Chapter 1

 

The magistrate looked sternly down on the defendant and although he tried his best not to look smug about what he was about to do, he couldn't help a tiny curling at his mouth at the thought of that delectable body which was about to be revealed to him and to everyone else in the courtroom. After that, in the course of a few hours, it would be revealed to the nation - for there was now no prohibition on photographs of defendants being sentenced - as long as no flash bulbs were employed in the process.

"Ellie Mackintosh," he began, "you have pleaded guilty to the charge of endangering schoolchildren at a school crossing. I should say here that it was a wise decision for under the new sentencing laws, a plea of not guilty when the outcome is obvious, resulting in an expensive trial and wasting the court's time now earns a double sentence.

"A week ago, this offence would have merited a rather hefty fine. Not any more. Under the laws that came into force on 1^st July just passed, you are to be dealt with rather more severely. I should also say here that I heartily approve of these laws and believe they are going to go a long way to changing our society for the better.

"Your offence is one of endangering our children. Because you were running late due to your own sloth, you caused your children to be late for school, bringing them the punishment of a caning before their fellows. In trying to overcome their lateness, you stopped to allow them to disembark right on the children's crossing outside their school, thereby endangering other children and blocking traffic.

"Ellie Mackintosh, you are hereby sentenced to four weeks public nudity...

"As these laws are still very new, I shall explain to you what this means. You will be publicly stripped here and now by the bailiff. As it is now Tuesday, your sentence will actually be four weeks and three days since all such sentences expire on Saturday. During that time, you may not travel by private car at all and, unless the journey is over five kilometres, you must walk or run. On all other occasions you may use public transport when you may not occupy a seat.

"Additionally, since you caused your children to earn a punishment for their lateness when the fault was yours and not theirs, you are to be publicly caned. On each Saturday for the next four weeks, you will report to your local village square to be pilloried and then receive ten strokes of the rattan cane to your naked buttocks.

"Pursuant to this penalty, you will now be stripped naked and taken to the Preparation Room where you will be shaved nude and the hirsute portions of your torso permanently depilated as a reminder of your crime.

"Bailiff, do your duty!"

 

Britain, like the rest of the world had been sliding into social chaos.

Crime was rampant, good manners non-existent, people existed for themselves alone and were fat and lazy. The first three of these meant that jails were bursting at the seams, police resources massively overstretched and the courts emasculated by a myriad of civil liberties. As a result, people went in fear of their lives at night and even during the day. The last, the obesity that now affected almost ninety percent of the population, was exacting another sort of toll: heart disease and diabetes were running rampant and costing the nation dearly.

William Fenwick had persuaded the grey eminences of the Conservative Party, which had been in opposition for nine years, that the two major issues facing the electorate were crime and health. He was an extraordinarily energetic and charismatic young man of just forty-two and they as well as the parliamentary party saw in him the means of regaining the treasury benches.

He campaigned vigorously and the result was a landslide. Clearly the people wanted a return to safer days and were apparently truly concerned at the health issues attached to obesity for he had had not dissimulated at what he proposed to do about either of these two major problems facing the country.

"I will not hide from you the fact that our ills are severe and will need rigorous remedies. Police forces and the powers of the courts will be strengthened and the slow erosion of their effectiveness by the so-called civil libertarian movement returned to more normal levels. Jails will eventually be abolished and punishment will be both public and shameful. Until a more normal balance is recovered, chain gangs will be reintroduced. So will corporal punishment and to make these penalties the more effective, offenders will be stripped naked for the duration of their sentences.

"So far as the disgraceful state of our peoples' bodies, laws will be introduced making obesity a crime unless it can be medically demonstrated that it is not due to overeating. These offenders will also be exposed naked and made to perform at public exercise sessions until their grossness is returned to normal levels. Rewards in the form of tax concessions will be offered for fit and athletic bodies.

"In schools, teachers will be permitted to order overweight children to remove their clothing and expose their gross bodies to their fellows and these children will not be permitted to purchase items at the tuckshop or indeed to eat at all during school hours. Instead, they will be subject to rigorous exercise programmes during school recesses and the lunch break."

So far as the second plank to his election platform was concerned, whether it was a guilty conscience or a genuine desire to see the people again become fit and lean, it worked. Or perhaps it didn't - but the people were so keen to see his law and order measures accepted that they voted his party in anyway.

Whatever the reasons, the Conservatives now had the biggest majority the House of Commons had ever seen and he used it to give immediate effect to his ideas.

The laws on obesity were easiest to enact and implement but less popular than the measures to combat crime and so a six month's grace period was built into them. People were given that period to voluntarily reduce their weight and to become as fit and lean as the new Prime Minister. Most took advantage of the moratorium and enrolled in get-fit programs and diets to reduce their weight.

The ideas contained in the law and order reforms were more complicated, although the sentencing aspects were simple enough. Jails were to be abolished and once the process was complete, the land they stood on was sold. Existing prisoners would progressively either be freed or stripped naked and transferred to one of the new chain gangs. New offenders could be sentenced to periods of public nudity and/or a public caning easily enough but the measures to recruit, train, properly equip and effectively house the nation's police was more difficult.

First, to make it work effectively, the various county forces would need to be incorporated into the former Metropolitan Police, now renamed the British Police Service. Then the cadets and mature age recruits found, the training college massively expanded and provided with top level teaching staff and the police stations around the nation expanded and equipped with the latest and best crime-fighting technology.

Then a careful examination of the so-called reforms in police procedures and civil rights had to be undertaken. The Prime Minister did not want to turn the country into a police state and so a proper balance had to be maintained. Striking that balance was the difficulty. Accordingly, he and the Home Secretary set up a think tank of experts. This was to be a real working committee, not the usual Civil Service sinecure and it was ordered to come up with the goods in two months - maximum!

It did and the results were already working.

 

Ellie had slept in that fateful morning.

She and her husband Gary were a very loving couple and they had loved well into the early hours of the morning. As a result, the pair of them had overslept and she had tried to make amends by rushing the kids to school, although she well knew they were a couple of minutes late. She had indeed stopped on the school crossing and Patricia and Peter had tumbled out and rushed into the school grounds, hoping against hope that they would not earn the shameful caning that was now the punishment for tardiness.

Alas, their teachers had not been forgiving of their sin and as they entered the classrooms where the lessons had already begun, they had been ordered to place their books in their desks, then come back to the front, strip naked and bend over with their bottoms to the class for five meaty strokes of the cane.

Under the new laws, children under sixteen were not stripped but as they were seventeen and sixteen respectively and could therefore be stripped, the effects, both physical and mental were devastating. Each classroom now boasted a caning bench and Patricia and Peter had to lay their naked bodies down over this narrow wooden bench, grasp the handles at the end and hook their feet around its legs and then suffer the pain and humiliation of a naked caning of their delectable bottoms. And then they had to stay naked until the class was over. It was dreadfully humiliating and quite painful enough to make them certain they would never be late again!

Ellie had the misfortune to be spotted by a passing patrol car as she was about to move off from the kerb. The two officers had stopped her fifty metres up the road and were questioning her as to her reasons for such a dangerous driving practice.

Her excuse that she had been late in delivering the children fell on deaf ears and she was summarily arrested on the spot and taken to the local nick. The other officer drove her car there,

She was interrogated further and then, after phoning Gary, was thrown into a holding cell containing a dozen or so other women. The cell was bare. There were no chairs or tables - no furniture at all and the women had to sit on the bare concrete floor or lean against the walls or the bars at the front of the cell.

The Medical Officer arrived at eleven and the women were ordered to strip naked, fold their clothes and place them in neat piles on the floor then line up to be examined.

This was undertaken out in the area in front of the two holding cells - right in view of the men in the other cell. It was intrusive in the extreme, intentionally so. The guidelines prepared by the Home Office made it clear that prisoners were to feel shamed and humiliated by their experiences in the police station. The MO, Dr Hardy, was only too happy to comply with this instruction and he therefore made each woman stand before him with her legs spread wide open and her hands clasped up behind her head while he ran his hands over her naked flesh. Oh, he certainly checked them out medically, but it was as much a clear negation of their rights as a free citizen as a proper examination.

Only when he had finished with all the women were they permitted to return to the cell and dress; and then it was the men's turn. During the women's inspection, the male prisoners had crowded against the bars of their cell and watched avidly as the stark naked ladies had had their bodies pawed over and their vaginas, anuses and mouths probed with fingers and various instruments that had them blushing a bright crimson and at times moaning in mild pain. He spent an excessive time with each woman's vagina, tickling her clit until it gushed while she stood there in mortification that she was being masturbated so publicly.

Now it was their turn and the doctor was no less intrusive with them than he had been with the women. They too had full mouth and throat inspections, the doctor's fingers moving around inside them as a prospective buyer might with an animal. Then their anuses were fingered and probed digitally and with the same instruments that dilated the women's orifices so painfully. Finally, their genital organs were manipulated and fondled until each had a full erection and some actually climaxed, to their eternal shame.

Of course the women now stood at the bars of their cells and grinned at the discomfort and humiliation of the men. Some actually fondled themselves as they stood and looked at the bodies of the better-built and younger males.

But both men and women were extraordinarily shamed by this experience and most were full determined never to let themselves be arrested again - as, of course, was the intention.

When she was permitted to ring Gary, he had been less than sympathetic with her plight. "Oh, for Heaven's sake, Ellie, how could you have been so stupid? The kids were late anyway..."

"Oh, I know, Gary. But now they've got the car and you have to come and claim it. And I need bail ... please come and get me out of here!"

"Of course I will. But I can't get there for another hour. You'll just have to hang on."

"No, Gary. They won't let me go until after three this afternoon. Something to do with my contrition, they said. Can you pick up the kids from school and then come and get me? Don't bring them in here, though. I couldn't bear for them to see me in this cell or even in the police station."

"Okay. I'll be there as soon as I've picked up Pat and Pete. Oh, I'll talk to Jim Bentleigh, too. He should be aware of the ramifications of the new laws and whether, as our solicitor, he can appear for us."

Ellie then had the rest of the morning (including the humiliating medical examination) and half the afternoon to contemplate her crime, small and all as it was, and what penalty she might be facing. She hadn't been more than superficially interested in what the new Prime Minister had been on about. They lived in a nice house in a pleasant street in a picturesque little village since Gary was an up and coming advertising executive and they had little or no contact with the urban crime that had gripped the world of late.

She knew that things had changed and that a fine was probably no longer applicable to her, but when Gary had come and bailed her out and they had discussed the possible outcome with Jim Bentleigh, her mouth had dropped open and her face drained of blood.

"No! You can't mean it, Jim?"

"I'm sorry, Ellie, but the new laws are draconian. Already, a week after their proclamation, street crime has dropped amazingly..."

"That's all very well, Jim, but I only committed a small traffic offence!"

"It wasn't a small one, Ellie. You risked the lives of children and that is considered very serious..."

"Oh God," she said, her face still white as she stared across the desk at their solicitor.