by Holroyd, Tom
What can you tell me about the re-cycling effort?
Well as I said earlier we had almost no industrial base to draw on. In the years since World War II, Britain had become a post-industrial society and almost everything we used on a daily basis was imported from somewhere else that could produce it cheaper than we could. Obviously when the war broke out and global trade collapsed overnight we found ourselves drastically short of everything. All the clothes that I used to sell were made in China, the TV I used to watch was made in Taiwan even the iron that was used to produce the SA80 was imported from India. We needed to find ways to equip our soldiers, mend our machines, even simple things like finding enough nails to allow people to build homes but we just did not have the natural resources to supply all those needs. What we did have was a wealth of gadgets, consumer goods and cars in every household that were a mine of resources we could dig into. Thank God for years of Western consumerism.
We set up workshops in every town that processed everything from the steel and aluminium in cars to the copper in telephone lines, even the rare metals in plasma TVs and mobile phones were used. Everything that could be recycled was. Of course, some people objected to losing their hard eared property but each salvage party had Government backing, plus a squad of soldiers to back them up. When the new laws about hoarding came in, we found most people came forward and gave up their goods voluntarily. Of course, the standard punishments and public humiliations helped. Nothing like a day in the stocks for a former celebrity or billionaire who is hoarding food to get the point across that we are all in this together.
The process became so efficient that we could set up productions line aimed at a single product. There was one in Dumbarton that would have cars going in one end and wind-turbines made from engine alternators and door panels coming out the other. There was another in Perth that produced nothing but cutlasses.
He gestures to the wall behind him which is festooned with weapons both ancient and modern. He is describing the signature weapon of the war in Britain, it has a blade about forty centimetres long, it starts off narrow at the hilt but widens out to a large curved chopping tip. The basket hilt is hollow which allows it to be clipped to a wooden pole and used to dispatch zombies from behind the safety of a fortification.
We made thousands of those in the first year. They were the perfect multi-tool; good for farm work, butchering animals and lopping off heads. The first batches went to the Military of course but after that we issued them to everyone, farmers and Militia first and then to everyone we could get them to. After all, there were nowhere near enough guns to go around and not enough bullets so a massive bloody meat cleaver was the next best thing to allow the population to start defending itself. Makes you feel a whole lot safer and I never went anywhere without mine, still don’t.
Roundheads and Cavaliers
Oxford University, Oxfordshire
Professor Andrew Smale is head of the Political Studies department at Oxford University. He is a keen historian and a widely recognised expert on the subject of this interview, the Royalist Movement. He has written two books on the Political impact of the Zombie War and is halfway through his third.
It would not be too sensational to say that the political upheavals of the first years of the Zombie War were almost as devastating as the English Civil War of the seventeenth century. The early signs of the political change to come could be seen in those first clashes between the Military and Government before the Panic. By essentially facing up to the Prime Minister and ignoring his direct orders to take no action and then going ahead anyway, the Chief of the Defence Staff had done away with hundreds of years of political understanding; that despite no direct oaths of loyalty to the Government, the military would follow their orders as if they came from the Queen.
That first moment of defiance and the Government’s inability to enforce its will on the Military sowed the seeds of its own downfall. Of course the fact that the Military were morally right to act as they did in no way justifies their flagrant disregard for the proper chain of command.
Despite the fact their actions saved thousands of lives?
I don’t deny that by circumventing the Government and putting Operation Senlac into effect they saved lives. If they had done nothing then millions more people, possible the entire United Kingdom would have died. I am not disputing that they did the morally correct thing. I am arguing that they did the politically wrong thing. Let us not forget that the actions of the Sanitation Teams were entirely illegal.
Why was that?
To deploy soldiers on the streets of the UK without the permission of Parliament is illegal. It is as simple as that. It is an understanding that all stable democracies have as a fundamental agreement between the Military and the people they serve. The Sanitation Teams had no such mandate and were operating outside the law. Because their record is sealed for the next hundred years we will not know in this life time whether or not any innocent civilians were caught up in their missions.
You say the seeds were sown in those first years, when did they bloom so to speak?
It was at the beginning of the Consolidation that events began to come together. The Military had built and sealed the Safe Zones, again completely independent of any political control and was essentially running their own kingdom within the borders of the UK. I have not even touched on the Burghs which really could be construed as the Army grabbing its own independent fiefdoms.
Isn’t that a bit harsh given that it was a clearly stated aim of Op Senlac to maintain control of the Safe Zones until a civilian government could be elected and that the Burghs would only be under military control until a civilian council could be formed?
I grant you that that was the stated intent but the risk, that history has shown us, with so many military coup d’état that having seized power “for the good of the nation” it is then almost impossible to get them out again.
Regardless, the situation was that the Military had control of the Safe Zones and there was no civilian government to contest them.
Why was there no Government?
The simple answer was that they were all dead, although that is not entirely accurate. The vast majority of the Cabinet was killed during the Panic when they were trapped in the Cabinet Office, the Prime Minister among them. Those politicians that managed to make it to the Northern Safe Zone were either Scottish MPs or former MPs whose constituencies were in the Gray and now had a significantly less vocal population.
The political parties were in chaos, busy tearing themselves apart. Added to this was the fact that the people felt let down by their politicians; they had let the Panic happen and had not acted when it was required. There was simply no one in a position to offer political guidance to a traumatised and damaged nation.
Except the Military.
Yes, except the Military. While I don’t agree with what they did, they provided the stability and security that allowed the Consolidation to happen and to their credit they did try to form a civilian government from the remnants of the political parties. They put all the surviving politicians in a room in Stirling in the hope that they would come to an agreement and form a Government.
Of course it was a bloody disaster, most politicians couldn’t agree on the colour of mud and yet they were expected to agree on who should run the country. They wasted two valuable weeks trying to grab power and throw themselves into roles on party lines. I consider myself an advocate of the nobility and fairness of the democratic system but I still feel ashamed by the self-serving nature of those politicians. Added onto this was the fact that the population was deeply resentful of politicians and grateful to the Military, it is easy to see why the Royalists stepped in.
Who were the Royalist precisely?
It is actually very difficult to say. The Royalists were not a political party; they were merely people who felt that the country desperately needed leadership that was acceptable to the people. The most obvious and appropriate was the Royal Fam
ily. The Queen was held in high regard by most of the population and her actions in the Panic and generosity with the Balmoral Decree had shown that her first role was always to serve the people.
The first use of the term was I believe just after the attempt to form a government. The story goes that having lost patience with the lack of progress, the Military turned them out of the theatre and told them all to report to the job centre where they could “make themselves useful”. One officer was reported to have said that he understood how the Royalists felt, referring to the English Civil War. I believe that the phrase just caught on from there but it only became a widely used term after the fact.
How did the movement gain momentum?
It actually began as a grass roots movement, which is surprising given that the term “Royalist” brings about images of elitism and class society. The first calls for change came from the soldiers in the lower ranks of the Military; many of whom had seen the political infighting first-hand and were no doubt aware of what had happened in Stirling. They began to voice more and more stridently to their officers what they felt. Why should they be expected to follow the orders of politicians who, as far as they could see, had done nothing to help the country and couldn’t organise a proverbial “piss up in a brewery”.
The Generals realised fairly quickly that without the support and consent of the soldiers there was no way a government could be formed and indeed the country as a whole would suffer. Those first few weeks were essentially rudderless after all, no major decisions could be made and no major appointments announced. The Generals could have taken control and formed some form of British Junta but there was the likelihood of splitting the country and inciting a civil war. To their credit they realised they needed someone that was universally respected and that person was the Queen.
How was the Queen persuaded to take control?
A delegation of Generals, Admirals and Air Marshals first approached the Prince Regent with the intent of sounding out whether he would support the idea. From everything I have heard he had actually come to a similar conclusion but would not make a move without the consent of the monarch. The next step was to contact the Queen in Windsor and ask her permission to disband Parliament and form “an interim Royal Council to administer the realm, until such time as a new government could be formed” which she duly granted. It was a very British coup really, no guns, no one killed, lots of formal language but the government of a nation overthrown none the less.
What form did the Royal Council take?
It was a return to feudalism in its most basic form. The Queen was the head of government, as she had always been but now she had real power to run the country despite being under siege in Windsor. The Prince Regent was tasked as her deputy and because of his location in the Northern Safe Zone and his freedom to move around, the real role of administering and running the country fell to him. The Regent set up the Privy Council which consisted of the head of the Military, the Minister for Resources, Foreign Secretary and a number of other posts either filled by members of the Royal Family or high profile public figures. Below the Regent were his sons each of whom was the Governor of one of the Safe Zones, both of them with an advisory staff made up of military men and civilian experts. It was a family pyramid of power that put the country back to 1066.
You can’t dispute that it was an effective form of Government and that it got things done?
So is a dictatorship but that doesn’t make it right. For the first year the Royal Council ignored all of the opinions of their subjects and just ploughed ahead with their plans; the mass relocations, the collectivisation of farms, the categorising of individuals along skill lines, Stalin did less to his people. A thousand years of hard won civil liberties swept aside. That is not to mention the new punishment laws that were brought in; flogging, stocks, public humiliation, chain gangs and hanging. It was unbelievable.
Surely you have to agree that the thinking behind the laws was sound?
I have heard this argument before young man. That we did not have the resources to guard prisoners and why should able bodied citizens be expected to guard other able-bodied citizens? Better to give them a short sharp punishment to make the point and then get them back to work. Yes, it all sounds very logical and process driven but the fact remains that the Royalists ran roughshod over every social development since Magna Carta.
But it got things done and more often than not for the better. What if the government had had these powers prior to the War, it could have been prevented?
But what sort of country would we have been? North Korea had these powers and look at them, no one knows what the hell happened to their entire population, they could all be underground in a Stalinist utopia for all we know. I cannot dispute that the Royal Council got things done and for a while people were content to go along with it on that basis but once the initial panic and re-locations was over and people began to get more settled that was when they began to demand more freedoms and a return to government accountability.
What form did this change take?
The most obvious and sweeping change was through the formation of a new parliament and elections. However, this time the elected representatives were chosen from among the community. It was truly a liberating moment for many people, really knowing the person they were electing and not just ticking a name on a ballot sheet. Each settlement in the Safe Zones elected one person to represent them; this person then attended the Regional Councils. There was one of these for each Safe Zone and it was here that all the problems were discussed and solutions proposed. Whatever a Council decided on had to be ratified by the Royal Council but it allowed people to regain control over their lives again.
That was just the first step; with a Regional Government set up the Royal Council began to hand over more and more roles to the people. It was one of the beauties of the system; it identified natural leaders and people who could get things done. After all there was no way that a community would elect someone who was not willing to fight for that group. It was the first real meritocracy where the right people ended up in the right positions and I would argue that it was this approach that really got us back on our feet.
When did “Royalism” end?
In a sense, it ended when the Royal Family handed over most of their roles to civilians. Some of course stayed on but that was because they were the best person for the job and not because they were a Royal, a meritocracy as I said. The two princes handed over their governorships to elected representatives some two years after the panic and although the Prince Regent remained in overall control of the day to day running of the country, he did appoint a Prime Minister and form a cabinet to replace the Royal Council. However, one can argue that “Royalism” as you call it, has never really ended. The King is the head of state in more than just name and all official organisations are Royal this or Royal that. If I were asked to define what Britain is I would have to say we are a “meritocratic representative monarchy” which I think makes us unique in the world and something to be proud of.
Militia
Ashwater, Devon
James Boardman is the Reeve for Ashwater and is responsible for the security of his local area, often based around a manor or settlement. His main role is to organise and train the local Militia and patrol for any remaining pockets of infected. I have joined him on a Wednesday, the traditional day for the Militia of Britain to train.
I guess the Militia was formed because the Army was just too small and overstretched to be able to guard every single settlement in the Safe Zones. I was moved to Ashwater from one of the camps during the re-settlement program right before the harvest, I was a P3 you see, no useful skills. You have no idea how crushing it is to be told that. I was an insurance broker before the war and a bloody good one. I had a great job, nice flat in Chelsea and had promotion prospects, going to the top my reports said. Ha if only I had started selling zombie insurance or Apocalypse protection I would have been laughing, as it was I was a P3
and a drain on the state. So they moved me some where I could do some good.
As a city boy, I had always thought that the country side was a nice place to visit or go for the odd weekend shoot. Never realised just how much work there was involved in being a farmer. Christ, I learnt fast.
We were moved out by truck, about a hundred of us in a small convoy that stopped on the main road through the village and then we were allocated our houses. I was put into a beautiful thatched cottage that would have been worth a fortune before the war and was home to Mrs Janet Stallard, an elderly widow and owner of the cottage, myself and a family of four from Southampton. It was quite cosy but we actually got on really well. Mrs Stallard was a great host and knew everything about growing vegetables and storing the produce she grew.
Pretty much on the first day we were put to work by the Village Rep. We used to call him The Chief. He was a sixty-year-old retired Army Officer with a chest load of medals and a moustache like a walrus. He may have looked like Captain Mainwaring from Dad’s Army but he knew his stuff.