“You don’t have a real name. The one you were born with means nothing.”
It’s a Sunday afternoon in Oadby, a genteel suburb of Leicester, and I’m in a packed room above an empty pub. Standing over me is Sovereign Pete — tall, goateed, and dressed head to toe in black. Everything I’ve ever understood about life as a citizen of the United Kingdom, he is calmly explaining, is an elaborate, centuries-old fiction.
Around me, a dozen people sit with pens poised over notebooks. There’s a young, angelic-looking man from Moldova with unsettlingly blue eyes; an elderly couple, upright and alert; a smartly dressed man who could pass for a retired solicitor. At the front of the room, an interactive whiteboard allows us to analyse council documents in minute detail. Beside it, another board is scrawled with references to Bitcoin, tangled financial systems, and the faded outlines of more esoteric beliefs.
This is the court of Sovereign Pete: part informal citizens’ advice bureau, part induction into the coming financial collapse and breakdown of society.
“If that’s not my name, then who am I?” I ask Sovereign Pete. In response, he produces an old map of Leicestershire, bordered by an ornate coat of arms — the sort of faux-heritage decor that might once have hung in the pub toilets downstairs. “These people have a coat of arms,” he says, tapping the edge of the map. “The people who control this place. You, on the other hand, have nothing. You’ve been entered into the contract of a slave — one that stretches back thousands of years without your consent.”
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