Revolt

by Vernon Coleman

  They got in through a fire door that had been left open by staff members who, judging by the number of cigarette butts on the ground nearby, used the doorway and the shelter provided by the small canopy over it, as somewhere to stand when taking their smoking breaks.

  For many years EUDCE had had a double-edged approach to smoking; it had two official policies. On the one hand EUDCE’s first, and best known, official policy was to discourage smoking. In the old Europe, smoking had killed more people than the two World Wars of the 20th century. EUDCE had introduced a good deal of legislation designed to attack this problem.

  But the other official policy was to encourage tobacco farmers. Over the years, countless billions of euros had been given as subsidies to farmers growing tobacco. There are few crops that are easier to grow than tobacco, particularly on rough and relatively infertile ground. And selling tobacco to developing countries proved hugely profitable.

  The end result of this schism was that EUDCE banned smoking but turned a blind eye when its own employees insisted on statutory smoking breaks.

  ***

  Within ten minutes Tom, Dorothy, Dalby and Gladwys had found the perfect site for their meeting; one of many large committee meeting rooms. The room they chose was well equipped with expensive and comfortable furniture. There was no sign here of the poverty and pain that was so widely seen in the world outside. The room’s temperature was controlled by a sophisticated air conditioning system

  ‘Crumbs!’ said Tom, looking around. ‘People could live in here at night. Out of the cold or the heat.’

  ‘As long as they remembered to get out in time every morning,’ said Dalby.

  ‘It’ll make a damned good meeting place.’

  ‘Are you sure there are no bugs?’ asked Dalby, looking underneath one of the desks and searching for microphones or wiring.

  Tom shook his head. ‘They would never dare risk it,’ he said. ‘Not even Europol dare put microphones in here.’

  No one working for EUDCE would risk the chance that reports on meetings held in a EUDCE building might somehow be leaked and made available to the suspects. EUDCE commissioners had long memories. They knew about Nixon and Watergate and the role the White House tapes had played in the President’s subsequent embarrassment and impeachment. One viewpoint was that he should never have kept the tape recordings. A commoner viewpoint was that he was mad to have authorised them in the first place. Nixon’s weakness was his yearning for a place in history; his memoirs; self justification. But EUDCE was, and always had been, a haven for corruption and theft and the people who worked for it cared only for the now. The truly corrupt and the truly dishonest tend not to think too much about how they will be remembered; they prefer to leave stones where they are lying.

  Chapter 29

  The meeting began with talk. People airing their complaints in a way they never usually dared to do. They were in a forbidden building. Everyone there was breaking the law. It gave them a bond.

  There were many heartfelt complaints.

  ‘I was nearly deported for riding a bicycle without a bell,’ complained a slender woman in her twenties. ‘I’ve had three bells stolen in the last six months. And where can you get bells from these days?’

  ‘Steal one,’ suggested someone.

  ‘What happened?’ asked someone else.

  ‘I bribed him to let me go,’ said the girl. She blushed.

  ‘How much did he want?’

  ‘I didn’t have any money,’ said the girl.

  ‘So how did you bribe him?’ asked a tall man with long hair and a port wine stain on his right cheek.

  Everyone looked at him.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, suddenly embarrassed. ‘Oh. I see.’

  ***

  ‘We had the planners round,’ said a woman in her fifties. ‘They said our windows were too small. I’d never heard that one before.’

  ‘They brought that law in a couple of months ago,’ said a girl with a ponytail. ‘They say that windows have to be bigger so that they let in more sunshine and light. They claim it will keep energy usage down and save the planet.’

  ‘It costs a fortune to have windows replaced,’ said the tall man.

  ‘Whatever it costs, we can’t afford it,’ said the woman in her fifties. ‘The joke is that we haven’t had mains gas or electricity for two years. We don’t use any energy. They know that.’

  ‘What did they do?’

  ‘They’ve given us official notification that if we don’t have our windows made larger then we’ll be subject to whatever punishment they consider fits the crime.’

  ‘Deportation?’

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘We left two nights ago. We’re living at my sister’s place. It’s overcrowded but she was worried that she’d be told to take in some Turks so she’s happy. With us living there the sprouts won’t put any more people in the flat.’

  ***

  An elderly woman and her husband (‘too old to be part of a revolutionary movement but too old to put up with the world as it is,’ said the wife) reported that two Amenity Inspectors had come round with cameras to photograph the inside of their home. Councils had been entitled to do this for some years, ostensibly to enable them to decide what local taxes to charge. EUDCE now did it in their place.

  ‘They laughed at every one of our possessions,’ said the woman. ‘They didn’t speak English so I don’t know what they were saying. But they just picked our things up and sneered at them. Some things, the things they liked, they put in their pockets. They found a silver photograph frame that belonged to my parents and took out the photograph. They ripped up the photograph and stole the frame.’

  ‘They broke a vase in the bedroom,’ said the man. ‘I understand what they said then. They said it was ugly.’

  The long arm of authority, instead of protecting the public, had become the enemy.

  ***

  ‘We need to hire some hit men,’ said Dalby.

  ‘Like those mercenaries in The Magnificent Seven,’ said Gladwys.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Dalby.

  ‘We have to do it ourselves,’ said Tom. ‘There are too many of them. If we’re going to start a revolution then we all need to be involved.’

  ‘I’ve never killed anyone,’ said an old lady. ‘Not even a fly.’

  ‘It’s true,’ said her husband. ‘She keeps a kid’s fishing net in the house. She catches the flies in that and then releases them.’

  ‘Catches what?’ asked Dalby, who hadn’t been listening properly.

  ‘Flies,’ said the husband.

  ‘None of us are used to killing people,’ said Tom. ‘But these are exceptional times. We’re fighting a war.’

  ‘The people at the bank won’t let us have our money,’ complained Mrs Tuck. ‘They say that since we have a joint account we both have to have passports before they’ll let us draw any money out.’

  ‘But what do we need passports for?’ asked Mr Tuck, indignantly. ‘We can’t afford to go anywhere.’

  ‘And we can’t afford to buy passports until they let us have our money,’ Mrs Tuck pointed out.

  ‘We’ve had accounts there for forty years,’ said Mr Tuck. ‘We’ve been at that bank longer than any of the staff.’

  ‘The man we saw said the bank isn’t allowed to give out money without passports,’ said Mrs Tuck. ‘He said it’s to stop terrorism and money laundering.’

  ‘We went to the passport office,’ said Mr Tuck. ‘They told us that passports would cost us 500 euros each. And we would have to pay in advance.’

  ‘So we can’t get our money out,’ sighed Mrs Tuck.

  ***

  And there were some surprising admissions.

  ‘I killed a taxman,’ said Mrs John.

  Everyone stopped and looked at her. Mrs John, whose husband had been a veritable giant of a man, was little more than five foot tall. She could not have weighed more than seven stone
s.

  ‘He came to the house and demanded to see my husband’s accounts,’ said Mrs John. ‘They’d been chasing him for two years. It killed him, you know. The letters. They threatened all sorts of terrible things.’

  She opened her handbag, took out a small, light-blue, linen handkerchief and wiped her eyes. ‘He paid them everything he owed. Probably more than he owed. He was a very honest man. He hardly earned enough to keep us alive but he always paid his taxes. But still they wouldn’t listen. They always wanted more documents. More receipts. More paper.’

  ‘How did you kill the taxman?’ asked Dalby quietly.

  ‘He came round just a week after my Geoffrey’s funeral,’ said Mrs John. ‘They wouldn’t leave him alone even then. They wanted to see a receipt for something he’d bought six years ago. They said they were going to arrest him and deport him.’

  ‘Did you tell them he was...’

  ‘I told him Geoffrey had passed on and he said they’d arrest me and that would be Geoffrey’s legacy to me,’ said Mrs John. ‘That made me very cross. My Geoffrey would have been angry that they said that. So I took the man up to the attic where Geoffrey kept all the old receipts and then I came downstairs and I locked the hatch into the attic and I left him there.’

  ‘Didn’t he make a noise? Shout and bang?’

  ‘Oh yes. He made a lot of noise. He shouted and threatened and banged on the floor. But we live several hundred yards away from anyone else. And Geoffrey made the hatch himself. It’s very strong. And he boarded up the roof on the inside to keep out the wind.’

  ‘How long ago did this happen?’

  ‘It was a week after Geoffrey died. Just seven months ago now.’

  ‘Have you been back up into the attic?’ Mrs John shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘And no one else came to see you?’

  ‘Two men from the tax people came. They wanted to know if I’d seen the man they’d sent before. They showed me his picture. I told them it looked like my cousin who used to live in Great Yarmouth but who died on the trawlers back in the days when there were such things. I told them my husband had died and that I didn’t know what they were talking about and they went away.’

  For a while no one spoke.

  ***

  ‘So, what the hell are we going to do about it?’ demanded Will Stutely. ‘Are we just going to sit around all night and tell each other horror stories? Or are we going to decide to do something? Mrs John has showed us the way.’

  Silence.

  ‘You’d better say something,’ whispered Dorothy to Tom.

  ‘What?’ asked Tom.

  ‘Just talk,’ said Dorothy. ‘Something will come to you.’

  Chapter 30

  Tom stood up and walked to the front of the room.

  ‘Things are the way they are because too many of us said and did nothing for too long,’ he said. He felt nervous but too angry to care. He was talking to about thirty people. All hand-picked. All angry. All ready for the revolution. He looked around and suddenly realised that there were few people under fifty in the room. Young people thought that they were revolting if they took drugs, dyed their hair green and sat around all day drinking home-made potato wine. Years of living in a world run by EUDCE had taken the heart and soul out of them. They did not understand that the bureaucrats, paid to protect the innocent, had become the enemy; that they were now the ones against whom the citizens needed protection; that authority had become the mask of violence.

  ‘The sprouts who work for EUDCE are not our friends and not on our side. They have been bought by large salaries (far greater than anything they could have ever earned in the real world) and index-linked pensions and a good deal of power. And oh, how they love the power. Think back to how it started. The security guards at airports, there to protect us from terrorists. But did they ever catch anyone? Did they ever prevent any tragedy? No and no again. They were dumb, unskilled idiots. No skills. They just loved ordering people around. Think of the dustmen refusing to take your rubbish because you’d put a yoghurt carton in with the egg boxes. They loved the power. Our present tormentors are the same people. But they’re paid more and treated better and they have become the ‘them’ we always feared would one day take over our lives.’

  ‘We should be able to put EUDCE and its bureaucrats on trial for the crimes they have committed in our name. But we can’t.’

  ‘We can’t get rid of them by voting them out because they offer us no alternative. We can’t demonstrate in the streets because they’ve banned that. We can’t get rid of them with an ordinary, old-fashioned revolution because they own all the weapons worth having. We can’t kill the leaders as the people usually do in revolutions because they are too well guarded. Our only option is to start at the bottom and work our way up.’

  ‘We trusted the people who had the power because it never occurred to us that they would betray us and lie to us and use us. We trusted them too much because we did not understand how much people will cheat in order to obtain money and power. We were more innocent, more naive, than we thought we were. We judged them by the same standards we were accustomed to using when judging our friends, our relations and the people we meet at work and in the shops. In our normal daily lives we try to be a little cautious, and we assume that we can judge when people are lying to us. We have all met people who cheat a little or lie a little. But we have little experience of people who cheat all the time and whose every word, every promise, every reassurance is a blatant lie. We have little experience of such uncompromising deceit. And so we trusted when we should not have trusted. We believed when we should not have believed.’

  ‘Like the ordinary Germans in the 1930’s, we trusted too much. That was our original crime, if you want to call it that. We said nothing, allowing our country to be stolen from us. Now, we know that complaining won’t do us any good. We either have to live with what has happened or we have to do something about it ourselves. In my view, living with it has become impossible, unbearable and close to pointless. And so we have to do something.’

  ‘It’s too late to change things with talk or persuasion. We live in a world where we no longer have the rights we used to have; the rights we believed we would always have. Everything we valued; our freedom, our history, our culture, has been stolen from us by people who looked us straight in the eye and made promises they had no intention of keeping; people who, with honest faces, made assurances they knew were untrue. They’ve taken our past, our present and our future.’

  ‘I am in mourning for my country because the life and soul have been taken from it. When they take your country from you they take your identity. We have been deprived of our birthright, our pride, our passion and our sense of belonging. And what have we been given in exchange? Would any one of us fight for EUDCE?’

  ‘They have given us a world in which social engineering programmes such as means-testing, political correctness and multiculturalism are used as weapons to oppress us. They have given us a world in which health and safety bureaucrats create rules not to make the world a safer place but to enhance their own power and status and end up making the world more dangerous than it was before. For years we have all pushed aside our fears and our sense of injustice, not because we felt that our fears were unfounded or because our sense of injustice was misplaced, but because deep down we felt that we could do nothing to change things: we knew that justice and the law had been separated. And so we suppressed our feeling that things were wrong and just put up with our lives.’

  ‘We have been betrayed by people who pretended to care about us, men and women who claimed to be driven by a desire to serve, but who cared only about themselves. We have been cheated by people whose ambitions were purely personal, materialistic and oh so very, very selfish. We have been betrayed by people who sold us out in return for chauffeur-driven cars, unlimited expense accounts and huge pensions.’

  ‘And now it is too late to change things by what we say or how we vote. We have sleepwalke
d into defeat; we have wandered, perhaps innocently, perhaps a little stupidly, into a fascist world where we no longer have any say in our destiny or our children’s destiny. Our mistake was to believe what we were told. The consequences are around us every day and unless we now accept the existence of the problem, and the fact that our destiny is in our hands, we can never defeat those who oppress us.’

  ‘You could argue, not unreasonably, that our quarrel should be with those who have done these things to us; those whom we trusted and who then lied to us, cheated us and betrayed us. You could sensibly claim that our quarrel is with the politicians who signed the treaties which gave away our rights, our freedoms, our democracy, our culture and our independence.’

  ‘But such an argument doesn’t get us very far. Most of those who signed those treaties are dead or dying or rich and in hiding – well protected and beyond our reach. They will have to pay the price for their disloyalty and their greed in some other jurisdiction. But, the truth is that revenge against them will change nothing. We could dig up the ones who died, try them for treason and then hang them. We could drag the ones who are still alive out of their beds and into the courts but doing so would change nothing.’

  ‘Our war now must be against the institution they created. But what is an institution? What is there to fight? The institution is represented by buildings. We could blow them up, but what difference would that make? They would shoot us all and then put up more buildings. Nothing would change. The institution is run by the commissioners and the senior bureaucrats. They serve the institution. They are well guarded. What happens if we manage to break through the security and kill the leaders? Nothing. The institution now has a life of its own. The institution will merely recruit more commissioners and more bureaucrats. It will have no difficulty in finding people prepared to accept the lifestyle enjoyed by the commissioners and the bureaucrats. Our lives will not be improved one jot by removing these people. We will still be oppressed. We will still live in fear. We will still live in poverty. We will be manacled by rules and regulations which govern our every movement and we will live in a joyless, hopeless world; denied a history and denied a future by colourless, faceless, unelected bureaucrats. The next generation of commissioners and bureaucrats will simply introduce more rules and more regulations and more policemen in order to ensure that we do not rise up again. We will be worse off than before.’