NationStates Jolt Archive

"...purporting to be 'Captain' Marcus Cole, claimed for the Newry National Socialist Party Defenders responsibility for the blast which last night claimed the lives of the two Conservative giants and leaves four more people, including Constable Reynolds, in still serious condition at Royal Mavis NHS Trust Hospital."

The latest wave of Newrian sepratist violence was the worst endured in a good number of years, presumably it came because of perceived vulnerability and because a good many Newrians were willingly volunteering for the Home Guard and clearly caught the ire of the rebels by doing so, but these same reasons were working against the republican cause, since people resented rabble-rousing while the nation was in danger, and regarded Cole and his associates as bullies.

There was no news on Gibraltar and Sir Viirgil's frustrations over governmental paralysis, no longer much about the former colony of Nigeria and its abuse by the Russians, and no discussion of the fact that France was raising an army 1,000% larger than Britain's while making threats and accusing Britain of spoiling for a fight.

Sir Henry Wayne was still off in Spain, trying to convince the League's newest member that, while they could do what they liked internally... joining Hitler and Mussolini on their imperialist rampages would have ruined Franco thirty years earlier. Britain was trying to put herself in a position to restore Malaysia from chaos but without commiting to abandonment of Roycelandia or to upsetting 'friends', allies, and rivals in Asia, and all the while minor government ministers and all the opposition parties were arguing violently about the continentals and the reality or hype of this threat and that.

Mainwaring watched calmly, even to the point that some anti-government papers were starting to accuse him of ineptitude and a lack of leadership and metal. The PM folded a letter, newly arrived from Gibraltar, placed it into his bedside cabinet, said, "Good night, Elizabeth" in the usual tone and went to bed, setting his alarm uncommonly early.

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Fifty thousand servicemen and women had just, finally, returned from Africa. With army downsizing (partly to pay for naval expansion), some were out of jobs... but walked home to low-fuss placement as mines reopened in Wales and the north of England, or factories in the north and midlands. Since nobody suffered as a direct result, this didn't make big headlines, and Mainwaring's efforts remained quiet and sidelined. Other regular army personnel entered unusual new Parachute Regiment and Royal Marines recruitment schemes, or looked to the restored prestiege and capacity of the Royal Navy. Still, the people who mattered saw these sort of changes, and liked them.

The next news programmes would tell of SAS operations in Newry, but hardly as a footnote to the arrest of numerous key opposition figures in a climate of outrage over long-term corruption, as railed against in Mainwaring's victory speeches, and of fear of Catholic expansion, not helped by the previous day's terribly convenient Newrian bombings. Armoured cars and even army personnel carriers and trucks turned up outside places of work, residence, and holiday, taking into custody Conservative and some Labour politicians, party backers, and disgraced diplomats and businessmen, including several titled ladies and gents who'd headed programmes in the Thatcherite privatisation conspiracy and its legacy. Arrests were made for larceny, corruption, electoral fraud, treason, war crimes and human rights offences, on charges stretching back in a few cases to the late 1970s.

As pro-Tory and 'New' Labour media barons were detained by uniformed, undercover, and armed police and even the army, the return of troops from Africa seemed to have been conducted along-side a Whig Party coup after the fact of their legitimate election.

His Most Christian Majesty Louis-Auguste was under intense pressure from the Clergy to liberate Newry, and strike a blow for the Roman Catholic faith.

Yet nothing could be done until the imminent naval actions had occurred, and Spain had the War Ministry's full attention.

As a matter of fact, as the Royal Family was eating a sumptuous dinner in some eccentrically ornate hall the Most Christian King even expressed a bit of admiration for Godfrey III, toasting him as a worth opponent and a man not unlike himself.

Nevertheless, under unyielding pressure from the devots at Court, which constituted Louis-Auguste's power base, plans were drawn up for the insertion of commando teams into Newry should the 'Iberian Conflict' last much longer...

This, of course, did not stop virulently anti-British and Protestant homilies from being delivered in every town, village, and city parish in France. Needless to say, thanks to the good offices of the Secret State Police the Marechaussee, everyone attended Mass, compulsory under the Restoration Government. The population was slowly beginning to realize a holy war was about to begin, and Louis-Auguste truly was a lieutenant of God.

What little news of the Whig Party's coupish actions leaks back to Mumbai is largely ignored. After all, Unioners have more to worry about Mainwaring's perhaps overzealous anti-corruption campaign and no few sympathize with it. Margaret Thatcher, many Unioners recall, very nearly cut the Union off from British arms markets, and Chaffins' Conservative administration almost forced a war between two nations that Mumbai considers allies. Nobody is about to shead tears if the men responsible for such inconveniences end up in jail. Great Walmington is at war, after all, and men of questionable loyalty and questionable integrity can't be allowed to hold high office.

As the INA enters the first weeks of what looks to be a long-term counter-insurgency effort in north-central Rajasthan, Unioners can also sympathize with Walmingtonians on the Newry issue. Considering French interest in stirring-up nationalist rebels, Parliament rather uncharacteristically forgets to condemn "Walmingtonian missteps in the past," as it had taken to doing earlier, and equates Newry's status to that of Rajasthan.

Newry, with rather less than six million residents, counts many hundreds of thousands of its citizens in the Church of Walmington's flock, amongst a couple of million Catholics and a few hundred thousand who -like more than a few of the outwardly affiliated- don't know and/or don't really care. The last two generations have seen sectarian trouble caused when the British Army went in force to protect Catholics from the angry reaction of loyalist Protestants to the rise of the Newry National Socialist Party, which advocated German landings in Newry en route to Great Britain, and things, 'got out of hand' when men trained to bayonet foreigners for political reasons were asked to police countrymen for spiritual reasons.

A couple of thousand on both sides have since died in Newry, and dozens on the mainland, as a direct result of the resulting tensions, but a recent upsurge in NNSP activity under the notorious Captain Cole was hitting the sepratist cause fairly hard in mainstream Newrian society, which by and large was far the more fearful of coming under continental dictatorship than it was keen to see pro-Catholic administration. But this was the sort of fluctuation in public disposition that happened over the years, and may have just as easily shifted back in another direction...

...but Newry, rural as much of its economy may be, still had internet access, and footage from Gibraltar was a stone anchor holding the current bias firmly in place. More Catholics had just died on the rock in a night of Catholic royalist bombing than in two generations of Protestant bombing and Walmingtonian riflefire.

Two thousand Newrians had already signed-up for active duty before the glum evacuation vessels returned empty from half-way to Gibraltar.

((OOC: Really just wanted to say that I don't know whether I'll be on-line tomorrow. I know that I'm going out, but I don't know when I'm coming back :) ))

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[Tag tag]

Ah, yes, this thread.

Well, for anyone who is confused (especially by phrases like, "as a direct result of the resulting tensions" ugh), the Whig Party, under George Mainwaring, a small-time banker and former Army Captain (who, in his own words, "Served in the Falkands in the last conflict, during the whole of July"), won the last general election, pushing-out Chaffin's Conservative government.

Most parties directed their opposition against the Tories sympathy with the Holy League, and the Whigs just let New Labour, BID, and the rest spend their budgets slandering the Tories, and assumed their work done for them in that respect. Mainwaring directed his campaign on a more domestic platform, exposing how the system works in simple terms, citing examples that correctly painted the country in corruption. Tens of billions of pounds worth of it. The Whigs were elected to clean-up Britain, and, generally, bring back a 'social' golden age. BID had perhaps been voted-in to bring back the industrial era, and the Tories... well, God only knows -money talks, I suppose-, but the Whigs are about knocking-down council estates and not deliberately under-funding public institutions as the Tories did in order to cripple and privatise them.

The attack on Gibraltar co-incided with the return of British troops from Africa, a Catholic terrorist campaign at home, and the government-sponsored exposé of several high-profile corruption cases, and the Army has essentially shut-down all political opposition to Mainwaring, though without actually shooting anybody. It is a pretty bare-faced left-centre military coup d'état... except that the coup-leaders were already in power by electoral means.

Notably, since then, though the Royal Navy has engaged Franco-Spanish forces in the Atlantic, Britain has made no obvious efforts to tackle the HL on their own ground, even to support Australasian strikes on the continent. Of course, once we win the war and the enemy is gone, Mainwaring will be hard pressed to justify suspending the next election.

Why those two things are in a single paragraph one is at a loss to explain! They're clearly not related in any way.

[Whistles and catches a passing public-owned red bus]