Revenger by Tom Cain Read Free Book Online Page B

much time have we got before the police arrive?’
    ‘Plenty. They’ll all be at that rally down the O2 trying to keep order.’
    ‘How about media coverage?’
    ‘Same thing: all at the O2 as well. Just make your own video. Stick it on YouTube. Have someone tweeting live as you go in. That’ll get us all the attention we need.’
    ‘Right, yeah, we need to break the hegemony of state-controlled media and corporate mind-control. This is a much more authentic way of communicating to the masses.’
    ‘For fuck’s sake, Bakunin. Save us the political lecture. Just go and fuck some stuff up.’
    Well, he was always happy to do that. In that respect, nothing had changed since the boyhood days when he’d still been called Donald Blantyre, and grown up in Tunbridge Wells, acquiring an impressive set of O- and A-Levels at Tunbridge Wells Grammar School for Boys, and a First in English literature at King’s College, Cambridge.
    It was at that august, yet self-consciously radical seat of learning that the eighteen-year-old Blantyre first found an ideological voice with which to express the vast, poisonous well of indiscriminate fury that had lived within his apparently perfectly placid exterior for as long as he could remember. To his Tory-voting parents’ horrified surprise he’d returned from his first term at university in December 1978 with his hair dyed jet black and sprayed into short, scruffy spikes. He had, he informed them with a defiant snarl that begged for an argument, changed his name to Bakunin and joined the Socialist Workers’ Party, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and an anarcho-punk band called The Spartacist League. The Blantyres told one another that this was just a passing phase. They were wrong.
    After leaving Cambridge Bakunin went into teaching, but unlike most members of his profession his ambition was not to give his pupils the best and most enriching education; quite the reverse, in fact. He wanted to ensure that they learned as little as possible. His aim – one shared by a small, but influential hard core of extremists – was to create an embittered underclass, whose members would be lacking in skills, motivation or self-discipline. They would be shut out of the labour market and bitterly aware that they had no hope and no future. This would fill them with hatred for anyone better off than themselves, and make them ripe for recruitment as the foot soldiers of the revolution.
    In the past few years he had abandoned his teaching career for a life of full-time political agitation, and as the fabric of law and order had begun first to fray, then fall to shreds, Donny Bakunin had become a sort of twenty-first-century Fagin. His gangs of urchins were not chirpy Artful Dodgers and innocent Oliver Twists. They were precisely the kind of young men he had always intended to recruit: functionally illiterate and innumerate, unqualified for any well-paid job but greedy for the gaudiest designer brands, and only too happy to seize by force that which they could never hope to earn by hard work. They came from every one of the myriad ethnic groups of South London, their perennial hostilities temporarily set aside in favour of a joint assault on society. And when the calls went out from Bakunin’s flat to others just like it on a dozen nearby estates, the gangs began to gather and an army of the night was formed.

9
    THE CROWDS STREAMING out of the exit to North Greenwich underground station were overwhelmingly white, middle-aged, middle-income, middle-class. They looked on themselves as the law-abiding, hard-working, tax-paying backbone of the country, and they represented both the single biggest demographic group in the British population and the one that felt itself to be the most unjustly ignored and even despised by the political and media elite. As they made their way through the cold, persistent drizzle towards the O2 Arena they were greeted by giant advertising hoardings that screamed out, ‘THE