"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants. It is the creed of slaves" (William Pitt). Home Affairs correspondent Jim Kyle, a journalist for one of Britain's three remaining newspapers, provides secret assistance to people trying to escape the repressive regime. His activities continually bring him into contact with the Public Control Department, its tools of bureaucratic repression and its ruthless Controller Herbert Skardon. However, Kyle's current attempts to help a doctor struggling to help his asthmatic daughter leave the United Kingdom may be hampered by Kyle's ambiguous personal relationship with Deputy PCD Controller Delly Lomas.

"We don't make laws, we only carry them out". Despite the Home Secretary's abolition of all exit visa appeals, Kyle successfully helps Doctor Vickers leave the United Kingdom, but without his wife and daughter. Dr. Vickers invests his hopes in the international law which states that his family can join him one month later, provided he can attain residency status in another country. However, the Public Control Department are determined to seal up any possible legal loopholes to block Vickers' efforts and in so doing put an end to Kyle's interference - permanently.

"...no barbed-wire, no strait-jackets, no padded cells. After all, this is 1990". When the Public Control Department send union leader Charles Wainwright to the United States of America to promote their cause, the plan backfires disastrously when his speech is littered with dissident criticisms of the bureaucratic nightmare the United Kingdom has become under the stewardship. When he returns home, the PCD are quick to repay the compliment by sending him to an Adult Rehabilitation Centre, a place where offenders against the state (political activists, murderers, thieves, etc) are sent for "correction" under a combination of drug therapy and severe treatments which change their way of thinking.

"This is an island prison. Getting us all together is one thing. Getting us out is something else". High-profile political adviser Doctor Sondeberg, a man responsible for the rising fortunes of a variety of presidents, pays a state visit to the United Kingdom on a fact-finding mission to understand the workings of the Public Control Department. However, his motives are far more covert than first appearances. Meanwhile, Dave Brett persuades Kyle to obtain permits to allow them to travel around the country to advance his deal with underworld figure Sammy Calhoun - a deal which involves a motorised caravan as a passport for top academics to flee the oppressive regime of the PCD.

"The age of the common man seems to be degenerating into the age of the common denominator". When the Public Control Department take steps to shut down an underground newspaper peddling dissident stories critical of the regime, Kyle provides assistance to its publisher, Avery, in a bid to prevent their interference.

Dr. Alan Vickers, whom Kyle and Breet helped escape, has been campaigning throughout the United States to get public and world opinion to force the PCD to let his wife and daughter emigrate. The problem is that in his speeches he may have let clues drop that may lead Skardon and the PCD to Kyle. When the PCD go after Kyle's family and a plot to frame Kyle blows up in the PCD's face, Delly Lomas goes to America to persuade Dr. Vickers to return to England to testify against Kyle in return for exit visas for his wife and daughter.

After the Kyle Trial fiasco, Skardon takes his revenge by turning Kyle into a Non-Citizen: stripping Kyle of his ID and Union cards, freezing his bank account and seizing all his assets. With no home, no car, no job, no money, only the clothes on his back and his family missing (and a bugged Non-Citizen ID card so the PCD can track him), Kyle is forced to wander the streets in what seems like a hopeless attempt to survive, especially when he is constantly and sadistically harassed by Skardon and Inspector Nichols. His only hope is that Dave Brett and black marketeer Sammy Calhoun can find him before his mind and will are permanently broken.