The year is 2095. Britain has become an impoverished country on the outskirts of the world’s poorest continent, Europe. The British economy collapsed in the mid twenty-first century after the City of London “outsourced” its financial services sector to Bangladesh. With unemployment standing at 95%, law and order broke down and the British elite fled to the Caribbean. An international peacekeeping force of French and Italian soldiers landed in Kent to relieve the starving population. Within a few years, however, the British National Party under its new leader Baloney Tear had become the dominant force in British politics. In the general election of 2080, it captured two thirds of the seats in the British Parliament. International observers commented that the election could be considered “neither free nor fair”. Ballot boxes were stuffed, bribes proffered and paramilitaries roamed the streets, intimidating voters and burning Asian families out of their homes.

The BNP succeeded in driving the French out and restoring some sense of pride to the battered Third World country. But the BNP elite was corrupt and venal. Now in his third term, Baloney Tear looked to foreign adventures to bolster Britain’s declining economy and regain his international prestige. He planned to invade the oil-rich democracy of Iraq and install himself as Global President. The pretext for the invasion would be Britain’s claim to its former colony of Kuwait, now an autonomous province in the Democratic Republic of Iraq. Unfortunately, in the two hundred years since the First Gulf War of 1990, Iraq had built up one of the world’s most sophisticated armed forces. The British surprise attack initially caught the Iraqis off-guard. Soon, however, British forces had been pushed out of Iraqi territory. The British capital came under air bombardment for the first time since 1945. With its armed forces shattered and its capital in ruins, all the British people could do was to prepare for the inevitable.

We knew the war was starting to go very badly when the first Iraqi paratroopers landed in Watford Gap. The BBC went off the air, except for a pre-recorded broadcast reassuring us that everything was going to be OK, and all males aged between 18 and 55 were to report to their nearest territorial army base. Republican Guard tanks were spotted on Clapham Common. In Whitehall, confidential papers fluttered from the windows of abandoned ministries. Her Majesty’s Government had fled to Oxfordshire to conduct a heroic last stand against the invaders. Rag-tag civil defence militias patrolled Oxford Street to prevent looting and disorder. Most of the shops were closed in any case. There hadn’t been any trains since the Iraqi air force had bombed Clapham Junction three days earlier, killing one hundred commuters. A single Union Flag fluttered above Parliament Square, where a handful of die-hard regime loyalists had dug themselves into an A-bomb crater. The charred remains of Big Ben smouldered in the late afternoon breeze.

As the sun set over the blackened hulk of Westminster Abbey, the first column of Republic Guard entered Parliament Square from the direction of Victoria Street. All the bridges over the Thames had been bombed, but Iraqi engineers had succeeded in constructing a pontoon bridge from the Albert Embankment. A few sporadic bursts of small-arms fire rattled out over the rooftops of Portcullis House. The tank commander ordered a shell to be fired at point blank range into the building. Two journalists from Sky News were killed in the resulting explosion. A small number of nervous citizens began to take to the streets. One or two waved Iraqi flags and shouted greetings in Arabic. Some muttered sullen threats under their breaths. The majority just looked stunned and stared in silence at the rearranged landscape.

An armoured personnel carrier edged over to Nelson’s Column on Trafalgar Square, miraculously still standing after ninety days of continuous bombing. The Iraqi engineers attached a steel rope to the base and reversed slowly away from the column. Slowly, imperceptibly, the steel rope took up the slack and the column began to buckle. The one-eyed admiral came tumbling to the ground, whereupon a small crowd began to attack the statue with their fists and shoes. A correspondent from Iraqi Television News (ITN) explained that the British people were venting their entirely justifiable anger on a grotesque symbol of militarism that had mocked them for over two hundred years.

Later that evening, the Great Father of the Iraqi People, Saddam Hussein III, declared major combat operations over. His speech was broadcast from a captured British aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf.

Iraqi Television News headlined its nightly news report with some footage that had been filmed on the elevated section of the A40 (M) motorway in west London. Dozens of burned out Warrior fighting vehicles were strewn across both carriageways along with hundreds of civilian trucks and cars that had been caught up in the sudden retreat. The obsolete equipment of the British armed forces had been cut to pieces as they fled pell-mell from the battlefield. Some British officers abandoned their units and changed into civilian clothes. One British deserter claimed that more soldiers would have given up earlier, but their unit had been bolstered by regime paramilitaries whose orders were to shoot anyone who wanted to surrender.

Although the British capital was now under the control of the Baghdad division of the Republic Guard, former regime loyalists were regrouping to the west in the vicinity of High Wycombe. The evil dictator Baloney Tear was reported to be hiding out in a bunker fifty feet below the ground. All Iraqi soldiers were dressed from head to toe in their NBC war-suits, since the unpredictable British tyrant was expected to unleash a deadly barrage of weapons of mass destruction on his own people in order to escape justice.

Several mass graves were discovered in Hyde Park containing opponents of the former regime. Some people claimed that the mass graves actually contained victims of the Iraqi bombing.

The embattled residents of High Wycombe had a sleepless night. A spokesman for the Iraqi air force regretted the collateral damage that had occurred when a cluster bomb accidentally detonated over a residential area. Republican Guard artillery pounded regime positions on the road to Oxford, where an entire division of British Special Forces were said to be preparing their last stand. In Birmingham, Bradford and Oldham, Iraqi armoured columns were met with crowds of cheering bystanders. People threw flowers from the tops of buildings and kissed moustachioed Iraqi officers. The only remaining areas of the country still under regime control were the capital, Oxford, and a large portion of territory to the north of the River Clyde.

In the event, Oxford was taken without a fight. Lines of abandoned Challenger tanks greeted the vanguard of the Iraqi division that edged nervously into the former regime stronghold. Neither Baloney Tear nor any of his evil lieutenants were anywhere to be found. People fired their weapons in the air in celebration as they realised the nightmare was over. Prisoners who were liberated from a local jail told of their appalling maltreatment in captivity. Some had been held for several years in windowless rooms that measured six feet across and stank permanently of faeces and urine. Many complained of beatings by guards, inadequate food and violence at the hands of other prisoners. A concentration camp that appeared to be specially constructed for children was discovered in west London, near the remains of Heathrow airport. The children, some as young as fifteen, were kept in abysmal conditions, some suffering from acute mental health problems. The Iraqi minister of Health was visibly shocked by the discoveries and promised to send a full report to the United Nations.

Civilian uprisings now took place in Edinburgh and Glasgow. The MP for Glasgow West welcomed the Iraqi invasion with open arms, saying that Scottish people had never liked the English and had nothing to do with imperialism. The Iraqi flag flew above the national parliament in Edinburgh.

In homes and factories across Britain, people tried to make sense of recent events. A small minority were hostile towards the invaders, but the majority were just glad to be rid of Baloney Tear. Some of the older workers remembered that Britain had used to be quite a prosperous country, but the economy had been destroyed when the evil dictator had seized power in a coup and driven the British people into a series of disastrous wars. Some of the more cynical younger people accused the Iraqis of having invaded in order to seize Britain’s North Sea oil reserves. The Iraqi oil minister said that this was rubbish, because if they had wanted to reach a trade agreement with Britain, they could have done so on very favourable terms, since we had been selling them weapons of mass destruction for years.

A tape purporting to be the voice of Baloney Tear was broadcast that night on Iraqi Television News. The former dictator said that British forces would resist the foreign occupier just as they had resisted Napoleon and Hitler.

Some hot-headed young people, inspired by imperialist propaganda about Britain’s role in the world, decided to launch a campaign of armed resistance against the Iraqi “occupation”. An Iraqi soldier was shot dead in West Kensington. A car bomb killed three Sudanese engineers in Watford. Two more soldiers were badly injured by a roadside device in Harrow-On-The-Hill. A prominent Arab political scientist explained on Larry King Live that many British people felt culturally inferior to the Arab forces, because our economy had fallen so far behind and our society had collapsed into unfathomable levels of depravity after we turned our backs on God and started worshipping money instead. Horrified Iraqis were treated to endless documentaries about teenagers working in British sweatshops and single mums living on paltry benefits while Baloney Tear and his evil cronies lived it up in mansions. Even while one in four British children grew up in poverty, Baloney Tear spent millions improving security at Chequers, one of his many luxurious palaces.

Back in Baghdad, an increasingly vocal anti-war movement took to the streets demanding an end to Iraqi involvement in British affairs. Two hundred thousand Iraqis marched through the capital with placards that read “Troops Out Now” and “No Occupation”. The Iraqi information minister chided the demonstrators for their ignorance. “It is a price worth paying,” he reiterated, “to rid the world of this evil dictator and his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.” Some Iraqi critics of the war pointed out that no weapons of mass destruction had actually been found in the UK. The vast majority of Iraqis supported the war on the grounds that a major threat to world peace had undoubtedly been removed. The Iraqi president was said to be privately annoyed about the protests, but an aide commented that it just showed what a great democracy Iraq was these days. When the British people had tried to protest about the Poll Tax, five hundred had ended up in jail.

The campaign of resistance by Britain’s youth escalated in the run-up to Christmas. A BNP suicide bomber drove into an Iraqi army base in Hereford and blew up fifteen soldiers. There were gun and bomb attacks in practically every English county, but the resistance was strongest in the former regime strongholds of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire. The Iraqi information minister went on the airwaves with the news that the evil British foreign minister Stack Jaw had been captured while sitting on the toilet in Eastbourne. Among other things, Jaw had been responsible for the carpet-bombing of Afghanistan and the mass imprisonment of British pensioners who didn’t pay their Council Tax. It was hoped that the eventual capture of Baloney Tear would end the campaign of resistance. However, seasoned Britain-watchers noted that some of the armed groups were ultra-patriots who had gone to ground and appeared to be acting on their own initiative.

As the occupation eased into its second month and normal life returned to large parts of northern and western England, the resistance became increasingly desperate. Suicide bombers struck at the Regent’s Park Mosque in central London, killing 115 worshippers. Increasingly these attacks took on a sectarian and Christian fundamentalist character. One respected Arab political scientist wrote a highly influential book asserting that the British could never respect the rights of other peoples because they were steeped in a culture that glorified violence and aggression. It had been a tradition throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries for the British armed forces to parade down Whitehall in mid-November to celebrate the sickening excesses of imperialism and colonialism. Although these parades were disguised as “remembrance day” ceremonies, everyone in the free world understood that they were a statement of Britain’s continual bloodlust and determination to rule the world through force and terror.

On a visit to the liberated British capital, the UN Secretary-General opened the new Holocaust Memorial Museum in Lambeth. As he toured the exhibits, many of the British delegates begged for forgiveness and openly wept. The huge statue of Winston Churchill that had previously stood on Parliament Square formed the basis of an exhibition on weapons of mass destruction. Churchill had once ordered the RAF to drop chemical weapons on Iraqi Kurds in order to induce “a lively terror”. From now on, the former British prime minister would be referred to in history textbooks as “Chemical Churchill”. One of the Syrian delegates was so revolted by the display that he was sick on the carpet and had to be carried from the room.

The Iraqi armed forces were bolstered by a coalition of Syrian, Egyptian and Sudanese troops as the civilized world united in its resolve to remove the scourge of terrorism from this earth. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council (Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria and North Korea) issued a resolution condemning the BNP as an “international terrorist organisation”.

In London, moderate C of E leaders joined the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem for a special service of reconciliation at the huge mosque that now stood on the site of St Paul’s Cathedral. Hardline Christian fundamentalist protestors vowed to disrupt the proceedings “by any means necessary”. There were repeated scuffles resulting in over one hundred arrests. Many of the detainees complained of excessive force and racial harassment. Lee Jones, 19, of Chelmsford claimed that one Asian officer had called him a “white honky bastard” before punching him on the nose. Metropolitan Police commissioner Mohammed Hussein defended his officers against allegations of racism, saying that the Met had made considerable progress in this regard and that institutional racism was a thing of the past.

One of the problems faced by the coalition was how to hand power back to the British people. Britain had been a dictatorship for so long that most of its people didn’t have a clue how to run a democracy. In any case, Britain was obviously so culturally backward that it needed the outside world to continually intervene in its affairs, if only to keep the peace. This after all was a country that had a nasty habit of invading its neighbours and using weapons of mass destruction on its own civilians. It was soon discovered that the British government had tested biological weapons on its own soldiers in the 1950’s and had released huge quantities of nuclear waste into the environment, causing thousands of deaths from leukaemia. In the end, the Iraqis decided to run the country using a Coalition Provisional Authority based on the ruins of the old Parliament building at the south end of Whitehall. Everyone knew that the Coalition Provisional Authority wasn’t provisional and didn’t have that much authority, but there was no way the British could be trusted to run their own affairs.

Away from the major population centres, law and order was still largely in the hands of ordinary British “bobbies”. These police units were very suspect since many were implicated in the crimes of Baloney Tear and his criminal gang. In the thirty years preceding Britain’s liberation by Iraqi forces, over one thousand persons had died suspiciously in police custody. However, the CPA had little choice in the matter, given how over-stretched the coalition forces were. Iraqi intelligence uncovered a plot by “bobbies” in West Yorkshire to supply the resistance with firearms and explosives. Many British police officers were found to be secret members of Masonic Lodges that were clearly implicated in some kind of Judaeo-Christian-Fascist conspiracy to undermine the Iraqi state and its allies.

The CPA set up a special prison for British terror suspects on the Isle of Wight, which they called “Camp Freedom”. The prison was surrounded by barbed wire and protected with armed guards. Detainees were held incommunicado in cells that were constructed out of wire mesh. They were not allowed out except to see the doctor, but were allowed a Bible and regular visits from a C of E vicar. Human rights organisations complained that conditions at Camp Freedom were in clear breach of international law, but the CPA responded that the detainees were unbelievably dangerous terrorists who couldn’t be judged by normal standards. When the UN High Commissioner started talking about the Geneva Convention, the CPA spokesman terminated the interview.

Some Iraqis, particularly the ones that went on anti-war demonstrations, thought that it was a bit hypocritical to lecture the British about imperialism and then set up a concentration camp on British territory. The Iraqi information minister replied that if you didn’t like it, then you could always vote for another party in the next election, which was scheduled for the year 2100. Meanwhile in Camp Freedom, three of the detainees managed to commit suicide. One was found hanging in his cell, another ate pebbles from the floor and choked to death and the third dashed his brains out with a Bible. The Iraqi information minister commented that this just showed how fanatical and irresponsible these men were, and how culturally removed they were from the civilized world.

The Stop the War Coalition organised another demonstration in Baghdad, but the majority of people stayed at home because it was raining and they were bored with hearing about Britain on the evening news.

The CPA chairman in London narrowly avoided being killed when evil Christian fundamentalists launched a rocket-propelled grenade through his office window. The coalition launched a security sweep that picked up two thousand potential terrorist suspects. Rumours spread that Baloney Tear had fled to Bermuda and was organising the resistance through a network of offshore bank accounts.

Rebuilding efforts continued in London and the Home Counties, the areas most affected by the war, but these efforts were hampered by the sabotage of power lines and mains water pipes. Even after three months, most areas of Greater London had only two hours of electricity per day. The first civilian flight took off from the renamed Saddam International Airport in west London, only for the plane to be targeted with a surface-to-air missile. The Iraqi parliament allocated $80 billion to the reconstruction effort, only to see the vast majority of the funds squandered by the CPA or diverted to pay for security. The 250,000 Arab troops in Britain were costing upwards of $100 million per month to maintain. Saddam Hussein III appealed personally to France and Germany to provide troops, but quite wisely these nations decided to stay out of it, fearing reprisals by Christian fundamentalist terrorists.

The coalition conducted raids on houses in Oxford and Cambridge and discovered large caches of weapons and ammunition. Many of the small arms were manufactured in the USA. Some respected commentators began to speculate whether the resistance was being financed by Jews and Satan-worshippers in Washington DC.

The Regent’s Park Mosque was blown up again, this time with the loss of just four worshippers. The suicide bomber was prevented from getting too close to his target by the concrete bollards and the armed security guards.

Six months after the Iraqi liberation of Britain, a coalition spokesman announced that Baloney Tear had been captured hiding out in a disused mineshaft in Cumbria. Looking pale and haggard, the former dictator was paraded in front of the cameras before being whisked away to a high security jail in London. On the same day, BNP suicide bombers struck a police station in Greater Manchester, killing seventeen officers and wounding 45.

With unemployment standing at 99%, resentment among British people grew, yet most did not join the resistance. There were periodic riots in the Home Counties. Late at night, gangs of gun-toting young white men would squeal through the inner-city streets in stolen cars. Even the ever-optimistic Iraqi information minister was forced to admit that the invasion had not achieved all its stated objectives. No weapons of mass destruction had been found. There was more Christian fundamentalist terrorism in Britain than there had been under Baloney Tear. The occupation was costing an absolute fortune. Iraq had lost friends and allies in the UN over the issue. Nevertheless, there was a consensus that the invasion had been inevitable. The information minister was insistent on this point: “Rogue states like Britain can’t be allowed to thumb their nose at international opinion. If the UN is incapable of dealing with the threats posed by the likes of Baloney Tear, then Iraq must lead a ‘coalition of the willing’ to disarm them and restore peace and security to the civilized world.”

The next day, Iraqi Television News interrupted normal programming with a special announcement. The Iraqi armed forces had just invaded the USA.