Competition No 3713

Set by George Cowley on 7 January

You were asked for an extract from 2084.

Report by Ms de Meaner

Oh, the bitterness towards Tony Blair! Hon menshes to Hamish Hamilton and D A Prince. £20 to the winners. The vouchers go to Michael Cregan.

Drawing on a Victory spliff, Leo Smith walked to work past the shamefaced lines of down-and-outs hawking their used pocket PCs, sunglasses, religious paraphernalia and week-old copies of the New Spectator & Statesman. Supposedly an influx of foreigners, many of them spoke good - even educated - English. These were the work-shy ones, Leo reminded himself, who'd dodged the healthy labour opportunities offered by the Golden Arches Resettlement Camps. Too lazy to help themselves. As The Great And Beloved Leader said: "Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind."

Leo dropped his roach into the fetid mulch of soft-drink cans and pizza cartons underfoot and ignored the sick, imploring faces. He walked on, clenching the handful of euros in his pocket. He fixed his eyes on the building where he worked; they'd been building low since 911, but it still dominated Millwall - Island Gardens, he nervously corrected himself - like a vast concrete palace.

His section of the Ministry - Cultural Studies - dealt with the revision of novels, plays, films, etc, so that they no longer represented false and harmful ideas. It was a merciless job, the penalty for error unthinkable. And Leo had just been dealt Blade Runner.

Basil Ransome-Davies

It was a bright cold day in April and Winston Smith slipped quickly through the doors of Business Friendly Mansions, watched by the CCTV camera. There were now cameras in every room of every home, ostensibly to keep a watch on possible dissent, but really to feed the insatiable demand for reality TV. Tonight, Winston reflected, thousands of proles would be gambling their meagre wages on the fortunes of Constipated Nick.

Across the road stood a huge poster with the Party slogans: PRIVATISATION IS SOCIALISM, BOMBING IS HUMANITARIANISM, EDUCATION IS FAITH.

Below them was a gigantic leering picture of Big Blair. Nobody had seen Big Blair in the flesh since the Last Election, in 2005, but the computer-generated images of him and his smirking wife were eternally young.

Winston walked to the end of the street on Harrow Hill and looked out to the rolling sea, where London had once stood. He thought gloomily of labour camps full of anti-capitalist protesters, of trials without juries, of derelict railways. But then a smile came to his face. Two and two were four; Big Blair was not omnipotent. His hand slid towards his pocket. At least we had kept the pound.

Ian Birchall

The view from Winston's flat in Straw Towers was uniformly depressing: cars nose to tail as far as the eye could see - or rather, the rusted shells of cars, abandoned and vandalised after the last Great Gridlock of 2080. His most recent downloading of news from Murdoch Inter-Galactic suggested that the Government had a five-year plan to deal with the problem, but Winston was unimpressed. Britannia plc was now a One-Party corporation, the few remaining Tory and Liberal Democrat MPs having died the previous year. Nor did Winston put much faith in the President, despite his moderately successful cloning from the original Tony Blair. No one could doubt his ferocious energy, but his vision soared above petty, Earth-bound concerns. Even now, the Presidential Space Cruiser was on the launching pad at Buckingham Palace, ready to propel Blair to mediation in yet another interplanetary dispute, with a brief touchdown in Washington to give his backing to the American bombing of al-Qaeda training camps on the Moon.

Winston, however, had more pressing things on his mind. Two hours earlier, Innovations had delivered (by helicopter) a fully automated, stainless steel prostatectomy kit. It was time to grasp the nettle.

Watson Weeks

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen Brussels Mean Time. Winston Smith Minor slipped through the doors of Overall Majority Mansions.

He noticed that the hallway smelled of muesli, lasagna and Veuve Cliquot. Didn't anyone eat egg, bacon and chips any more? Or drink sweet tea from chipped white mugs? Or was that past merely imaginary?

Inside his flat, the combined television/computer was issuing the usual stream of soundbites and list of figures proving that hospital waiting-lists were down, class sizes were down, train cancellations were down. Winston wondered if any of it was true. How could you be sure of anything in the days of doublespin? Was there any objective reality at all?

He dressed in the informal way that the Image Police preferred. The TV/PC switched to broadcasting the latest Britpop, and Winston assumed the required expression of attentive enjoyment as he looked out of the window. The poster of The Leader was still on the wall opposite, the giant face frank and youthful, the hair luxuriant, the smile fresh and boyish.

"But who are you?" he murmured. "Who really are you? . . ."

Michael Cregan

No 3716 Set by Margaret Rogers

Kipling's "If" defined what it was to "be a Man". We want you to send in Kiplingesque verse on what it means to be a terrorist, celebrity footballer or any other contemporary figure.

Max 20 lines by 7 February (to appear in issue dated 18 February) E-mail: comp@newstatesman.co.uk