A Most Violent and Glorious Island
1997-2003 Tony Blair (Labour) [1]
OCCUPATION AUTHORITY [2]
2003-2010 Jack Straw/Ra'ad al-Hamdanit (British Section of the Iraqi Ba'ath Party) [3]
SECOND GLORIOUS REVOLUTION/WARLORD PERIOD
2010-2012 Andy Brooks (Red Front) [4]
2012-2013 Richard Dawkins (Rational Liberation Army) [5]
RECONSTITUTED GOVERNMENT
2013-2016 Andy Burnham (Movement for Education, Leadership and Truth) [6]
THIRD GLORIOUS REVOLUTION
2016-- 20XX John McDonnell/Abdullah Öcalan (Universal Socialist Party) [7]
[1] The Iraq War was the defining moment of the Blair premiership, and of Britain's 21st Century. While controversial at home and abroad, evinced by daily monster rallies, it was clear that Britain would join the US in the war, and reshape the Middle East in its own image. After all, what could the frankly pathetic Iraqi Army do against the combined might of two world powers? Victory, in other words, was assured.
[2] A funny thing happened on the road to Baghdad.
So it turned out that while inspecting troops just prior to the invasion, President Bush took a little tumble and bumped his head. While not in and of itself a great event, the fact that when he awoke he displayed a (geographically unsound) Damascene conversion on war in general and this one in particular was rather more of one. Even this would have merely pushed back the invasion slightly, until Article 4 could be invoked, or alternately Dick Cheney could pull his famous party trick. However, in all the confusion no one thought to tell the British, who proceeded to act as the tip of a spear that had no shaft. But still, even alone, surely victory was assured.
So it turned out that the Iraqi army had decided that with the Americans operating a circular firing squad (constitutional debates about the fitness of the president to serve in the middle of an army base with an unclear chain of command can get dicey) the previous policy of "what's the Iraqi army, never heard of it guv, this rifle and uniform is an elaborate fancy dress" might not be necessary, and that it might even be a good idea to try attacking. At the same time, much of the British high command fell victim to the MRE's they had been eating, which unfortunately had been painted with lead. And so the confused, demoralised British army was dealt its most humiliating defeat in history, with most of the equipment falling into the grateful hands of the Republican Guard. But still, the British Mainland was secure, meaning that while this was embarrassing, it couldn't get any worse.
So it turned out that that nice Mr Assad had noticed that Allah was apparently a Ba'athist, and in an act of reconciliation that would have made Michel Aflaq weep, lent the now absurdly well-equipped Iraqi army borrow the Syrian Arab Navy. They proceeded to sail up the Mediterranean, dodging the extremely short localised civil war/"drastically divergent firing solutions" the US Navy was engaged in, and land at Dover. Despite the increasingly desperate protestations of Comical Campbell, they advanced ever closer to London, with the speed of men who knew that at some point they'd wake up from the dream and wanted to get as much done as possible. But still there was one final option, one way to make all the issues disappear in a bright, radioactive cloud.
So it turned out that the new Mr Bush, who walked out of the burning remains of the US's forward command centre with consensus that he was constitutionally fit for office and dead eyes, was also very, very anti-nuke. Specifically, he was anti the British using them. As the British government began to face up to the fact that the "independent" in independent nuclear deterrent was doing a lot of heavy lifting, the Republican Guard entered London. There is little need to recap in detail what followed. Atrocities such as the Burning of Buckingham Palace, as well as spectacles such as the arrest of the cabinet on live television (minus Mr Blair, who had an urgent engagement in Geneva) are etched into the public mind. Britain had fallen, and in the following months it was clear that it would stay that way for a good long time.
[3] Inaugurated by a cheerful round of show trials and disappearances, the Straw government remains one of the most hated in British history. While real power lay in the hands of General al'Hamdanit, it was Straw, perpetually in the shadow of the noose that had claimed most of his colleagues, who was the public face of the regime. After the initial bloodletting died down, grim authoritarianism became the order of the day. Indefinite detention, constant electronic surveillance and, shibboleth of shibboleth, mandatory ID cards were all rushed through the cleansed House of Commons, and the imprisonment of much of the Queen's family ensured royal assent. This, combined with the giveaway of public assets to create an enthusiastically collaborating oligarch class, meant that for a brief, shining period, it seemed like everything might turn out fine. And then everything went to shit.
It turned out that adopting a radical pacifist platform wasn't a vote winner in America, and Bush failed in his attempt to win the Republican nomination, losing to the insurgent campaign of John McCain, under the definitely not a fuck-you slogan of "No more illegitimacy". McCain was then also nominated by the Democrats, who didn't want to appear unpatriotic. Arms and "advisors" began to flow into Britain, theoretically to nice fluffy liberal groups, but in actuality mainly ending up in the hands of radical groups, on the grounds that they were actually willing to use them. Meanwhile Saddam's decided that if he could beat the Anglos, it might as well be time for another crack at the Iranians. And the Kuwaitis. And the Saudis. And the Turks. And really anyone else that was looking at him funny. While difficult to argue with from the evidence, this still meant that Iraqi troops had to be pulled out of Britain in ever greater numbers. Then the bottom fell out of the global economy, and there was no more money to pay the conscripts who were supposed to take their place. And then before you knew it was 2010, and Straw was being hustled onto a helicopter an hour ahead of the advancing Red Front militias, who had strong views on his economics (social fascist), his authoritarianism (not being done in the right way to the right people) and his head (shouldn't be attached to his shoulders). The occupation was over, and what a slightly literate PR intern in Langley had dubbed the Second Glorious Revolution had begun.
[4] Or alternately the Warlord Period started. While Brooks' forces were by far the strongest, having grown fat off of the aid Americans gave to any group who could mouth the cant of democracy, they were never unchallenged. Britain's Kurdish community, who had heard enough from the old country to book it the moment Iraqi boots hit the ground, never came down from the hills, and were increasingly joined by compatriots who had fled the chaos of the Middle East. Meanwhile fascist groups of various sizes held streets, boroughs, sometimes towns, and from his mountain fastness the bearded, wild eyed Richard Dawkins readied his legions of fanatics for war. Brooks compounded this problem by acting much in the way you would expect from the leader of a small Stalinist party who had lucked into leading the Left Opposition to the occupation by virtue of everyone else with organisational experience being dead or imprisoned. Many erstwhile comrades in the struggle were shuttled off to the same prisons, while aid money was sent towards the construction of gigantic statues of Stalin in every government-controlled town, and the rewriting of the school curriculum to increase revision, but remove revisionism. However, it was perhaps his most understandable excess, the liquidation of the collaborator oligarchs, that was to doom him. Faced with the death of people who could afford journalists and lobbyists, the incoming Clinton administration pulled support (coincidentally freeing up funds to be spent cleaning up McCain's decision to declare war on Iraq and Iran simultaneously) and instead endorsing well known liberal thinker and man of science, Richard Dawkins. This time, they were backing the right horse. Definitely. After that, Brooks' disaffected and underpaid troops began to melt away. Any hope of salvaging the situation was lost when a fedora and leather duster clad teenager drove a truck packed with semtex into the Palace of the People (formerly Buckingham Palace) killing Brooks and many of his remaining loyalists. Dawkins was then able to enter London unresisted, inheriting an even more fractured nation than before.
[5] The Dawkins regime began with a bang, and maintained that tenor throughout. Even more than under Brooks, Dawkins' Britain was terrifyingly fragmented. Lacking Brooks' credibility as a resistance fighter, or anywhere near as large a fighting force as the Red Front had been at its peak, Dawkins was unable to maintain a steady control of the nation, especially further north of Middle England. At first, it seemed that no amount of American aid could keep the Rationals in power. Then Dawkins and his acolyte's hit on a traditional solution, but with an innovative, disruptive twist. What if pogroms, but for Muslims? Speeches, articles and posters began to flood forth from London, denouncing "fifth columnists", collaborators with the "Islamo-fascist occupation regime" lurking amongst the population, in ways that left no doubt about whom to target. As the government inaugurated a purge of these misogynistic, homophobic, traitorous irrational elements, they could relax for a period, secure in the knowledge that they wouldn't need to guard their own flanks while citizens and militias made war elsewhere. Simultaneously ex-Red Front bands, who had been in the process of reforming, began to splinter as they fought over whether to refuse to engage in "sectional politics", intervene in defence of the persecuted minority, or in a few cases join in the purge in order to wipe out another tiresome opiate of the masses. Now, the Rationals could implement their program in security, usher in a new age of science and scepticism.
And what a program it was. Non-STEM education was banned, ending the corrupt woolly thinking encouraged by the humanities. "Biological Truth" was enforced, rather than irrational delusions on gender being indulged. While never pursued with the same vigour as Muslims, all theists, or in the regimes cant "Spaghetti Monster worshipping irrationals" were purged from public life. The only thing preventing the demolition of every place of worship the regime could find was that Brooks had already turned them into stables to prove a point. And in all areas, freedom was made mandatory. Every man was subject only to his conscience and his intellect, freed from the cloying embrace of the state, whether they wanted it or not.
Really, it was a surprise the regime lasted as long as it did. Never really more than Mayor of Greater Greater London, Dawkins relied heavily on American aid to keep himself afloat. As pictures began to flood out of Britain depicting the carnage inflicted on minority groups, America looked up from the red ruin it was making fighting a losing war, a conflict that now stretched from the Bosporus Straits to the Arabian Sea (the Clinton clean up had not gone to plan, to put it mildly) and saw a chance to regain the good old moral high-ground. In a swell of definitely sincere outrage, aid was cancelled to the Rational regime, and "advisors" began to pour into the country. Knowing which way the wind was blowing, Dawkins declined to imitate Andy Brooks, and absconded with much of Britain's remaining gold reserves, smuggled out inside small jars of honey. He currently resides in a compound in the Australian outback, fighting extradition requests from several British governments and writing apologetics for the regime. In his place the Americans installed an inoffensive moderate, someone who had served in the last democratic government in Britain. With power finally reasserted over the entire nation, and most of the armed groups having gone to ground, things were beginning to look up. Right?
[6] At last, stability! And for a brief, shining second that could actually be said with only a minimum of sarcasm. While more obviously a puppet of a foreign government than any PM/First Comrade/Technocrat in Chief since Straw, the rather gentler American occupation, and the fact that money was flowing into rather than out of Britain, kept the population quiescent. While never quite able to get the fear out of his eyes, Burnham ran, to the extent that he ran anything, a competent ship. Education was radically overhauled, actually aiming to educate rather than root out treason/revisionism/feelings. Infrastructure was repaired, rebuilding the links that had held the nation together. The prison camps of the various regimes were thrown open, and secret policemen brought to justice. A combination of Truth and Reconciliation commissions and overwhelming force brought most of the militias to the table. More than anything else, though, what the Burnham regime asserted was that people were no longer required to care about politics, that rather live in fear of the government they could relax in the knowledge that those on top strived for their betterment, and good times were just around the corner.
Then, and stop me if you've heard this one before, they weren't. It had always been known that a substantial amount of the reconstituted government's manpower and expertise came from former Ba'ath officials, many of whom had been civil servants at the beginning of the occupation, and anyway had been out of power long enough for memories to dull. For the early part of Burnham's tenure this was met with nothing more than low level resentment. There were occasional scandals when it turned out that Mr Philips in Accounting had previously moonlighted as the Butcher of Barnsley, but nothing major. In 2015, this all changed, as it was revealed that one of Burnham's chief advisors was William Straw, the so-called Green Prince. This news, on the heels of delays in aid convoys from America, substituted with dark rumours about internal ructions deep in the heartland, brought hundreds of thousands out into the street. The predictable, but still tragic response of the American troops then turned the protests into insurrection. It remains unknown whether the first shots fired were accidental or under orders, as the records were destroyed or lost within the next year. The grand tragedy, or possibly farce, of all this was that Straw wasn't even a very good advisor, and was weeks at best from being packed off to join his father in exile.
But even with the population busily digging up their buried Kalashnikovs and technicals, Burnham knew that he wasn't going anywhere. As long as he had the support of the US, he could stay in power. The situation would improve, people would return to their homes, and things would get back to normal. The work could begin anew to revive the Britain of 2003. And then, like Jack Straw, like Andy Brooks, like Richard Dawkins, he reached out for the support of his backers. And found only empty air.
The bloody details of the Heartland Coup are well known, so all that needed to be said is that the new hard-right ultra-isolationist junta saw no need to spend American blood and treasure propping up a commiecuck euroshill. It was probably being told this that pushed Burnham over the edge. As government officials crowded onto US helicopters, Burnham decided that he was unwilling to follow Straw and Dawkins into the humiliation of exile. Nor was he willing to wait for the end, as Brooks had done. On the fourth of June 2017, Andy Burnham shot himself. The troops of the Universal Socialist Party entered London the next week.
[7] It had been an odd path that had taken two old men to the very seat of British power.
John McDonnell had been part of the perpetual left awkward squad and had been swept up in the first round of arrests following the invasion, reportedly as part of a "self-care exercise" by Jack Straw. He waited out the long years of the occupation in a work camp near St David, helping in the construction of a gigantic statue of Saddam Hussein flipping the bird at the distant United States, and their not so distant navy. When the regime finally collapsed, and the camps were opened up, McDonnell was lucky enough to be able to get out before Brooks closed them again. As a social fascist revisionist crypto-trot wrecker/irrational Flying Spaghetti Monsterite crypto-theist/old dinosaur McDonnell was naturally not well liked by any of the new bosses, but a quick retreat to the hills, and a link up through his long-time colleague Jeremy Corbyn with the Kurds, allowed him to avoid their scrutiny. It is here that our second player, Abdullah Öcalan, enters the scene.
A titanic struggle had gripped the Middle East, intensifying as more and more outside actors were dragged in. It was a war of all against all, of nation against nation, and predictably this ended up fucking over the Kurds. More and more began to flee, some to Germany but more to Britain. Amongst them was Öcalan, freed from Imrali in a daring PKK raid in the chaos while the Pasdaran advanced on Turkey. Once in the country he quickly saw the way the wind was blowing and worked to build a strong network that could weather whatever storm was coming. He was much aided in this by his alliance with McDonnell, and together built an organisation that stretched from Bennites, to the strange Bookchinism of Öcalan's loyalists, to the ML and MLM Red Front diehards who still controlled a number of pockets in the country. Allegations that they received training from Iran's elite Quds Force, in attempt to both spite the Americans and keep the Kurds from coming home and making trouble, are fervently denied. When the time came, they were ready.
With the Burnham government already fatally wounded, the Universal Socialists swooped in and provided weapons and leadership to the up till that point largely leaderless mobs that had formed. American troops had largely pulled out at this point, but those that remained were quickly and brutally overrun, giving the rebels both serious hardware and valuable propaganda wins. The fall of London, which had happened so frequently at this point that the American late night hosts (even under a blood soaked fascist junta, some things never changed) joked that the city should have a sign on the road in asking invaders to please wipe their feet, merely confirmed what everyone already knew. Britain was an independent, socialist, nation once again.
In the years since what optimists call The Final, and pessimists the Third, Glorious Revolution, much has changed. Britain has become the Arsenal of Anti-Imperialism, funnelling weapons and experts to oppressed groups and nations across the globe, in a constant effort to spread the revolution. At home there is a mixture of tightening and loosening. Culturally the nation is a liberal as it has ever been, as LGBT rights and representation are pushed from the highest levels on down. Meanwhile much of the economy has been seized by the state, as computers do the work of hundreds if not thousands of central planners. Tensions exist of course. The democracy question is fraught, as people wonder when the much-promised election, the first in over 20 years, will be held, and if it should be, for the people have grown used to autocracy punctuated by mass insurrection. More worrying is the growing divide in the party’s cadre between the old and the young, as the incredibly radicalised youth push for greater, quicker, bolder reform, in the face of their elder’s conservatism. How long the present situation can hold, no one knows.
But it seems for the first time in years that there is a both a unity of purpose, and a drive to actually improve the nation. And after all, things can't exactly get worse. Right?