This is the 10th 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 nine chapters here.
For the first time in what felt like months (but was only three days), he was alone. There were no brokenhearted, sobbing children; no awkward, apologetic big sisters; no warmongering Ella; no suspicious men delivering mysterious and unwanted envelopes.
Just him, a mug of black, sugary tea, and – finally – the letter.
Hard-edged, bold letters were printed across the top.
DEPARTMENT FOR INFORMATION CONTROL
Encasing the envelope, a red border. To create a sense of danger, he supposed. Funny how there always seemed to be the budget for that.
Steadying himself, he took a slow deep breath and exhaled noisily.
That he was about to be on the wrong end of some kind of Free Speech Offence was all but certain. Why else did the Department for Information Control exist, other than to ensure that those who dared to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies were denounced and delegitimised, struck out as traitors to the cause of someone’s truth? Heretics to be – at best – derided and – at worst… well, who really knew where the worst lay, now. He was as aware as anyone about the rumours of ‘re-education camps’.
“We must disinfect free speech, to protect free speech,” Mrs Surrey, the Minister for Opportunities, had said, sincere, straight-faced and in an incongruously soothing voice, standing on the podium outside Number 10 a few months back, introducing Britain’s new Freedom of Speech and Thought Act.
Still, there was a chance it might not be terrible.
There was a sliding scale of ‘free speech’ offences, after all; singing slyly subversive song lyrics one night late in the local pub, say, as Robert had been a while back – the kind of socially acceptable indiscretion usually met only with fines provided that one could show there was a genuine degree of creative intent or perhaps community forgiveness; to the regrettably nebulous and risibly broad “threatening democracy or any organisation, institution or individual whose primary purpose is the furthering of democracy”; to the most serious. Those, almost always announced as ‘extremism’ charges, included “subverting trust in Key Industries”, and “quoting a Proscribed Author or Organisation”, the latter of which had, at a Ministerial stroke of a pen consigned all manner of activists, freedom fighters, thought leaders and thinkers – Gandhi and and Mandela, Orwell and Voltaire, Monbiot, Liddle, Rowling and, ironically, the Fabian Society and Free Speech Union – to the dustbin.
He racked his brain thinking about what he’d written.
If he was honest, he was slightly surprised he’d not already received some kind of notification.
After he’d lost his job at the paper for declining to sing from the editorially prescribed hymn sheet by proclaiming his unswerving allegiance to the overwhelming and unarguable benefits of the Efficiency Programme, he’d played it, if not safe, smart, or so he’d thought. He’d been careful, almost to the point of neurosis, never to suggest directly that the Programme might be unsafe, or buoyed by anything other than complete public support. He’d studiously avoided any whiff of anything which might ‘subvert trust’ in the idolised Key Industries. He’d been rigorous and pedantic about focusing always only on issues that were unarguable or could be evidenced by one’s eyes and ears: proven transgressions carried out in plain sight or whose existence had been accepted by a public authority.
Still, it was undoubtedly a thin line and one that no amount of crafty navigation could completely inoculate against. For what had felt like a long, anxious period he had assumed that, sooner or later, he was bound to attract the attention of DICs, as he liked to call the Department of Information Control in his head. But then the weeks had turned into months, and then to years, and even as it became abundantly clear that certain opinions and topics could not safely be given a hearing, he was yet to receive any notification of infringement let alone a formal charge. He had, naïvely he supposed, assumed that was deliberate: it was important, after all, for a country masquerading as a democracy to maintain at least some illusion of press freedom — carefully calibrated censorship was the order of the day. Plus, in theory journalists were off limits, though everyone knew the theory only held so far.
He supposed, looking back, that he’d become more brazen. Although he’d always stopped short of writing or saying anything totally daft, he’d slyly strived to outsmart the system. He’d started to attack the protected industries, never head-on, but still, from around the edges, articles shining a light on serious breaches of ethics and flagrant deviations from procedure. He’d peppered his pieces with cunningly covert references to blacklisted authors, being always careful to jumble up quotes and mixing and matching his revered masters to a degree that he felt sure not even the cleverest of AI censorship bots could detect.
Or so he’d thought.
He guessed he hadn’t been careful or clever enough.
Unable to put it off any further, he picked up the letter. It weighed down in his hand like lead.
Slowly, deliberately and carefully, he opened it, coldly observing, as if he were a bystander, the fact that his life might be about to spill open with the letter’s contents. As if on autopilot, an action over which he had no control and about which he barely wanted to be informed even after the event, his eyes scanned down the page.
And then, not believing what they saw, they scanned again.
For a few seconds, he was too paralysed to move.
It was bad, as expected. But also, it made no sense.
He read again.
DEPARTMENT FOR INFORMATION CONTROL
Notice of Official Investigation
Dear Mr Oberman
This letter informs you that you are currently under official investigation in relation to a potential Anti-Health Extremism Offence.
The Offence relates to statements made by you in the Weekly Thinker on November 12th, in relation to an article titled ‘Pothole Epidemic At Crisis Point’.
We have identified a number of serious inaccuracies, misleading statements and references to Proscribed Authors or Organisations in this article.
You will be notified in due course of the outcome of our investigations.
He stood up, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.
However much he had expected this, at some point, he had not expected it to be for this.
Potholes?! Potholes that were ripping apart the roads up and down the country in plain sight for all to see? The same potholes which, just a few months back, Ella and Libby and Ted had careered into, flying off the bike and Ted nearly ending up under a bus?
What beagle-eyed, malicious official, what snooping neighbour, what mindless computer algorithm, had reported him for this?
It was almost too ridiculous to believe.
Holding the letter, he paced the room.
His mind, never normally one to get out of control, raced. The penalties for Extremism Offences were severe, opaque and notoriously unchallengeable.
He would be lucky if he was even told what it was.
It could involve anything from a custodial sentence to a whopping fine to a dreaded ‘re-education camp’. It could be months until he found out. If, indeed he ever found out at all.
Perhaps they’d just put him on a list. Never telling, never informing, simply suffocating him still further out of society as they ripped away ever more of his remaining vestiges of citizenship – bank accounts, digital identity documents, medical records – erased. ‘Decitizenry’, it was called.
And the kids? What might it mean for them?
His hands went cold thinking about it and for a minute he felt as if he were going to vomit right there and then.
He stumbled over to the computer. Began typing,
“Consequences for anti-health extre —
But then stopped. Damn it, damn it, damn it. Did he want to create a permanent record of that search? Did he have any other option?
He deleted it, but then typed back in,
“Consequences for anti-health extremism. JOURNALISTIC RESEARCH FOR AN ARTICLE.”
Even now, even consigned to writing for fringe outlets and taking whatever scraps publishers would offer him, he still considered himself a journalist – just about.
The search page came back.
The penalties for Extremism Offences may include custodial sentences, decitizenry and re-education…
Yes yes, he knew all of that. He scrolled on.
In extreme cases the offence will be judged a kin offence and the members of the perpetrator’s family and community may also be subject to criminal penalties.
This was not good. He was going to have to tell Ella.
And then, out of nowhere, tagged on to what he mostly already knew and – at some level – may even have been braced for, this:
The children of those found guilty of extremism offences can be placed in State custody and/or may be sent to juvenile corrective education facilities.
Look out for chapter 11 next week.
Molly Kingsley is a founder of children’s rights campaign group UsForThem.
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Great serialisation. I look forward to each episode!
Agree it’s very good
Thank you so much! That’s great to hear.
“carefully calibrated censorship was the order of the day”
That is what they called for at a WEF meeting no less…..A recalibration of free speech!