"They can't have it both ways," she said. "Two years there wasn't any food at all. Inflation is the price you pay a free-market economy. Wages rise to cope, it's cyclic."

"But do student grants rise as well?"

"Christ, whose side are you on? If they're so bloody aware they should know freedom isn't perfect. If they'd tried protesting when Armstrong was running the country they would've become non-people before you could say community responsibility."

"So put up your own banners, tell them, not me."

The motorway was in surprisingly good condition. Dead sycamores with peeling bark and bleached wood rose out of the scrub tangle at the edge of the hard shoulder. Greg toed the brake as they approached a large densely packed patch of scarlet flowers shining with livid intensity under the Sahara-bright sun. He thought they were poppies at first, except they were too big. A single palm-sized petal, waxy; thousands of them waving in the breeze.

"Someone agrees with you," he said drily, inclining his head. Two young men in sombreros and dirty jeans were ripping down one of the kelpboard placards. Their bicycles lay on the fringe of the flamingo flower carpet. He spotted badges with the deep-blue crown of the New Conservative party emblem pinned on their T-shirts.

Gabriel nodded with tight approval at this vandalism of graffiti. Greg returned to the tarmac ahead. Crazy world.

He turned off the nearly deserted road at junction ten, on to the A505. There was a new brightly painted green-and-gold sign at the side of the sliproad.

DUXFORD

Event Horizon Astronautics Institute

Freshly torn scraps of kelpboard littered the grass below it, flapping like broken butterflies in the hot dry breeze.

The Astronautics Institute was an all-new construction that'd sprung up out of the ruins of the Imperial War Museum. Armstrong's extremist followers had gleefully set about eradicating the museum's exhibitions and aircraft collection after they’d come to power, calling it a war pornography monument. The cabinet declared that Duxford was to become the National Resource Reclamation Centre, intended as the prestigious mainstay of the PSP's self-sufficiency policy. They said it would dismantle the war machines scrapped under their demilitarisation programme and turn them into useful raw material for industry.

Greg remembered the hundreds of APVs and Challenger IV tanks parked in the Chunnel marshalling yards after he got back from Turkey. All earmarked for Duxford and ignominy.

But all Duxford had ever achieved was to smash up the beautifully restored aircraft displays, and the first few trainloads of redundant Army vehicles. The promised smelters had never materialised, and the dole-labour conscripts had rioted. For eight years the abandoned hammer-mangled wrecks on the runway had snowed rust flakes on to the concrete, oil and hydraulic fluid seeping through the cracks, poisoning the soil. Then after the PSP fell, Philip Evans chose the site to be the foundation of his dream.