This is the 13th chapter of a novel being published in serial form in the Daily Sceptic. It’s a dystopian satire about the emergence of a social credit system in the UK in the near future. Read the first 12 chapters here.
The commotion from upstairs had been continuous – and crescendoing – for a good 20 minutes, layering aggravation onto an already aggravated day. Theo reminded himself that, for now, he should just be grateful that Poppy was back, and safe, not locked away in some ‘juvenile corrective facility’. He shuddered involuntarily.
Gently, he pushed the door ajar with his toe, to better hear the two belligerent voices – Ella’s and Poppy’s – reverberating down from the landing.
“Poppy, I’m not having another fight with you about this!”
“But Mum. It’s not FAIR! You have one!”
“Yes, but one of us HAD to get one or we wouldn’t have been able to eat! Do you want us to not buy food, is that what you want?”
“No, but everyone else has one.”
“And I hate it, Poppy. It scratches and itches and tracks every sodding move. Do you know what it feels like when it buzzes? It HURTS. It properly hurts! They don’t tell you that when you get it.”
“I don’t care, Mum. All my friends have one!”
“Well, good for all your friends but you’re NOT ‘all your friends’!”
”None of them have dropped down dead!”
“I’m not saying you’re going to drop down dead, but there are all kinds of side effects. Half of them they won’t even know about yet.”
“Mum, don’t be so exaggerative!”
“I’m not sure that’s a word, popsicle. Anyway, they’re probably about to make the updates mandatory. Do you know how fucking scary that is?”
“Mum! You don’t need to swear!”
“I do need to swear, Poppy. It’s that bad! You’d have NO control over what you’re putting in your body, is that really what you want?!”
“It’s MY body. MY decision!!”
“That’s exactly the point I’m trying to make.”
“Well I don’t care what you say!” Poppy’s voice had by now risen so far that she was pretty much screaming at Ella. “Because in four months I’ll be 13 and then there’s nothing you can do to stop me. So you might as well just say yes NOW!”
“I’m not going to say yes, now, Poppy.”
“WHY NOT MUM?!”
“I will never say yes, don’t you get it, Poppy? Not now, not in four months, not in four years. I know in the end I won’t be able to stop you but I have to be able to say if I think you’re making a terrible mistake. I’m your parent. I have to be able to say it without you exploding at me!”
There was a heavy thud, the unmistakable sound of something being thrown in rage. Theo glanced over at the playroom door. His mind briefly turned to Libby and Ted, sequestered away, eyes no doubt glued to the TV. They would be out of ear-shot – hopefully.
“But Mum,” Poppy continued, less shrill but apparently unabated, “You never do anything for me!”
“I am literally doing this for you; I know it doesn’t feel like it but I’m trying to protect you.”
“You call this protecting me?! This isn’t protecting me, it’s smothering me and suffocating me and literally ruining my life!!! I don’t think you get it; we would have WON, Mum, if I’d had a BIM, we’d have WON.”
Poppy’s heavy foot thuds stormed into her room, the door slammed, then a wail.
Closing the door a little, Theo walked back over to his spreadsheet. How concerned should he be that the crosses on his screen far outweighed ticks, that the number of countries not implementing some form of efficiency control was dwindling.
The email from school had solidified in his mind how badly they needed a plan B. Hearing that your kid hasn’t shown up for school could be any parent’s nightmare. But, against the backdrop of the drama with the Department for Information Control, the school’s email had propelled him into a purgatorial afternoon of blind panic in which he felt sure his heart was straining to escape from his chest. Barely able to breathe, palms sweatily clutching trouser legs, wondering if his eldest daughter had been snatched away without them knowing, now languishing in some awful grey camp surrounded by high walls and barbed wire.
When, after what seemed like the longest and most excruciating three hours he’d ever lived, he’d heard the muffled creaking of the back door, followed by the clumsy tread of a growing adolescent not wanting to be heard attempting to tip-toe up stairs, and had immediately recognised the elephantine clambering to be that of his eldest, he’d been filled with such immeasurable relief that he’d buried his head in his hands and quivered, over and over and over again, “thank you, thank you, thank you, thank YOOOOUUUUU”, not pausing for breath to contemplate who ‘you’ might have been.
Poppy, unaware of the agony she’d caused the father who would die a thousand deaths for her, had, trembling and with querulous tears of anger in her eyes, eventually confessed that yes she’d bunked off school and yes she knew that was VERY naughty. But no, she did not care and yes that was just the way it was going to be from now on if they didn’t surrender and let her have a BIM. She’d stomped upstairs, Ella barrelling after her.
For the first time since the argument had started, the house was almost silent. The sound of Ella’s footsteps retreating along the landing and down the stairs edged nearer. Theo poked his head round the kitchen door, aiming to strike a note of solidarity, vaguely aware that even by his standards he’d been particularly non-communicative today. He glimpsed her before she saw him. She looked exhausted, desolate and drained.
They were losing Poppy, they both felt it.
“What are we going to do? Rollerblading is – was – her life. If we take that away from her, what’ll be left? She’d be a shell.”
“Come on, come sit down,” Theo said. He wished he could have offered her a glass of wine – a soothing glass of Rioja would hit the spot þ but they were down to their last four bottles. Needed to save that for a better time.
“Let me make you a cup of tea.”
“I just don’t get it, Theo,” Ella continued. “How can they be letting these kids decide for themselves. Thirteen!!! She’s not even allowed to watch Bridget Jones! Thirteen wouldn’t be old enough even if there was proper information out there about bloody BIMs. How’s a child meant to wade through the propaganda and the government bullshit when most adults haven’t managed it?! I tried telling her about all the cases I’m seeing but she doesn’t understand how serious it is.”
Poor Ella, thought Theo. She was so committed to fighting all the time. But what if there was no way left to fight? Lose your children, or let them risk their lives. It was an impossible choice, a choice that no parent should have been faced with. But there it was.
He toyed briefly with the idea of showing her the spreadsheet, but seeing how shattered she looked and knowing there were only three remotely viable countries (and that one of them was Greenland), he opted instead for reassurance.
“It will be okay, somehow,” he said, all the while his heart sinking as he thought about the newspapers which had been bought off and the TV stations which had been infiltrated, the cameras and sensors seemingly tracking every human movement and him now facing incarceration. How would it get better with the power of The Complex consolidating like a turbo-charged cancer, and a new set of efficiency updates planned almost weekly?
Yes, he realised, bracing himself; however we do it, we’ll have to get out before they crush the life out of us.
Look out for chapter 14 next week.
Molly Kingsley is a founder of children’s rights campaign group UsForThem.
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As ever with a Mr Tucker article, far too many words. He probably didn’t have enough time to write a concise piece so produced this instead.
You should stick to reading posts on Twitter/X. Have you ever read a book?
Thanks for your advice. I have read a book. To be fair, not recently though.
You said the article has “far too many words”. Not a little too many words but FAR too many words. How many words do you think the article should have? Half as many? Or fewer than that?
As opposed to some of the others, I thought this one was really ok.
Almost wish I had read it now. I get a few paragraphs in and there is no purpose and then I read on and it’s more periphery stuff and I scroll up to see author and when I see Tucker (and to be fair a couple of others in recent times) and just scroll down to next article. That’s the problem when the editors don’t edit….
Dystopian and why the Police need a thorough cleansing, as do our ‘laws’.
Pets and minorities can now be offended by something and register a crime against you.
As the author asks – is hating the non-crime of a hate-crime, itself a thought or hate crime?
Massive government and state power. And we are to worship the police as ‘heroes’. They are no such thing, too many of them are useless and most of them are part of the problem.
Indeed the process is in itself the punishment; doing it to a high-profile journalist ensures that the message will get publicity. The message being “keep quiet or the police will turn up on your doorstep”.
The police visiting you is in itself a punishment. You are only human: you will feel stressed out, intimidated and humiliated just by them knocking on your door. That’s the aim here. That will teach you a lesson. Next time you’ll keep quiet.
The fact that “hate crime incident” is such a vaguely defined term is deliberate too. Its aim is to include anything that the government doesn’t want you to do.
The whole thing is not even particularly original: it is a copy of the 1927 Stalinist “Counter-revolutionary activity” law that allowed people to be sentenced to 10 years in the Gulag for making a joke.
Not for me it won’t.
I’ll follow my own conscience, post what I want when I want, say what I want to say.
Always have, always will.
There’s more of us than them and they’re terrified of us.
The point remains, however, why British police officers would cherrfully stand to be photograohed next to a flag which represents any nation other than ours which I doubt they understood. The article says it was a flag for a Pakistan political party which British police and other officials have no business being associated with.
I have no idea of the policies or charavter of that party but it does not matter.
It is also important to recall just how the police and UK public authorities generally have stood by Hamas and Palestinian demonstrations. At the wholly peaceful protest by naturally peacable farmers the Met rolled out 20 vans of police. When anyone protests for Israel or Jews they better beware. The contrast is binary.
Sam Melia is to be released from prison but the punishment continues;
”UPDATE: Sam Melia will be released before Christmas. However, they’re not allowing him to spend Christmas at home with his family. The state ensured he missed the birth of his baby girl and now they’re denying him her first Christmas. Sam will be placed in accommodation and monitored for 6 months because they claim his stickering makes him high risk of “serious harm”
https://x.com/MrNChance/status/1861905073904980376
An update from his partner, Laura Towler, here. It all sounds completely over the top and disproportionate when you consider who they’ve let out early and who gets suspended sentences;
https://x.com/MrNChance/status/1862038872621760746/photo/1
Thanks for these.
That we have an anti-white government and an anti-white Establishment is becoming clearer and clearer to more and more people.
In this context “high risk of serious harm” means “He could still have some stickers left and put them somewhere!” That’s the actual issue here: The notion that speech can be harmful in itself, ie, that people may be harmed by being exposed to opinions they really don’t like (or rather, the government really doesn’t like).
The evil bastards.
Fascinating this morning to see on GBNews, the corbynista criticising the police for arresting protesters trying to stop the detention of suspected PKK members because they had the cheek to search the community centre and ask the people living in the same house as the suspects to vacate, so the properties could be searched. In his view, these people of faith were all innocent and should not face jail time for the protest because it’s the police who were heavy handed, but he still said that waving the St George cross should be an imprisonable offence when done near a mosque!!!
All social control is predicated on fear.
No system of authority has enough resources to keep a population under control by sheer force.
Brainwashing helps, but the further from reality the brainwashing is, the more reliant on the threat of force authority becomes.
The problem the UK and most western nations have is the ideology of established power has been diverging from reality for sometime and the population isn’t having it.
No, it’s achieved NOTHING. Roll on the 20th January 2025, when sanity will be returned to the world.
The purpose of NCHIs seems to be to discredit the legal system which is based upon one law for everyone. This is individual law