Worst case scenario

Posted by Guessedworker on Monday, 22 November 2004 21:30.

Picture for a moment an early morning, say, next Spring. It is the middle of the rush hour in a city in the north of England. But this is not to be just any city or any morning. This morning will be remembered as long as men draw breath. This morning local radio has reported that three identical backpacks, each equipped with a tank and motorised aerosol, have been discovered - one at the railway station, two on busy street corners. The tanks were said to be empty. How many more there are out there nobody knows. Shock and rumour spreads. Al Qaeda. People are talking about biological weapons, smallpox possibly. Could it be true? It doesn’t matter. Everyone knows what it means if it is true.

By nine the broadcast media are reporting the events and speculating on their cause. Scheduled programming has been suspended. A few talking heads – opposition politicians, terrorist experts, ex-military men, an ex-scientist at Porton Down – are wiseacring at short notice in the way they do. But as yet there is no official statement.

In any case almost as one, people are drawing the obvious conclusion and deciding what they must therefore do. An exodus of citizens terrified for their children and themselves bursts into being. Schools just filled are quickly emptied. Cases are packed, cars loaded and driven out into streets in which no law, no bar to progress is tolerated.

It takes another sixty minutes for central government to act. There is no great appeal for calm. Calm, if that is what it is, will be enforced. Everyone attempting to leave or who has left the city is to return. Everyone contemplating leaving the city is to remain where they are. All are to obey a 24-hour curfew to be effected from 6pm. Ominously, there is no confirmation or denial of the rumours, no attempt to appear other than authoritarian. Public fear reaches a point of conflagration.

Now survival is the only consideration. In the tightening gridlock, mob rule and chaos quickly take over. Armed police, garbed and helmeted in bio-suits, are deployed. But their numbers are simply too small. The murderous will and uproar of the mob greets them. When it comes to it most cannot train their weapons on their own people, for which kindness they are overwhelmed and beaten to the ground. Some simply turn around their vehicles and flee the city and their masters too.

By mid-morning everyone who can or wants to run is engaged in the attempt. The remainder, violent and vengeful whites and criminal blacks either unawares or uncaring of the biological hazzard, embark upon an orgy of rape, looting and racial homicide. No one with a brown skin is safe. The city’s two large mosques and all the Muslim meeting places are burning. Ironically, Asians of whatever religion have mostly calculated the odds of survival to be better if they stayed off the streets. They understand at whose cost Al Qaeda hopes to awaken the Ummah. They have to keep their heads down and wait it out. They lock their windows and doors.

The madness catches up with them anyway. They are firebombed or just hacked to pieces in their living rooms. Known Muslim households are the prime target. But any dead Asian is better than none. Some are crucified in trees, a few left to die next to their naked and mutilated women. By the end of the day there is the sound of gunfire across the city. A permanent haze of dust and smoke filters the dying light of evening. Too late, bio-suited Army units have moved into the city, taking control, shooting to kill at the curfew-breakers. Tomorrow morning the sun will rise on a different country.

Alright, nightmare finished. What wouldn’t you give for a government that could handle such a disaster decisively and in the greater interest of the nation? Well, what wouldn’t you give?

How about your freedom of speech? Would that be a fair exchange in return for effective government in extremis? Yes? Well then, how about all, absolutely all, your civil rights? Would you object to them being thrown into the bargain? No? Well, how about the suspension of Parliament and the democratic process? Or suspension of the Constitution? The scrapping of the Monarchy? How about mass arrests and indefinite imprisonment without trial? Still with me? How about if this beloved, free land of ours could be transmogrified into a totalitarian police state by the signature of one Home Secretary, and with no prior Parliamentary debate? Oh yes, and with no right of appeal – merely a review by appointed judges a few weeks afterwards, just to make sure it was all done quite properly, y’know - and no allotted time after which governance must revert to the one we know and love (sort of).

Beginning to wonder yet whether that wouldn’t be a tiny bit over the top? Well, how about if the definition under which this great leap into the dark could be taken is not confined to a major terrorist attack. What if it was any public order offence … anything the Home Secretary doesn’t like, really? One man and an “Enoch was right” placard in Bradford? No problem. Suspend Parliament and the Constitution. Send in the tanks. Just like that.

If you don’t already know all about David Blunkett’s Civil Contingencies Bill you may want to check out these links, the first dating from this September when it was still only a worrying possibility.

ThoughtCrimeNews video interview with Lord Lucas.

www.statewatch.org

That nice, friendly and shiny new government department that explains just why we need this nice, friendly and shiny new legislation.

Tags: British Politics

Comments:

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Wed, 24 Nov 2004 03:40 | #

“If you don’t already know all about David Blunkett’s Civil Contingencies Bill you may want to check out these links, [...]” (—from the log entry)

Mr. Blunkett denounced Anthony Browne as a “racist” on the floor of Parliament for committing the “racist act” of raising certain specific, wholly legitimate public-health questions in regard to massive third-world immigration into Britain.

When young Pakistani thugs in towns in the north of England openly promised violence if Le Pen visited the area at the invitation of the BNP, was Blunkett’s response to warn the thugs? No. His response was to announce that if violence erupted he’d have Le Pen arrested. Everyone got that? (...I’ll wait…) Let’s go over that again. When one of the most prominent political leaders in France arrived in England on an official visit at the invitation of a legitimate U.K. political party, and Pakistani thugs in certain cities said there’d be violence as a result, Blunkett reacted by saying he’d have that prominent political leader arrested in the event any violence broke out.

Let everyone think about that a minute.

Blunkett recently stated there was, in his words, “no theoretical upper limit to immigration into Britain.” He didn’t say there was no practical upper limit, but no theoretical upper limit. (For the incredulous, he did say exactly this. Go ahead and google it. I don’t happen to have kept the reference but it should come up right away on a Google.com search.) In other words, there’s no theoretical reason—mind you, forget any practical reasons they can’t all come, such as, let’s say, sheer lack of living space, because Blunkett’s gone way beyond that now, all the way to theoretical reasons—so, according to this undisputed genius there’s not even a theoretical reason why one billion two hundred million Chinamen, one billion Hindus, all of Pakistan, all of black Africa, all of Latin America, the entire populations of the Middle East and of Southeastern Asia, and anywhere else on the planet shouldn’t all, every man jack of them, come pouring into Britain next week.

To paraphrase something John Kerry said of Bush during the late election campaign, Blunkett is the wrong man for the wrong job at the wrong time. He’s just plain wrong. Period. About everything. The man ought to be chased out of government, and that as soon and as ignominiously as possible. The most flattering thing that can be said about him is he’s odious. It goes downhill from there.

Posted by EC on Wed, 06 Jun 2007 04:42 | #

A latecomer to the party (this having been posted six months ago), you may include me as one of the icredulous, although the red-hot anger I initially experienced will no doubt soon be tempered by an icy resolve to get involved!