Blair's UK (Night's Black Agents, Dracula Dossier)

 I've been reading a lot of early-2000s histories, specifically:

Generation Kill Evan Wright

One Bullet Away Nathan Fick

Hella Nation Evan Wright

Fiasco Thomas Ricks

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room Bethany MacLean, Peter Elkind

All The Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis Bethany MacLean, Joe Nocera 

HBO Series, clip sourced from Storytellers

Sourced from Movieclips Classic

It's remarkable to me how all these events are happening at broadly the same time. As First Recon marines charge into Iraq in fall 2003 with a nervous Rolling Stone reporter hanging out of a humvee like a golden retriever on a road trip, the fallout from Enron's collapse in 2001 is ongoing; Skilling and Lay won't see the inside of a courtroom until 2006, and their former employees and investors are bankrupted. Meanwhile the major players in the 2008 financial collapse are galloping towards the finish line. By the time 2008 hits the Iraqi conflict is very much ongoing, and the marines Wright wrote about and Fick led have, in many cases, gone on to multiple tours, some of them suffering grievous injuries in that conflict. 

There's a common through line: the willing complicity of those put in power, to guide institutions and countries, in their own destruction, for reasons that don't hold up intellectually or philosophically. Hubris, and pride. From Dick Cheney massaging intel until the White House could swallow it, and Colin Powell standing up in front of decision makers and spouting a lot of what proved to be nonsense designed specifically to bamboozle his listeners, to Enron's financial wizards and, later, the major banking institutions' accountants, auditors and risk analyzers willfully manipulating data to make the onlooker believe the risk was minimal or, at best, appropriately managed, we've been living through twenty years at least in which the facts on the ground never mattered, funded in part by the economic machine that is the United States running full tilt until it couldn't run any more. 

A significant portion of the US electorate has now been conditioned to believe in bullshit and elect bullshitters, and there are times when I wonder whether this modern variant of a much older story can be traced, ultimately, to the politicians who cooked up the Iraqi conflict all those decades ago, and the businessmen who fleeced their investors and employees; the ones who abandoned any semblance of truth when truth didn't achieve their goal.  

This has been the age of lunacy.

In the United Kingdom, this was the age of Tony Blair, prime minister from 1997 to 2007. He's there for Enron and Royal Bank of Scotland, there for Kosovo, Afghanistan, for Iraq, and bows out just as the economic disaster he helped create is about to explode. I lived in the UK more or less from his earliest days as PM almost to the end of his run; I was still a uni student in the 1990s. Personally I would have preferred his predecessor John Smith, but when Smith died of a heart attack Blair was the logical candidate.

Blair has extraordinary talent, and his premiership ought to have been glorious - were it not for his many wars. Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, and the one that broke him - Iraq. His willingness to follow George W. Bush's government into an unpopular and deeply divisive conflict cost Blair all the political goodwill he'd gained up to that point. Labour's majority shrank, and by the time Gordon Brown took office the writing was on the wall. It would have taken a much better leader than Brown to save the party from defeat, and in 2010 a hung parliament eventually gave David Cameron his shot at the brass ring - a chance Cameron dismally mismanaged.

Blair's UK is also the UK of Greg Rucka's Queen and Country, one of the ur-texts of Night's Black Agents. Rucka's Tara Chase is very much a creature of Blair's government, cooperating closely with the US' war on terror, and Blairs' wars are her wars, from Kosovo (the scene of her first adventure) through to an abortive attempt to remove Zimbabwe's Mugabe.

It occurs to me that Night's Black Agents, and its offshoot the Dracula Dossier, suits Blair's UK more, perhaps, than any other timeline. It's fresh enough that most people can remember the details, albeit through the fuzziest of lenses. The technology's not completely foreign to today's gamer; the internet now isn't the internet then, but it's not as if they were still using 3.5 inch floppies back in 2000. The first generation iPhone hasn't turned up yet nor yet the iPad, but that's the only major difference most gamers are going to notice. That, and the strange freedom air travelers enjoyed, before the towers came down.

Most importantly, the big relationship is already established and very familiar to everyone: Poodle-ism, the willingness of Blair's government to do pretty much whatever Bush wants it to do. UK business leaders aren't much different; just as Enron's destroying California's electricity supply and Lehman's racing towards a cliff, Royal Bank of Scotland is headed for a fall, Northern Rock is about to drown in sub-prime, and Rupert Murdoch, the éminence grise of journalism, is solidifying his grip on the UK's political landscape.

It's the age of lunacy - and who better to take over the asylum than the pre-eminent lunatic, Dracula?

So for the next few sessions that's what I'm going to talk about. A Dracula Dossier / Night's Black Agents game set in the early 2000s, during Blair's premiership. What would change? What would stay the same?

What stories can be told?

Enjoy!