2020

by Kenneth Steven

  “Yes, I do. No ifs and no buts; I believe it should be banned. When I see the veil rendering a woman’s face to nothing more than a pillar-box slit, I actually find myself wanting to rip it off. As far as I’m concerned, this is taking us back to the medieval period, and it should have no place in our Western society. I realise that’s controversial, but I’m glad that I’m part of an organisation that stands for controversial things. I see around me party leaders who are bending over backwards to conform, refusing to step out of line, desperately trying to please everyone. I think the fact that membership of White Rose has grown at times by over 20,000 a month says something about just how fed up the people of our island are with conformity and with political correctness. I hope I live to see the day when the burka is illegal in Britain, and when the women who have worn it are no longer treated like chattels. But I’m honest enough to admit that that day is still far off on the horizon. An awful lot of fighting will have to be done first.”

  *

  “SO MAY I ask what then happened to your prisoner once he was brought to London?”

  “Yes, as I’ve mentioned, he was taken to a secret location that I would ask not to be revealed even now. We made contact with certain individuals on our way, and during the journey—perhaps even as a result of that contact—he was often extremely agitated. That having been said, as soon as we got to London he seemed to calm down a good deal. We were aware, self-evidently, that even though he had just confessed to his part in the bomb attack, he had been through the horror of it all himself. He was given a full medical examination, he was permitted to rest for a time, and he was given a full change of clothing. His own clothing was in a terrible state and he had blood and grime on his hands. I omitted to mention that he was able to shower before changing.

  “He was then taken to a normal interview room for questioning and brought a light meal since he claimed he had eaten nothing whatsoever since leaving Edinburgh. And by the time that had all happened it was perhaps two o’clock in the afternoon. There were two of us present to question him, and I can remember almost at once feeling I was with a totally different person.”

  “I’m not quite sure I follow. What exactly do you mean?”

  “That he had calmed down entirely. He was relaxed, almost confident, and all the gibbering nonsense we had heard in the car was gone. I would say he was almost arrogant the way he sat there; the fear had certainly gone entirely, and I felt the whole business of questioning him was pretty much pointless.”

  “How long were you there for? And what about your superior? Was he present throughout this time too?”

  “I’m sorry, I should have made it clear that he had left almost as soon as we arrived at the place. I didn’t know why, but he was gone for at least a couple of hours. He would have returned at about four o’clock, and it was then I learned of his brother. I left the interview room and found him outside, ashen-faced. He told me that his only brother had been on the sleeper, that his body had been recovered. I didn’t know what to say; I found the whole situation very awkward. We had never operated on anything but a formal level; I wouldn’t say that it was a cold relationship, but it was most certainly strictly formal. I have no idea what I said, though I obviously made some kind of attempt to show my sympathy. He just stayed where he was for a long time—perhaps twenty minutes or longer. He sat facing the wall, not moving, and I remember thinking I had never seen anyone so pale in all my life. Then he just got up, put down the empty mug of tea he had drunk, and looked straight at me. His face might have been made of stone. It was devoid of emotion.

  ‘What do you want me to do, sir?’ I asked.

  ‘Squeeze him till he squeals,’ he answered.”

  *

  “WE HAVE BEEN prepared to be second-class citizens too long. I go to London and I sit on the upper deck of a bus, and I wonder where I am. But it isn’t just London: it’s Sudburgh too. I heard of a white English woman who learned Urdu in the end because she was so lonely in her neighbourhood and no one spoke to her. I’m going to see to it that a few more people learn English if I’m elected in this constituency.

  “It might come as a surprise to you to hear that I’m sad the four who committed the Burroway bombing all died. I’ll tell you why I feel sad. Because it was too easy a death. Were I to have had my way, all four of them would have faced the death penalty. Think of the people affected by that tragedy. But what would have happened to the perpetrators had they survived? At worst they would have faced life sentences. With you, me and everyone in this hall paying however many hundred thousand a year to keep them behind bars every year. What sort of lunacy is that? What sort of comfort would it be to those who lost parents and children and beloved friends on that train? I think to myself what they might have faced back in Pakistan. If they were lucky enough to make it to prison it would hardly be the bed of roses that incarceration is in England.

  “But it’s not just about flogging and hanging. I can see the tabloids tomorrow morning: Eric Semple wants to bring back the death penalty. Oh no, ladies and gentlemen, it’s about a whole lot more than that. Eric Semple wants to restore sanity. He wants to make being English and white normal again, instead of something that’s been reduced to something of an embarrassment. My grandfather fought for this country and he loved it; I can remember that even into his eighties when the National Anthem was played on Christmas Day after the Queen’s Speech he swayed onto his rickety legs because he was proud. There was no one would take his pride from him. He didn’t boast about what he’d done in the war; he didn’t even talk about it, no more than most of the men who fought. He just came back home to be English and British and live in the country he’d fought for.

  “You know what I sometimes think of this country as it is now? As a car park for refugees and economic migrants. And we can’t accommodate them. We go on ushering in hundreds of thousands more each year and we can’t even house our own teenagers. Now I realise that you voting for me is not going to change the whole country; it’s not going to mean blue sky and sunlight for the rest of your lives. But what I can promise is that I will work with blood, sweat and tears for the rights of those people I feel have been marginalised far too long. And I will work to see that this constituency isn’t just an anomaly, but that like-minded spirits have the courage to stand up for the kind of values I’ve been praising tonight. I would like to see pride restored in this city of ours, and I believe it can be done. But I think it has to be done by someone who takes immigration and race relations seriously, who deals with what has to be dealt with and doesn’t just come out with the usual party statements. This has all been put to one side for far too long, ladies and gentlemen, and I intend to do something about that, at a national as well as a local level. So I ask for your vote and I ask for your confidence: I am a man of my word and I am a fighter. I look forward to fighting for you.”

  *

  IT HAS BEEN announced by Downing Street that a garden of remembrance is to be created at the site of the Burroway bombing. A number of high-profile artists have been invited to create works that will be displayed there, and the sonnet that the Poet Laureate published shortly after the tragedy will be inscribed in the final slab of a stone pathway together with the names of all those who perished. Downing Street will not confirm that the idea for the memorial garden came from the Prime Minister himself, and he has stated that the question itself is a distraction, that remembering those who died in the tragedy should be the business of all those interested in strengthening tolerance and democracy. Nevertheless, it is believed that he was very much behind the original idea for the creation of a permanent memorial to the victims.

  The intention is to design the garden in such a way that it can be seen from the train, something that will be important to the many who are not able to visit the site on foot due to its relative inaccessibility. A number of well-known Asian artists have been invited to offer their work for possible inclusion, despite vociferous protests from White Rose. It has not been
revealed who will be part of the final line-up of artists, and part of the reason for this is believed to be that at least one Asian artist will be included.

  The organisation behind the creation of the garden has said it is hugely important to remember that at least thirty people from the Asian community were among those who died in the bombing, and that no single group or community should be seen to have ownership of the Burroway memorial. The Prime Minister was not available for comment earlier today, but Downing Street did confirm that he would make a formal announcement concerning the garden in the coming days. Money for the creation of the memorial will come primarily from one anonymous source; various other organisations in England and Scotland have committed parcels of funding. The Palace has expressed full commitment to the work, and it is fully expected that a member of the Royal Family will officially open the memorial once it is complete.

  *

  I REMEMBER SEEING a change in those in my school after the bombing. I am thirteen and back then I was just ten. There was a lot of name-calling; sometimes the bigger boys threw stones at us across the street. We weren’t included in games in the same way: I can remember someone shouting that if the ball was kicked to us it might blow up. Everyone laughed even though it wasn’t very clever.

  I came home from school once and felt very upset; I’m not sure what it was that had got me so down—I think just the long drip-drip effect of it all. I hugged my mother and felt the tears hot at the back of my eyes; I asked her why it was everyone hated us. She looked at me with such sadness; she bent down to my level and her hands were white with the flour she had been using for baking. She smiled at me, but it was more a kind of crying. She showed me her hands then and she said that whatever we did we would never be white. We had been made the way we were and there was no reason to be ashamed. She said that God loved the heart of people, that He did not care about the outer skin. She said that human beings were the ones who were worried about what colour we were, but that God was interested in who we were inside.

  I nodded and I understood that she was right, but I still felt so full of sadness. I don’t think I had ever felt such sadness before in all my life. My mother saw that and understood without saying anything. She left the baking and washed the flour from her hands and she carried me upstairs. I was far too old to be carried but I felt comforted when she did that. She sat me down at the window ledge in my room and she sat behind me and held me. She rocked me gently from side to side and she sang me a song I could remember from when I was a baby. I could not remember all of it, but somehow it was there in me all the same. It was a song that had come down through her family and was very precious to her. I could tell she was crying as she sang it and rocked me, but I never looked round once.

  *

  I THINK THE Prime Minister really did reach some kind of crisis point at that time. I’ve never said so openly before, but I think I can after all these years. It would have felt like disloyalty at an earlier time, but I do think that this sort of party solidarity can become quite ridiculous at times. Never admitting there’s been a disappointment, always insisting on talking in upbeat terms. I’m well aware that the electorate, at least what one might call the wise core of the electorate, are simply not fooled. If you lose a bloody by-election then have the honesty to say it was a disappointment! I remember once listening back to one of these dreadful radio interviews with politicians after a by-election—I can’t for the life of me remember which one it was and it doesn’t really matter now—and from the sound of it you would have thought no one had lost at all!

  At any rate, that’s all part of a wider question. I suspect that being somewhat longer in the tooth helps, and being a good deal further out of the eye of the storm. The less you have to lose the more you feel you can say. I think the best example of that was seen in Tony Benn. He became a maverick: he said precisely what he wanted to say and did so most eloquently. But the only time he certainly didn’t was when he was right at the heart of government! Perhaps I say all this to comfort myself; all of us are guilty of it.

  Yes, I think back to the time immediately following Burroway. There was something of a firestorm in Whitehall that this couldn’t have come more out of the blue. These four hadn’t been watched for a moment: they were on no one’s radar. I think the Prime Minister barely slept in the days following the whole thing; he did a tremendous amount, but he actually ended up attempting to do too much. He was in effect trying to be both Prime Minister and Head of State. I’ve never quite understood why he took the whole think so personally: perhaps it was quite simply because he felt he had built up such good relations with the Asian community, that he had established a genuine trust with leaders up and down the country. But it felt like something more and I have no way of knowing if I’m right or not. All of it will come out one day, decades after most of us are dead.

  What I can speak about now is his marriage. That had been under quite immense pressure during the preceding months, and I think there was still a sense in the party, and perhaps even in the country, that a strong marriage at the heart of government was something of a sine qua non. So there was all the strain of trying to keep things together and not give away anything of the real struggle behind the scenes. Oh, she wanted a divorce—a separation at the very least—and she didn’t care one whit what damage that did to him. Perhaps she even wanted to inflict that damage and would have been quite happy for it to happen then.

  I think all of us in the Cabinet felt desperately sorry for him, but in point of fact there was very little we could have done. I think it’s when the political world is at its very loneliest; you have spent all these years working your way up not just one but several greasy poles, and you feel you are going to slide all the way down if you suddenly show weakness. I simply don’t think it’s an option if you’re PM. And I’m not honestly sure he had any truly close friends in the House; that’s sad to admit, but I think it would be true. So it must have been an incredibly lonely time for him.

  I think the whole Eric Semple thing rather gave him breathing space, paradoxically enough. Of course to a large degree they were linked—one almost flowed into the other—but the actual white-hot focus on Burroway lessened. Once the memorial garden was under construction I think the PM actually began to relax somewhat, to let his shoulders drop just a little. That garden meant a very great deal to him personally; I know there have been cynical suggestions it was about little more than keeping people quiet, but that’s actually most unjust. He wanted there to be some kind of provision for people’s grief—not least his own!—and he wanted the place to be visible from passing trains. And let’s remember that despite its quite ludicrously inaccessible position, thousands upon thousands did go to pay their respects in the weeks and months that followed. I think all that did something to rebuild him personally, to allow him to feel he had somehow done the right thing. It’s as though he felt the bombing was his personal fault: it had been carried out on his watch. The creation of a garden of remembrance was not about winning any kind of glory; it was about having perhaps done the right thing—neither more nor less than that. And I feel he did believe in the end he had done that.

  *

  THE DREAM? DO you not know about the dream? That must have been about three or four days before the by-election. I suppose Trish would have told me about it afterwards, a long time later. It really annoys me now what they write about Eric and Trish: I suppose it’s true that what some newspapers don’t know they’ll simply make up. Trish and I were always good friends, but we didn’t see a tremendous amount of each other—we both had busy family lives. It was really only later, after everything had happened, that we drew much closer, and that was good.

  Well, it’s quite simple really—Trish had some fearful nightmare and woke up screaming. That may sound faintly ridiculous. What on earth would be seen as out of the ordinary about that? Don’t we all have at least one such nightmare in our lives for whatever reason? And wasn’t it the case that she was under a gre
at deal of stress anyway because of the by-election and everything that might lie ahead? All of that is true, but Trish had had some very vivid dream about Eric; she hadn’t actually seen what happened to him in the end, but she had been aware of some strange underground place and vivid faces. She said to me it was like a film; she felt she was there, somewhere in the shadows, watching and listening. She knew without any shadow of doubt it had to do with Eric, that something terrible was happening to Eric—and would happen to Eric.

  At any rate she woke up screaming and she and Eric got up in the middle of the night and went downstairs. Didn’t matter what Eric was doing in the morning, all that he still had to finish in the last hours of campaigning—that’s the kind of guy he was, and I wish the papers knew it. All this had been almost thrust upon him anyway; five years before he’d never have believed he’d be standing as a candidate in a by-election. So Trish told him the whole thing and he sat and listened; she basically begged him to let the whole thing go, not to go ahead with it. She believed that what she’d dreamed had something to do with his election, that there was no earthly doubt the two were inextricably linked.

  The polls were still putting the Tories ahead, though it’s true that Eric looked like coming strongly in second place. But Eric had no real sense then of the idea of winning; he was an independent candidate with no political history who was making race relations his core message. He was pleased to be giving speeches on what he cared about passionately, but there was almost a naivety about him regarding being elected. That was the strange thing: he was a very complicated figure, hard to get the full measure of. You could hear Eric making a speech and when the wind was in his sails it could be quite frightening; someone once called him a little Hitler, and the nickname stuck, though it made him very uncomfortable. It was a very dubious compliment. But he was certainly a force to be reckoned with on nights like that, and he was often at his best when he wasn’t reading or half reading from a script. When he really was in full flight he was at his best, and he knew it; the words seemed to come from nowhere. It was actually like a kind of flying.