Precautions taken against tiger attack Chapter 3

It took me less than half an hour to get to the Plough and Compasses. Yet again I passed through empty streets, in all my time in London I had seen nobody, my only conversation was with a tiger.

“Hello” the man said when I entered the pub, though in fact he was hardly a man, a stupendously youthful figure in a suit.

I nodded a greeting and helped myself to a beer before joining him.

“Thanks for meeting me here,” he said, “I couldn’t come to you in case I got called away urgently.”

“Called away?”

“I work for the government, the civil service. I’m number two in the Tiger Bill team. I’m on pager, email and text alert, could get called away at any second.”

“I thought that the civil service had been disbanded during the emergency.”

“Not us, we’re too important. We’re the reason the crisis happened.”

This was getting very surreal. The young man was doubtless genuine in his claim to be a civil service high flyer in an important department, but his youthful looks gave the scene the feel of being in a children’s play.

“What do you mean you’re the reason the crisis happened?”

Instead of answering he asked me a question in return. “Why have you come to London?”

“To report on the tiger story.”

“Then it must have struck you as strange that one escaped tiger should lead to the evacuation of an entire city. Stranger still that you’re the only journalist reporting the story that the nation’s capital city is closed until further notice, that seven million people have been moved from their homes, millions more are unable to work, millions of businesses are shut down, relocated or operating emergency measures, and the headline in today’s papers is about a footballer’s affair with a fashion model.”

“What are you saying?” (What was he saying?).

“This has been planned for years. The tiger is just an excuse, another excuse would have been found if it hadn’t escaped, assuming there is a tiger on the loose. Nobody’s actually seen it.”

I didn’t let on about my encounter, after all the tiger I spoke to claimed not to be a tiger at all.

“The emergency situation is being used to give the government and its supporters unprecedented powers.”

“The Tiger Protection Bill?”

“The Tiger Protection Bill is the most important piece of paper in this country’s history. The reverse of a constitution.”

“The reverse?”

“It takes away the rights and powers of the population much as a constitution grants them. The government can do anything it likes. The state of emergency enables them to seize property, ends the right to trial, they’ve even abolished the parliamentary process, the Lords stages of the Bill are replaced by a nod of the head by the three Peers in the Cabinet. And worst of all, these powers are being used before the Bill is even passed. It’s an incredible precedent, it means that the government can do absolutely anything it likes based merely on possible future legislation. It effectively it bypasses democracy.”

“It’s a public document,” I said, “it’s available to download for free on the parliament website. If it was as bad as you say we’d know about it.”

“Ah who reads Bills,” he said with a sigh that was contrary to his age. “Everyone expects the media to report these things, but the media are all owned by three or four billionaire friends of the PM. Nobody’s going to read a Bill and if they did what could they do on their own?”

“It sounds like a conspiracy theory.”

“It is a conspiracy theory, only a real one. It’s back up by papers, hard, cold evidence.”

It was at this stage that he passed me a wad of paperwork. A quick glance confirmed that these included the latest draft of the Tiger Protection Bill, but also confidential emails and memos from within the Tiger Protection Department.

“How have they got away with it?,” I asked. “I know that the press in this country isn’t exactly without bias, but every single journalist? Every single lobby group, every activist, every union? What are people, just plain stupid?”

“Yes, that’s it, everybody’s stupid. Really, really stupid. They assume that the government could never get away with anything this extreme, so they assume that this Bill couldn’t possibly do what it does.

“Read the papers, they show that this whole thing has been planned for years. These memos from two years ago set out the plan. These emails here show that Cabinet members were planning land seizures years under the Bill and had not just identified the land they would seize, but were actually making plans to sell it on. And these letters, all headed the Tiger Emergency Department but dated two years before it was even formed.

It was all true. With this evidence I had the government bang to rights. This had become the biggest story of my life, but I was well aware that if it didn’t make my career it would certainly break it.

“What about the talking tiger?” I asked.

He looked at me as if I was a mad. Perhaps I was.

“I have to go,” he said, “the Minister awaits. If you could get this published then it isn’t too late to save our democracy. Do your best.”

I would do my best, but even though I worked for a supposedly left wing, independent newspaper I couldn’t help but remember the enthusiasm with which the paper urged its readers to back the Lib Dems, and then the enthusiasm with which the same left wing paper urged the Lib Dems to go into coalition with the Tories. There was a separate conspiracy theory which said that the sole purpose of my newspaper was to get stupid left wingers to vote for a pro-Conservative party.

Besides which, for all the shocking evidence of government conspiracy and media corruption, it didn’t explain where there was a tiger walking around describing itself as a little girl. It was time to go back to the other Plough and Compasses and hoped I wasn’t too late for the return of Amy.