Tents of the Righteous

‘You would like things to be the way they were when the country was run by people weighed down by the heavy burden of office. We know where that led us. We now have a country which is fighting to stay alive and afloat, with a population which is at least 15 million too many. We have to kill large sections of the population in order to survive.’

2050. Protagonist Mark Carradine is promoted to the post of Lord Commissioner of Health by the Lord Protector, the ruler of a totalitarian regime. Tasked with reducing the country’s population by 15 million to save resources, one of his top priorities is ‘Take Your Leave’, a euthanasia programme aimed at the elderly and disabled. Carradine, who follows his chilling instructions to the letter, has to cope with many threats to his personal and professional life. He is also ordered to bring his brother in from a remote part of the country, where he has been running a rebel Christian community, to become the Archbishop of Canterbury and a government spokesman. His public duty is to underline the authority of the state and to give the churches full support to the Lord Protector.

As in Orwell’s 1984, the state rules the population’s lives and has sole control of not only communication, but also the weapons. From Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia, it is easy to see how, when civil society collapses and people seek order and structure, a totalitarian society can evolve – even in a country with a long history of democratic government, such as the UK. The novel examines such a state coming into existence and looks at how such circumstances can only serve to bring out the worse – but also sometimes the best – in people. It is a frightening scenario made all the more so because of the realistic way that Blair has approached the subject.

This work of speculative fiction is particularly relevant due to the current debate on government surveillance of internet traffic, reminding us of how easily individuals can cede information to the government. “I was inspired by 1984, especially knowing how close on a couple of occasions we came to having a nuclear conflict during the Cold War,” says the author, who had inside knowledge, as a serving minister of the Crown, when world peace did come under severe threat.