The Purge: Anarchy Applied To Britain

Earlier this week, I saw The Purge: Anarchy. When I stopped shivering at the sight of the ‘God’ mask and jumping at the sound of gunshots, I started really thinking about the storyline.

The movie is set in America in 2023, where people are living under the Government of the New Founding Fathers. I understood this to be a strange kind of Communism.

The NFF believes that the population doesn’t kill enough, so, for twelve hours every year, every crime on Earth is legal. Emergency services are shut down. If you want to be safe out on the street, you have to be armed. So far, this all sounds like the stuff of fantasy.

However, stay with me on this, readers. The wealthy throw ‘purge parties’ on purge night, at which they get dressed up and sign up to ‘purge’ the poor- to  harm or even kill them.

But here’s the part that most concerned me. An old man, who was, as he said himself, dying anyway, whose daughter could no longer afford his medicine, sacrificed himself. As he explained in a note to his family, he had been paid $100000 by a wealthy family who wanted to commit a crime on purge night. Those rich people who don’t go to purge parties pay the poor, the elderly and the sick for the right to kill them in a safe place, in secret.

Through all this I was thinking- how long before this becomes England? Will it even wait until the 2020s? Could it happen in 2015 if the Tories remain in power?

How long before the poor start committing serious crimes in revenge at government policies? Not by choice, readers, but simply to be noticed, listened to, to have their problems heard?

How long before the elderly, the terminally ill, the sick and the disabled start ‘sacrificing’ their lives to the promise of money for those they love from the wealthy? Could this start happening if the Assisted Dying Bill becomes an Act?

Like many of us, readers, I’ve heard this week about the ‘yellow card’ system of ‘final warning’ the Lib Dems want to bring in for benefit claimants before they are sanctioned. I don’t know what to think about it. I wonder how the ‘yellow cards’ will work. If they are a mark on a piece of paper hidden in a JobCentre for your advisor and you to know about and no one else to find out, then that sounds better than the system we have at the moment.

However, if benefit claimants who are on warning will actually have to carry a yellow piece of card around for a period of time, then the system worries me. If that is the plan, the system could lead to hate crime against people on ‘yellow card.’ (“You’ve broken the rules of benefits once, have you? I pay for your benefits, you don’t deserve them…”)

Readers, even if we accept that the Lib Dems don’t plan to introduce physical yellow cards at the moment, I have to wonder what might happen if the Tories win in 2015. Could they take on board the system of fair warning, but turn it into a physical yellow (or blue) card or paper? Could they introduce a system of making claimants carry a card or paper of some colour or design that will simply show the rest of the world at a glance that they are claiming benefits?

Readers, the question is: how long before ‘yellow card’ becomes ‘blue star?’ How long before the British Government starts encouraging crimes against the bearers of said chosen symbol because ‘they don’t die fast enough?’ They may not set aside twelve hours a year for this purpose- but what worries me even more is that they may start encouraging it at all times.

If the Tories, or even UKIP, come into Government, could we one day be living in a thriller?