Revenger (18 page)

Bakunin got unsteadily to his feet. Everything hurt. Nothing was working properly. The man was trying to guide him away. Somewhere in the periphery of his vision Bakunin caught the blue glimmer of an approaching emergency vehicle. He didn’t want to be around when the police appeared, so he impatiently waved his helper’s arm away and set off as best he could in the direction that seemed to lead to his flat.

Bakunin didn’t hear the man who’d been trying to look after him say, ‘Suit yourself.’ Let alone mutter, ‘Ungrateful old bastard,’ a few seconds later.

Nor did Bakunin see the man in the jeans and the long suede jacket, his face hidden by a baseball cap and a scarf, come out of the supermarket and, using the bulk of the garbage truck to hide himself, slip on to Netherton Street.

Carver could see that the riot leader was badly injured, disorientated and suffering severe sensory damage. Good, he was glad to see him suffer. And if those wounds made his target far, far easier to tail without any risk of being detected, then so much the better.

42

‘WE ALL WANT
to feel proud again,’ Mark Adams said. ‘And we will. I promise you. We will feel proud again.’

He was heading towards his conclusion now, and he knew it had to be good. He’d given his people plenty to think about; plenty to worry about, too. But that wasn’t enough. He had to show them that he had the answers and was willing and able to deliver them, given the chance. He had to give them hope, a positive vision of the future and – above all – a lot of good reasons to vote for the United People’s Party. ‘This is the good bit,’ Nicki Adams whispered to Alix. ‘This is what makes him different – just watch.’

‘I want you to help me – all of us, working together – to create an independent Britain that can forge its own future, determine its own destiny,’ Adams said, still sounding very much like any other politician. ‘I want a Britain that’s prosperous, with a vibrant, growing economy, peaceful and secure from external threats; where people of all races share common values, a common understanding of our way of life . . . and an appreciation for the culture that makes our country unique.

‘Together we can create an England fit for decent people to live in. All we need is a crackdown of common sense to sweep away all the daft ideas that have brought this country to its knees. And here, in four steps, is how we can do it . . .

‘One! We will declare unilateral independence from the European Union within twenty-four hours of taking power.’

There was a cheer as big as an England goal at Wembley. Adams nodded as the cheering and applause continued, smiling more broadly than at any other time since he’d come onstage. This was the promise no major politician had ever dared make, but it was one that more and more of the electorate had been longing to hear. And Adams knew it. ‘I thought you’d like that,’ he said, provoking another smaller cheer. ‘We won’t hang around. We’ll leave the EU and the European Court of Human Rights immediately. And we’ll stop all foreign aid, too. So we won’t be sending twenty billion pounds a year to Brussels, and another ten billion pounds to corrupt dictators in Africa, or countries like Brazil and India that have bigger economies than ours and don’t want to be treated like impoverished beggars any more, thank you very much. That’s thirty billion pounds to be spent on British people as a properly elected British government sees fit.

‘It also means no more EU regulations. No more British jobs being taken by foreign workers. No more European judges telling us that we have to let immigrant terrorists, rapists and murderers walk the streets because it’s against their human rights to pack them off back to wherever they came from . . . The United People’s Party is giving Britain back to the British!’

There were more cheers, but Adams didn’t wait for them to die down as he continued, ‘Two! We will reintroduce the death penalty for murderers and terrorists. It’s time a British government finally got tough on crime. That means no more softly-softly sentences. No more letting rapists, murderers and paedophiles back on the streets, and no more worrying about the human rights of criminals. A man who steals, or rapes or kills does not give a
damn
about the human rights of his victims. Why should he expect anyone to give a damn about his? Three! We will radically reform the benefits system. Decent working people are disgusted by the idleness, fecklessness and shamelessness of the scroungers they see all around them. Men and women who work hard to buy modest homes and can only dream of affording families of their own have to pay taxes to fund the work-shy scroungers who fake disabilities, find endless reasons why they cannot work, and fill four, five or even six-bedroom houses with kids they never have to pay for. Well, we’ll be putting an end to that. You won’t be paying for scroungers any more. I promise you that.

‘Of course if you take people off benefits you have to put them into work, and that is precisely what we will do. There are millions of jobs being filled by European immigrants. Well, we’ll give the British people those jobs back. And if the work-shy unemployed and the disability fakers don’t take the work they are offered, they will lose their benefits. Every single last penny of benefits.’

All Adams’s proposals were being met with rapturous approval. The people of Middle England were finally being offered things they’d wanted for years, but been told were bad for them. And they were loving it.

‘The scary thing is,’ one of the reporters in the press box said, ‘this is only one step on from what respectable politicians are already saying.’

‘No,’ Dan Brix replied, ‘the scary thing is what he’s not saying. He’s just shown us the icing. But there’s a great big cake of shit underneath.’ Brix paused for a second, listening to the words now coming from the stage, and then added, ‘And now here it comes . . .’

Adams held up a hand with all his fingers splayed: ‘And . . . four! We will finally keep another promise that has always been broken by other governments in the past. We will spend whatever it takes to secure Britain’s borders. We will ensure that there is no immigration-driven increase in this country’s population. And we will eject all illegal immigrants from this country. This will take a lot of time and a lot of effort. So to make the process easier and to
provide
proper interim accommodation for those in transit back to their places of origin we will replace the current system of detention centres with a network of resettlement areas: designated zones, created on surplus Ministry of Defence land, where out-going families can be housed, with their loved ones and fellow-members of their communities, until a new home for them can be found.

‘For those who remain, we will follow a policy of “active integration”. For decades, British people have been ordered to adapt our ways to those of newcomers to this country, not the other way round. Surely that cannot be right. We in the United People’s Party want a tolerant, inclusive England. All we ask is that you respect our culture, too. In this country we don’t hide our women behind veils and masks. We don’t use schools and places of worship to preach hatred. And if you want to go abroad to fight for terrorist groups, fine. But you’re not coming back.’

The crowd were on their feet now, and they weren’t bothering to sit down.

‘Anyone who wants to contribute, who wants to join in, who wants to be proud of being English, has my full and total support, irrespective of race, religion, sexual preference or anything else,’ Adams said. ‘But if you don’t like it here, and you don’t want to integrate into our way of doing things, well, there are two hundred other countries in the world, and I’m sure that one of them can offer something that might suit you better.’

The line went down a storm, but Adams barely paused before adding: ‘In the meantime, I’m going to save my efforts for people who want to earn their own money, pay their own bills and bring their children up to be decent citizens . . .’

Now he started pacing the stage as he had done right at the very start of the speech, pausing to punch out his words, jabbing the air with his index finger as he talked about, ‘The decent, law-abiding majority . . . The ones who’ve been taken for granted for years and years . . . Who’ve never been consulted as their country has been taken from them . . . Who’ve seen standards of public life slide into
the
gutter . . . Who’ve watched criminals literally getting away with murder; bankers getting away with theft and fraud; MPs getting away with blatant corruption . . . Who’ve had to pay through their noses so that others can be feckless and bone-idle . . . Who’ve been taxed and regulated and held in contempt by the political class . . .’

He’d come to rest in the middle of the stage. And now he stared hard at the audience and asked them, ‘Do you know who I’m talking about?’

There was a roar of pent-up emotion: of anger, frustration and righteous indignation.

‘I’m talking about people like . . . you!’ Adams exclaimed, with another jab of the finger, receiving another shout of acclamation in return.

‘You know something has to be done. We all know it. We all long for a better, prouder, harder-working, happier, more decent country . . . And we can get it, together, that better country.’

One last pause, one last deep breath and then one final line: ‘We can get it because we are united . . . we are the people . . . and the only way is UPP!’

Mark Adams left the stage to a standing ovation, and while the crowd went crazy the professionals who were watching – the media commentators, political rivals or professional consultants like Alexandra Vermulen – were all forced to accept the same conclusion. They might not like Mark Adams. In fact, they might actively dislike Mark Adams and everything he stood for. But he was about to dominate the political agenda, and they had no alternative but to take him very seriously indeed.

43

‘SO . . . HOW DO
you think we should deal with him?’ asked Cameron Young, turning away from the TV screens filled with pundits digesting Adams’s rally at the O2, and pressing the ‘mute’ button on his remote control.

‘Well, we could start by telling the world that this is the racist, Islamophobic, xenophobic extreme right-wing agenda of a man who wants to reintroduce fascism to Britain,’ suggested his Opposition equivalent, Brian Smallbone. ‘Mark Adams is just a twenty-first-century Oswald Mosley.’

‘Well, Mosley was fanatically pro-European union, not against it,’ Grantham observed. ‘Although he and Adams certainly have one thing in common: they were both ministers in a Labour government.’

‘Do I have to listen to this?’ Smallbone snapped back.

‘Really, Jack, was that strictly necessary?’ Young asked, doing his best to disguise his amusement at Smallbone’s anger. Grantham’s uncanny ability to get under people’s skins had certainly not diminished over the years.

‘Well, I’m always a believer that you can’t defeat your enemy without knowing him. It also helps to understand his strengths and weaknesses, even if it’s uncomfortable, or even embarrassing, to admit them,’ Grantham said.

Smallbone looked disgusted. ‘Strengths? The man’s a turncoat who’s betrayed every worthwhile principle he ever stood for. What fucking strengths can a slime-coated shitbag like that possibly have?’

‘He filled the O2, how’s that?’

‘So did the kids from
Glee
, and I’m not taking them seriously as political thinkers either.’

‘My point is, twenty thousand people just did take him seriously. And so should you. So my advice is: forget ideology or moral objections, and consider the logic of the situation. If the electorate looks at Adams’s ideas and thinks they’re as vile as you say they are, then you’ve got nothing to worry about. But if people start thinking that he might have a point, then you should at least consider what that point might be.’

‘The point is that if the electorate go for Mark Adams then they’re fucking morons.’

‘Even morons have votes. But what if they’re not morons? What if they have genuine concerns and they think Adams is answering them? Shouldn’t you have answers too? And shouldn’t you make sure they’re better than his?’

Cameron Young had said nothing, but he’d not missed a syllable of the argument being played out in front of him. This, he was thinking, was the next election in miniature and Adams’s best way of winning it: let the two parties on either side of him beat themselves to a pulp, then step in and take the prize. Then Cameron Young’s phone buzzed, alerting him to the arrival of a text. He looked at it and frowned as the other two continued.

‘What kind of answers can you have for a man who thinks the white race is dying out?’ Smallbone asked.

‘Depends on whether he’s got his facts right,’ said Grantham, ‘and whether anyone actually cares. If he’s talking bollocks and you
can
prove it, no problem. But if he isn’t, and the voters do care, then you can’t just tell people, “You’re not allowed to care about that.” Not as long as this is a democracy, anyway.’

‘Which it won’t be, if Adams has his way.’

‘Well, then,’ said Young, finally entering the fray, ‘let’s make sure he doesn’t, eh? Thank you so much for coming over, Brian.’ He got up and held out his hand, making it clear that the meeting was over. ‘I think we’re all going to need a little time to digest what Adams said, get a feel for the media and public response and then make our plans accordingly.’

Grantham had risen from his seat and was preparing to leave, too, but Young stopped him: ‘Jack, if I could ask you to stay for a moment . . .’

Young let Smallbone leave the room and then, as Grantham settled in his seat again, said, ‘There’s been a significant development, and I’d like to have your input on it.’

‘What kind of development?’

‘There’s been another riot.’

‘There’s always another riot.’

‘Not like this one. Mark Adams is about to find he’s been knocked off tomorrow’s front pages. Someone’s just turned South London into a warzone. We’re talking fifty deaths, maybe more . . .’

‘Fifty? Bloody hell, what happened?’

‘That’s what we’re going to find out. Make yourself comfortable. I’m going to order us some coffee and sandwiches. This is going to be a long night.’