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Dystoxit. A Nightmare of the Near Future

A bit of black humour that I wrote in September 2016. You can tell it was before November from the invented name of the US President.

Q. So how on earth did this country get into such a pickle in such a short time?

A. Are you the only person who doesn’t know what’s been going on? Where’ve you been? Planet Zog?

Q. Well, in a way! I’ve just come back from the orbiting space platform: we have to agree to a political news blackout before we go up.

A. Good grief… Then I’d better fill you in… How did it start? Well, with good intentions, at least I think so. The Prime Minister, Amy Ashtree, invoked Article 50 and got her top brains working hard, negotiating the new deal for Britain. But the negotiations dragged on and on for ages, and nothing much leaked out, and everybody became restless. We all wanted something quick and clearcut, so that we could get on with life. But eventually the PM reported back to the country that the thing couldn’t be done and wasn’t going to be. My private belief is that this might have been her ingenious plan all along—to show people that, desirable or not, unravelling our European ties was literally impossible.

Anyway, it enraged the extreme Brexiteers. The official UKIP though vocal were ineffective. However, one of their leaders, Reg I. Falange, had all this time been building up a sort of corps of activists (who soon got called the Falangists). They began to demonstrate and march—and attack immigrants. EU migrants were still entering the country because no final deal had been done on free movement, so the Falangists were on the warpath.

This was bad enough, but the trouble was that the other half of Brexit hadn’t been sorted either: we’d lost our free trade agreements and the price of everything, especially food, went shooting up. (You know we only have a few days’ supply of food in this country? Nearly all of it comes from abroad.) There was real hardship. The number of people needing foodbanks rocketed, and the foodbanks couldn’t cope. There was a popular movement called the Jermynites—followers of Bryce O. Jermyn, who’d all been expelled from the Labour party. They took up the cudgels on behalf of people struggling with poverty, disability, and unemployment, and they too began to demonstrate and march.

It was just at this moment that the government finally completed the privatization of the NHS. This was the last straw for the Jermynites, who became very assertive, coordinating strikes, occupying public buildings, putting up barricades, and so on. Of course, there were EU immigrants in their ranks and these soon became a target for the Falangists. The result: pitched battles on the streets, violence, murders. We had a three-sided fight: Falangists, Jermynites, and the Government all at odds.

The Government tried to pull together a sort of Centrist Alliance with the support of the official parties, but it didn’t stop the violence. Then wham! there was a terrorist outrage in London. It was more spectacular than harmful—not all that many died—but there was a lot of destruction. Suddenly we saw armed police everywhere. And soldiers. And when the Falangists and Jermynites became violent, they were fired on. And more frightening still, some of them were armed, and they fired back. It was like Syria: three-way battles in the streets.

Q. But it seems calm enough now?

A. On the surface! Only because of the American intervention!

Q. The what?

A. Well, you can imagine the consternation all this caused in the United States: unprecedented civil war in Britain, the pillar of democracy and so on! But what a gift to a new President a successful intervention would be. Obviously the Americans have always had a military contingency plan in case the UK should ever get out of line, so all Trinton Clump had to do was invoke the plan and, bingo, in a week, this country had been secured from air, sea, and land.  Westminster now answers to Washington (rather that than Brussels, some would say!), and armed US troops control the streets. I think they’ll impose a trade agreement on us—one that suits them, presumably.

Q. And what did the Christians do in all this?

A. The Anglican bishops were rather surprised. They’d been quietly reflecting on human sexuality. Actually most of the churches had been thinking that sex or gender in some form was the major problem of the day, so they hadn’t been very focused on the realities.  To be fair, when things got bad, many Christians protested, against Government cuts, against Falangist hate crimes, against Jermynite lawlessness, and latterly against the US crackdown on everyone. They all ended up in the cells. Often with unexpected companions: atheists, secularists, feminists, Muslims, gays. There was no distinction.


Oh, I forgot to mention that the terrorist target was Westminster Abbey. As a result, all churches—indeed all religious meeting places—have been closed ‘for their own safety’. So church life is a bit disrupted, as you can imagine.

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