary Fund was summarily rejected so that power could remain in Brussels and Strasbourg. The media, controlled and manipulated (through a sophisticated and effective mixture of threats and bribery) said nothing that was not approving. The mass of people, fearful and gullible, greeted EUDCE’s every involvement with gratitude and almost audible sighs of relief. Local administrations were replaced overnight by the unelected, undemocratic Regional Authorities which had for years been sitting quietly on the sidelines waiting for this very moment.
Europe had genuinely become a two-tier society – those who worked for the European Superstate and those who didn’t. Most of the jobs within the Superstate were manufactured non-jobs, designed primarily to provide employment, salaries, and pension entitlements.
Some of the jobs created were absurd. Tom had heard of one man employed as a Nasal Passage Obstructive Materials Extraction Supervising Trainee. He spent his days teaching children how to blow their noses. And there were two dozen Senior Presentation Manipulation Officers at the Lard Information Council.
Nepotism was at its most perfect within the European Commission. In the bad old days the commissioners had been appointed by national governments. The demise of national governments meant that such appointments inevitably came to an end. In the new EUDCE the 100 permanent commissioners (known by State decree as Princes) were allowed to pass their titles on either to their children or to the appointee of their choice.
By the end of its first frantic week of existence the new EUDCE had hired all the staff it needed. The millions of former civil servants who had been made redundant were denied redundancy payments on the grounds that their employer, various parts of the United Kingdom Government, no longer existed and could not, therefore, be expected to honour what had long been regarded as commitments. Their pensions, once considered to be gold-plated, disappeared overnight.
Private Pension funds which had been regarded as inviolable became ‘legacy assets’. Billions of pounds worth of investments suddenly became billions of euros worth of debts. Millions who had thought themselves among the most securely positioned in the country, suddenly found themselves without any visible means of support and without any prospects. Trade unions which protested that this was against the law were outlawed. The UK no longer existed, said EUDCE, and so its obligations had disappeared with it.
Two men in the North of England were deported after covering up EUDCE flags on motor car number plates with England flags. A couple in Dorchester were deported after a Union Jack, neatly ironed and folded, was found at the back of a wardrobe in their bedroom. A man in a public house in Taunton was deported after making a joke about EUDCE. Nowhere else in Europe were individuals persecuted with such enthusiasm and venom as they were hunted down in England. The eurocrats knew just how dangerous the English could be. England had been, they knew, the home of the Magna Carta, habeas corpus and Chaucer. It was the birthplace of William Shakespeare, John Milton and Winston Churchill, Isaac Newton and Robert Stevenson. It was the homeland of Lord Byron and William Blake, Charles Darwin and Charles Dickens. England had given the world Samuel Johnson, James Watt, Michael Faraday, Edward Jenner, John Keats and Christopher Wren, Oliver Cromwell, Charles Babbage, William Harvey and Joseph Lister, John Dalton, Queen Elizabeth I, Francis Bacon and Thomas Malthus. No other country had given the world one half the number of inventions that the English had given. And England was the universally recognised birthplace of parliamentary democracy. It was the birthplace too, of industry, finance, business and just about every sport on the planet.
And, most important of all, although the English are always slow to rise, and always reluctant revolutionaries, they were known within EUDCE to be the most determined, most bloody-minded people on earth. Bulldogs. Terriers.
The founders of EUDCE knew that if their project was to succeed, to bloom, they had to destroy England, demoralise the English, ruthlessly eradicate English culture and suppress all memory of English history. And they had to stamp on any sign of burgeoning English revolutionary zeal.
There were some protests, of course. But the leaders were quickly arrested and passed on, via the Americans, to other nations. (The words ‘suspected’, ‘arrested’, ‘charged’ and ‘sentenced’ had become synonymous, as had ‘intent’ and ‘guilt’.) Torture and imprisonment had been outsourced. The bureaucrats said i
t made economic sense and there was no one to dispute their saying. They called it the deleveraging of progress, though no one really knew what that meant. Anyone who opposed or criticised the peaceful work of EUDCE, the European Superstate (formerly known as the EU, EC, ECC and the Common Market) was officially defined as a terrorist.
They used fear to keep everyone in line; they had found the real power of intellectual terrorism. When terror triumphs it is institutionalised and thus it was.
Chapter 6
If you weren’t a registered, licensed sprout then jobs were hard to come by.
As a white male suspect Tom was not allowed to vote, own a motor car, have oil tokens or take any sort of permanent, full-time work. As a result Tom worked part time as a cobbler. Repairing shoes kept him busy. No one could afford to buy new ones. Even if they had been able to afford new ones there were no shoes shops. And if there had been any shoe shops there were no shoes for them to sell. Cobbling was a good business to be in. He didn’t have a shop, of course. Most of the few shops remaining were charity shops. He worked at home. Sometimes, if there were enough shoes to mend, he would go to someone’s home and repair them there.
He also had, and was grateful for, a steady private job as an allotment guard. He worked every Wednesday from 6 p.m. to 12 p.m. at the Sub-Region 47/H298 Community Growth Project. The allotment had once been a graveyard, but being centrally placed and having good soil meant that it had been compulsorily purchased. The gravestones had been tom out and dumped in a huge pile in one corner of the graveyard. There had been a plan to use the broken pieces of stone to repair crumbling buildings but no one had ever got round to putting the plan into action. Now people grew their own vegetables in the graveyard and Tom had been hired by the allotment holders as a guard to make sure that the hungry and the homeless did not succeed if they were weak enough to succumb to temptation and strong enough to do something about it. (The appointment had, of course, been confirmed and approved by the South Eastern Regional Parliamentary Commission.)
Revolt Page 3