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A load of bother

December 01 2025
© Chris Bird © Chris Bird

Time-travelling detective O’Haggis embarks on a trip to the near future, where totalitarianism and pre-loved orgasms for sale mark a troubled era. Story by Chris Sampson 

Disclaimer: Any similarities to any near future that Britain may experience are purely coincidental. We hope!

“Roll up! Roll up! Orgasms! Get yer lovely second-hand orgasms here!”

Well, that’s something you don’t hear every day, thought O’Haggis. He was at The Ejaculatorium, a black market bazaar where escaped orgasms came (no pun intended) to rest and recuperate before their vintage experiences were sold to modern, 21st Century genitalia.

The peddler continued: “This one is so old, it’s said to be one of Lord Byron’s!”

“Ew!” O’Haggis winced. “Didn’t he sleep with his own sister?”

“More than likely, knowing the gentry,” the peddler admitted. “But this orgasm dates from his pre-incest days. Honest..!”

O’Haggis shuddered. The Chronology Protection Agency™ operative knew better than to buy pre-loved orgasms from black market vendors, no matter what claims were being made for them.

O’Haggis’ latest mission was to 2032 and, now there, he turned his back on the filthy salesman and secreted himself in an alleyway, to get his bearings and reflect on info vital to understanding what was happening if this was a story, for example. It’s called exposition, he recalled, helpfully.

He thought-explained that three years had passed since New Labour had lost the 2029 General Election. Reform UK had swept to power on loud promises of ending migration to the UK – with lots of quieter plans against other minorities hidden in the small print of their manifesto.

Now, the party had begun deporting anyone with anything approaching a foreign-sounding name. And so even leader Farage had been ousted, and was forcibly extradited to Belgium, where his ancestors hailed from.

His replacement was Clarkson, once sacked for racism by his former BBC employers. His first diktat as Prime Minister was that the Beeb be forced to carry advertisements, his second to scrap the licence fee, and his third that it must, by law, show nothing but repeats of Top Gear on BBC4 ad infinitum. The intelligent programmes that BBC4 had previously shown were now banned, its archive celluloid footage incinerated, along with books by authors disapproved of by the state.

Migrant crossings were now unheard of, since small boats were now routinely fired on by the navy, and by toffs with shotguns, and by party members who had voted for the party for just such an opportunity.

On being elected, the party had adopted what it had tried to pretend was a ‘Swiss-style’ model of gun ownership. However, to no one’s great surprise, this had swiftly degenerated into a USA-style cult of pro-gun rights. Consequently, American-style massacres were now normalised in Britain, too. And picking off migrants was – if not legalised – then viewed favourably by the authorities.

Homelessness had finally been solved, claimed the propaganda. In truth, homeless people had been rounded up and forced to work in labour-but-not-Labour Party camps, without concern for any physical or mental health issues that may have arisen after sleeping rough. They were paid zero-hour wages and housed in ramshackle huts without heating, other than any scrap wood they could forage and burn themselves. For all eco-friendly measures were now scrapped, with wind farms and solar powers ritualistically burnt publicly, under the surveillance of chain-smoking, gas-guzzler-driving party activists.

Defying the 10pm curfew was now a capital offence and hangings were commonplace, now that the noose was restored as state punishments for civic disobedience.

The technology that allowed the sales of pre-loved orgasms was owned by moguls like Leon Skum, an anagram of the billionaire entrepreneur whose foreign origins had been conveniently ignored by the ruling party, in contravention of its own rules.

Other examples of creeping Americanisation contrary to the flag-waving regime’s stated ‘Britain First’ policies were evident, though pointing out hypocrisy was likely to get you a trip to the gallows.

The Big Issue had been banned and the Pavement magazine had been renamed the Sidewalk by its new, American owners. Now that “filthy beggars” had been removed from Britain’s streets, it now ignored homelessness issues and concentrated on pumping out pro-MAGA propaganda to those whose hands it was forced into on the streets. Failure to take a copy resulted in a week in the stocks for first offenders, then public hangings for any who resisted.

The resistance itself was comprised mostly of former editors, deputy editors, cartoonists, feature writers and scribblers of absurdist time-travel tales, who printed and distributed Resist! pamphlets from underground safehouses, and sought to sabotage the despotic state by blowing up right-wing munitions dumps and derailing troop trains, like the French Resistance of World War Two (but much more heroically and without berets, obvs).

Perhaps most heroic of all was the ‘fearless’ (it says here) satirist who lampooned the ruling party as Deform UK! Yup, that’d show ‘em! He was captured, but bravely never betrayed his fellow resistors, even under torture, and not because the befuddled fool couldn’t remember their names. Ahem!

Knowing he would never tell them anything, the state decided to make an example of him and he was – you guessed it – publicly hanged.

The black marketeer who O’Haggis had seen in The Ejaculatorium on his arrival in 2032 operated illegally, and ran the risk of having all profits confiscated by the state, before being publicly hanged in a town square or former charity shop.

The latter had all been firebombed on election night, as with help centres for immigrants, disabled people, LGBTIQA+ people and other minority groups, who were now all fair game for party members to shoot out of hand.

O’Haggis had been sent to 2032 to conduct a feasibility study for his employers. The Chronology Protection Agency™ wanted to know if it was worthwhile preventing this dystopia from happening. Would it, they wondered, fall apart swiftly due to infighting between members of its ruling elite? Would common sense (or at least the modicum thereof that we accept as normal today, pre-2029) return after the far-right revolution had burned itself out? If so, how high would the death toll be, and was that acceptable ‘collateral damage’? Or must it be thwarted before it even began?

If the electorate knew now what they’d really be voting for, then would they still elect their own oppressors? If they were given a glimpse into that future, would British voters retain enough integrity to alter its tragic course down the sewers of nationalism that O’Haggis witnessed in 2032?

We can only hope.

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