The British Enclave

Overview
The British Enclave is a powerful political and military organisation in the post-apocalyptic British Wasteland, governed by the Prime Minister and his Cabinet, descendants of the members of the Old World British Government. The original Enclave was composed of elite members of the Pre-War British government, the military, the intelligence services, the judiciary, the Metropolitan police, and various other high-profile individuals in both the public and private sectors.

The Cabinet: the Northern Rebellion, the Plantagenet Treaty, and the Resource Wars - 2050-2052
Project Avalon was envisioned and engineered by the enigmatic Lord Mountbatten, Secretary of State and Cabinet Minister, in the decades prior to the Great War of 2077. Mountbatten believed that the hostilities between the Russian, Chinese and American superpowers would lead to an inevitable atomic apocalypse and began preparations to preserve the State of the United Kingdom in a post-nuclear environment. Mountbatten first proposed the suspension of democratic elections to the Cabinet following the insurrection of the Northern Counties in the aftermath of the General Miner’s Strike, advising the Prime Minister to declare a state of National Emergency which would in turn necessitate the deferral of general elections given the compromised state of National Security. The Queen granted the Prime Minister an extension of his emergency powers and following the counsel of the Cabinet, the Prime Minister declared Britain to be in a state of crisis, before suspending the electoral and judicial process and dismissing the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The Southern Cities had descended into anarchy following the formation and separation of the U.N.S.R due to the regional power outages; the citizens of the South were deprived of food, water and energy and erupted into mass panic and rioting. Mountbatten recognised the urgency of the situation, and his next move was to persuade the Prime Minister to declare martial law following the dissolution of Parliament. Immediately after the declaration of martial law, the Prime Minister had the armed forces restore order to the major cities and began providing limited support and relief to the people. However, the relief afforded was merely temporary, and Lord Mountbatten recognised that the South could not survive without the fuel provided by the Scottish oil rigs and the Northern coal mines. He approached the Prime Minister and requested the authority to open negotiations with the Northern Counties, and receiving approval, immediately headed North in a government Vertibird.

The situation in the South was desperate; fuel levels were at a critical level, emergency relief supplies were running low and the populations of the major cities were still engaged in significant civil unrest. The Cabinet, unwilling to trust in the success of Mountbatten’s mission, and fearful of the powerful position the North would occupy should they accept the treaty, began preparations to launch a military invasion of the Middle East, identifying the Arabian Oil Fields and the petroleum reserves of the oil Sheiks as primary targets. Mountbatten was about to successfully conclude negotiations with the fledgling U.N.S.R while the Cabinet were mobilising the Southern armed forces for the Asian military campaign, finalising the Plantagenet Treaty and preparing to declare peace with the independent Northen counties. In order to gain the trust of the representatives of the U.N.S.R, Mountbatten, as a gesture of good faith, disclosed classified information regarding the threat of global thermo-nuclear war to the British Isles, and the existence of Project Avalon, the secret government initiative he had devised to safeguard the State of England and its citizens in the event of an atomic war. In exchange for this vital information, a formal recognition of the legitimacy of the Northern States, and the technology and information required to design and build Fallout Shelters, Mountbatten was thus able to secure sufficient fossil fuel supplies for the major Southern cities. However, in the middle of negotiations, Mounbatten received a message from the Cabinet ordering him to make the provision of military aid from the U.N.S.R in the event of an international war a requirement of the Plantagenet Treaty; the Cabinet had already committed the majority of the British armed forces to the Southern Cities and could not afford to commit any further troops to the invasion force. Mountbatten was placed at a significant disadvantage; the pre-existing treaty had already been approved of by the representatives of the Northern States and all that remained was the official recognition of its articles and the formal ceremony of its commission. Mounbatten had already expended his political capital in the prior negotations, and the U.N.S.R were unwilling to revise the Treaty; the Northern representatives did not want to commit the armies of the Union to a war that was not their own, espcially a war that would leave the nations of the U.N.S.R vulnerable to an attack from the South. Mountbatten was able to save the Alliance and assuage the fears of the Northern delegates by promising the North access to advanced military technology in exchange for the assistance of several regiments of Northern soldiers in the Resource Wars campaign. However, the blindness and incompetence of the Cabinet in their mishandling of the military armament and the fuel crisis provoked Mountbatten's rage and incited his enduring mistrust of the Cabinet members, hisfear of their independence; the jeopardy in which the Ministers had placed the treaty with the North convinced Mountbatten that the Secretaries could no longer be allowed to operate without his supervision and upon his return to the South, Mountbatten set in motion a series of events which would ensure that the Cabinet could no longer act without his approval, transforming the British government into puppets of his will.

Project Avalon and the Underground - 2052-2060
Mountbatten was the architect and director of Project Avalon, an initiative designed to preserve the British State and protect the citizens of the once-United Kingdom of Great Britain in the event of an atomic war, an initiative he planned to achieve through the construction of vast nuclear Fallout shelters in the major cities of England. Mountbatten was an elite member of British society, an aristocrat educated at Cambridge, from a family with old money; he had important connections with powerful individuals in every sphere of the civil service and in the public and private sectors. The first step of Mountbatten's plan was to secure emergency powers for the Prime Minister, in order to acquire the necessary resources and executive power necessary to accomplish his designs. The first stage of his plan completed, he called an emergency meeting of the Cabinet and presented the Ministers with the Project; receiving immediate and unanimous approval, he then began to reach out to his connections in order to assemble the personnel required for the initiation of the Project. Mountbatten had made many of his political allies during his time reading Law at Christ's College, Cambridge, and it was to his fellow alumni, his oldest and closest friends, that he turned first; he courted various members of the British aristocracy and several high-profile businessmen and politicians in order to secure the necessary funding and supplies for the Project. He contacted the Rector of the Imperial College, Jeremy Bartlett, an old friend of his from Cambridge, and acquired his support; the Rector commissioned several key projects and directed the Principals of Faculties of the University to prioritise experiments and research which would produce medicine and technology designed to aid survival in a post-nuclear environment. The Cabinet commissioned several construction firms, with the aid of the Mr. Handys, to begin work on the conversion of the London Subway system into a vast series of inter-connected Fallout shelters. The Circle, Metro, Hammersmith, Victoria, Central, District and Jubilee train lines were re-inforced, re-developed and re-constructed as Vaults the size of cities, each line capable of housing thousands of civilians; the train lines were each equipped with nuclear reactors tp provide energy to the populace, water supply lines from the Thames and a purification system to provide drinkable water, and vast underground greenhouses with artificial solar lighting capable of providing the agricultural produce needed to feed the population. The Churchill War Rooms were subject to equally extensive re-development, the underground headquarters converted into a vast underground fortress intended to provide a command base in London for the Cabinet and the military after the war. The Cabinet themselves began preparations to evacuate to Site 3, the Central Government War Headquarters located at Hawthorn, in the event of the imminent nuclear exchange. The facility would provide a haven for the Prime Minister and his Cabinet, the Defence Committee (the commanders of the Royal Air Force, Royal Navy, and British Army) and supporting civil servants and military personnel for the duration of the atomic war and the subsequent fallout. The Government ordered the controlled distribution of food, water and medical rations for the civilian population in order to preserve supplies in the event of nuclear holocaust; the Cabinet also began to issue propaganda to encourage the support of the British citizens for the Resource Wars campaign, announcing the development of the Underground to ease the fears of the British subjects and to inspire hope, courage, dndurance and community spirit. The Prime Minister ordered the creation of a new bureau to assist the rehabilitation of the citizens of the United Kingdom.

The End of the Resource Wars, the Underground and the Great War - 2060-2077
The Invasion of the Middle East had been a failure. The Arabic oil fields had been drained of their last resources and the British Army had failed to secure any fuel supplies for the Nation. The British Government ordered all military personnel deployed in Asia to return to England, bringing the Resource Wars to an end. The fact that the majority of British military personnel had been deployed in the Middle East during the Resource Wars had dangerously compromised the Government's efforts to maintain stability in the major Southern cities; in order to counter this threat, the Defense Committee commissioned the development of a variant of the T-45d Power Armour, based on schematics acquired from the U.S military and designed for deployment in urban centres, to assist those soldiers committed in the South of England to maintain order. The British Army's withdrawal from the East took place over several months in the Winter of 2060. The Fuel Crisis in Europe had functioned effectively as a blockade, preventing the armed forces deployed in Asia from receiving supplies, re-inforcements and intelligence. In 2060, the petrol shortage prevented the Defense Committee from sending both land and air rescue vehicles to assist in the evacuation; the military personnel deployed in the East were thus forced to retreat by land, travelling by foot through Asia and Europe. The armed forces sustained heavy losses during the evacuation of the East: the army suffered many casualities in skirmishes with guerilla fighters and terrorists during the Asian exodus, several thousand soldiers - hungry, tired and wounded - deserted and went into hiding in Europe, and many men simply succumbed to the hardships of the march, starving to death, wasting away from disease, freezing or simply passing from exhaustion. The survivors of the withdrawal of the British Army retreated to Dunkirk, where the Royal Navy, accompanied by a civilian fleet, transported the British soldiers, both the men of the North and the men of the South, across the channel and back to England, mirroring the actions of the British Military in the Second World War. The Yorkshire Rangers, the Manchester Wardens and the Newcastle Guard returned to their home counties in the North, while the Cabinet re-deployed the regiments of the South to the cities under the Government's protection in order to maintain stability and re-inforce martial law. The end of the Resource Wars was followed by nearly two decades of peace in England; during this time, the Government placed the highest priority on the completion of Project Avalon, diverting the majority of the finances, resources and personnel at their disposal to the nuclear survival strategy and ignoring any efforts to rebuild or restore England. The civilian population of England became accustomed to the strict sanctions of Project Avalon and even began to actively support the initiatives of the Cabinet; the citizens of England joined Government campaigns to gather scrap metal for Vault construction and weapons manufacture, worked to cultivate and harvest vegetables and fruits on personal allotments to provide agricultural produce to add to the emergency supplies, and signed up to join the Red Cross emergency relief efforts to help the areas in England hit hardest by the riots, amongst many other charitable drives. The success and popularity of the Government's initiatives accelerated the final stages of Project Avalon and t he construction of the Vault City beneath London was completed in 2070. The Underground received an official opening ceremony six months after its completion, after which the civilian population of London began to move into the housing assigned to them by the Bureau in anticipation of the imminent nuclear attack, assisted by the forces of the British Army. The Cabinet appointed the Mayor of London the role of Governor of the Underground, and several members of the London Council were given the office of Mayor and charged with over-seeing the city lines. The Metropolitan Police were re-assigned to the Vault City to protect and serve the civilian population and maintain the peace as a Security Force, performing a function similar to that of the frontier Sheriffs in the Old West. The events of the Northern Rebellion, the Fuel Crisis and the Resource Wars had caused the society of England to descend into chaos. The collapse of several major industries and the absence of electricity had lead to mass unemployment; the rationing of supplies, the suspension of labour, and the fact that the Government had resorted to the direct seizure of financial and material assets had rendered the tax system virtually redundant. In the absence of generated income, the citizens of England acquired supplies through Government-issued digital credits which could be redeemed for a weekly allowance of food, water and energy in return for the citizen's observation of their assigned tasks and responsibilities. The civilian population were designated work in the Underground based on their abilities and education; the working class were designated labourers and assigned to low-level maintenance, repair, agriculture and construction work; the middle and upper classes were assigned to roles in education, medicine, management, engineering and programming. The credits were made available for download to the personal digital devices issued to each citizen after the individual had registered the device at their place of work and performed the necessary task for the required length of time. The credits could only be redeemed for necessary supplies and as such the civilian population developed a complex system of trading and bartering to provide and accomodate those goods intended for recreation, relaxation and entertainment, both legal and illegal.

The Cabinet began the evacuation of the City of London after the civilian population had been safely housed in the Underground, transferring key civil service and military personnel, as well as the businessmen, politicians, scientists and the other high-profile members of society who had contributed to the progress of Project Avalon, to Site 3, the Central Government Headquarters.