Red Shift: A TLIAD

Whats this?

Ah, we're choosing to be polite today, are we?

I'm reserving judgement.

Well, since you asked so nicely, this is an idea which has been rumbling around my brain for a while. And I've been inspired by the recent outbursts of TLIADs, all of which are excellent from what I've seen, I thought I'd offer my own meagre contribution.

Are you planning on finishing this one?

Oi. A Comical Affair went down well didn't it?

That was ages ago, you git.

No need for language.

Any clues as to whats it on?

Lets just say, the POD is in the 1870s, and Britain is going to be a very different place politically and socially...

Wait... what is that at the bottom?

That's, um, my graphic.

Its rubbish.

Fuck off. I only have Paint. And Powerpoint.

I feel this is going to set the tone.

redshifttitlecard.png
 
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New Beginnings

In 1874, Benjamin Disraeli led the Conservatives to victory over the Liberals, a victory he achieved despite not winning the popular vote, but because the Liberals hadn't stood enough candidates to capture that vote. The Grand Old Man of Liberalism, William Gladstone 'retired' from the front bench but remained strident on the Opposition benches, famously decrying atrocities in the then Turkish Balkans.

A question was now set before the Liberal party. Would they choose the man of the moment, William Forster, who had helped set up church and chapel administered schools, and yet cost them the election as Nonconformists felt left in the cold? Or would they choose the more patrician Spencer Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington? There was some debate about if William Forster would even attempt to take the gift that was laid before him.

It is said that Forster agonised over the decision for days. This is most likely an exaggeration, politics being impatient, even in those days. Forster was a Whig, and was concerned that he would not be able to command the rising force of the Radical wing of the party. But he knew that if he chose to stand, the leadership would be his. Could he bear to take charge of a party that might split and argue with itself under his leadership? The question was a knotty one.

Finally he made his choice. He agreed to take the leadership of the party. He constructed his front bench by trying to appease the Radicals he assumed would not be as loyal to him as the Whigs. The biggest personality he brought to the front was John Bright, who had served in slightly smaller roles under Gladstone. He was a leading light of the Radical Liberals, a fierce proponent of free trade and a laissez faire economic policy, and also a social reformist and successor to the mantle of the Cobdenites. Around Bright coalesced a new faction of Radical Liberals who grew ever more concerned about the socio-economic reformism and interventionism of the Disraeli government, to the point where Bright himself found it uncomfortable. They were so loud in their opposition to certain policies, especially the Artisans' and Labourers' Dwellings Improvement Act 1875 which was termed a violation of property rights.

And so the first step was taken along the road to change. Alexander Macdonald was a Liberal-Labour MP who sat on the Liberal benches, but had his feet in the growing labour movement. The statements of the Radicals in defence of property rights trumping workers' housing, as well as Forster and Bright's hard attitudes to Irish Home Rule infuriated him. He vacillated over what to do over the lifetime of the Parliament, and finally, in 1879 he made a fateful decision. He crossed the floor of Parliament, rebranding himself as Tory-Labour. His union, the MNA, repudiated him for the remainder of the Parliament but he stuck to his guns in saying the Conservatives had done more for the working man in five years than the Liberals had in fifty.

In 1880, Disraeli lost his majority, but the Conservatives remained the largest party, having received a boost from his social policy and in the diplomatic field in the Balkans. While he suffered thanks to his refusal to bring back the Corn Laws and the government's entanglement in controversial foreign wars, the Liberals failed to marshal sufficiently against him. Disraeli hammered out an agreement with the Home Rule League, which kept him in Number 10. Forster stepped down, tired of the front bench work, and was quickly replaced by John Bright, his increasingly energetic Radical Liberal backers pushing him forwards. The MNA reclaimed Alexander Macdonald, and the age of the Tory-Labour MP began as a successful strategy of splitting votes in Liberal marginals proceeded.

Disraeli's coalition government fell apart after little more than a year. As part of their deal with the Home Rule League, they attempted to pass an Irish Home Rule Act. The Conservatives split, with those opposed to the Act, leaving the party to sit on the Opposition benches as the Conservative Unionists. A vote of confidence toppled Disraeli, and a general election was held. At the 1881 election, the Liberals stormed into power, allied with the Conservative Unionists, giving them a powerful majority. John Bright was now Prime Minister, but to what extent was he in charge of the government rather than the powerful Radical Liberal faction which had emerged from the Cobdenites, with or without his blessing?
 

Thande

Donor
John Bright Prime Minister in 1881? Actually, checking his age I see he'd only be 69 so it's not that farfetched...I just mentally associate him with the Chartist era of over a generation before.

Continue!
 
John Bright Prime Minister in 1881? Actually, checking his age I see he'd only be 69 so it's not that farfetched...I just mentally associate him with the Chartist era of over a generation before.

Continue!

Your enthusiasm is appreciated!

Believe me, farfetched is pretty much this TL in one. But its a TLIAD so I can hopefully stretch things a little further than would be ordinarily possible.
 
A Bright Tomorrow

The split of the Conservatives over Irish Home Rule saw Bright become leader of a great electoral alliance which would come to radically alter the Liberal Party's nature and composition. Many of those who had crossed the floor had opposed Disraeli's 'One Nation' policies and wanted to defend property rights and saw much in common with the protestations of the Liberals in opposition. Others had crossed the floor in protest at Disraeli's refusal to bring back the Corn Laws. The alliance of John Bright's government, the strange new creation that was the Liberal and Conservative Unionists was not a natural alliance. There were detractors from the very beginning, which weakened Bright's authority. It was the Radical Liberals who would bind the two parties together in an alliance of civil liberty and pro-business fiscal conservatism.

Over the next six years, Bright and his government would pursue laissez faire economic policies which increased economic growth but did nothing to alleviate the grinding poverty in Britain's industrial cities. The focus of Bright's government was also principally on the urban areas, the industrial regions which produced Britain's wealth. In Ireland and the countryside there was a sense of neglect. Strikes become more common and militant, and Bright was forced to bring up coercive acts to keep the peace in the cities and Ireland. He was personally exhausted by government, being an increasingly elderly man, and his annual trips to Wales to visit the grave of his son tired him out. While he had always desired to see a Britain of Progress built, his power had been hijacked by the soldiers of capital on the backbenches of the party.

In Ireland, reaction to the Liberal reforms saw the Home Rule League become more militant, nationalism becoming more fervent but a hope for parliamentary change remaining due to the Conservative commitment to Home Rule in 1881. But also, the growing socialist movement extended their tendrils into the Home Rule League. The issue of land reform had been brushed aside by Disraeli, but hadn't been addressed by Bright either, and coercive acts to put down riots in Ireland led to the birth of a notion that would in time grip the political consensus in Britain. Ireland had never followed Britain as fully into the Industrial Revolution, and remained a predominantly rural country. But while Marx didn't appeal as much, an idea of agrarian socialism became more popular. The Home Rule League itself split as this undercurrent grew, weakening the pact with the Conservatives, but the idea had been born. And ideas are hard to kill.

In 1887, the Liberal and Conservative Unionists were defeated, having lost some votes in their urban heartlands and had seen support collapse outside them. A new man was in charge of the Conservatives, a man who wanted to see an ambitious programme of social reform, of slum relief, of improved infrastructure. He appealed directly to the working classes, and yet at the same time was of the patrician class that appealed to the Tory aristocrats who remained with the Conservatives. That man was Arthur Balfour, and he began the programme of Tory Democracy that would reshape British politics in the 19th century and leave it utterly unrecogisable from the parties that went in.
 
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Bob's Your Uncle

The core of Balfour's government was the so-called Fourth Party, the recalcitrant young Tories who had made their aged aristocratic leaders' lives hell. It was these men who proposed radical new measures in relieving poverty, in demolishing slums and building new tenements for the poor, in courting the trades unions, in appealing to the rural poor, in redistributive measures both in land and wealth. But Balfour found himself dogged at every turn by his own party. The Old Tories, like his uncle the Marquess of Salisbury, believed that the policies of this new generation were dangerous, even socialist.

The black mark of state socialism was applied to Balfour by the Opposition as well. The Liberal and Conservative Unionists were a formidable combination, who continued to extend some influence into the Conservative party itself. The expropriation of land, either to demolish the cramped slums, or to build new, more spacious and habitable homes on, was decried as a violation of property rights, one of the holiest tenets of the British state, at a time when suffrage was still judged on property qualifications. The rightwards shift of the Liberals had begun in earnest. The return of Gladstone to the leadership of the party saw the plaintive protests of Bright against the inquities of capitalism fade away in favour of a 'do-it-yourself' attitude reliant on charitable giving as a redistributive mechanism.

Balfour's policies would lead to some interesting developments of the left. Ever since Marx had written his master works, the left had been divided between revolutionaries and parliamentarians. And those parliamentarians had long favoured the Liberals. Balfour was hardly an endearing figure, who found the union movement troublesome at best. The violent actions he authorised against strikes did nothing to help his cause. But there were those in his front bench who found elements of the union movement and the ideas of the co-operative movement interesting and even desirable. The trade union movement had become split between those who supported the radical socialism of Marx, those who supported the potential redistributive movement in the Liberals and Gladstone's soft and conciliatory attitude to the unions, and the proactive, pro-worker, interventionism of the Tories.

The leading party of the left, the Social Democratic Federation suffered a major split, which was mirrored across the left, between Marxists and Morrisites. The Marxists wished to avoid links with bourgeois parties, while the acolytes of William Morris saw much in Balfour's Tory Democracy that they could agree with. Morris believed that his agrarian craft socialist utopia could be achieved by aligning with the Conservatives against the Liberals. Another layer to union splitting was added as the Marxian SDF fell behind the urban workers who lost out most to Balfour, and Morris' Socialist League aligned with the rural workers and farm labourers who found Balfour more amenable. Other groups like Christian socialists, Fabians and even a few anarchists found Morris' Socialist League fascinating and believed there was a great deal of potential and possibilities. But for as long as the labour movement remained as divided as it was, there was no possibility for a concerted and organised party of the workers to make its presence felt in the halls of power.

Balfour's government ultimately fell as he came up against his uncle in the House of Lords when he tried to pass another Irish Home Rule Act. Lord Salisbury refused to condone the act, and in 1891 the government fell. The poor relationship between Balfour and his uncle has entered vernaculuar euphemism, with the phrase ' and Bob's your uncle!' indicating a situation that couldn't get much worse. At the general election, the grudges that Balfour had allowed to form against the Conservatives bit him in the back, and Gladstone returned to power after a seventeen year hiatus, eager to make a difference.
 
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The Prodigal Son Returns

Gladstone's return to the position of First Lord of the Treasury, after seventeen years on the Opposition benches or under other leaders was a moment of triumph. But the situation for the country in 1891 was not good. Britain was still suffering through the Long Depression, and it had hit her farmers and labourers hardest. Unemployment remained a serious problem. While Gladstone was sympathetic to the plight of the urban unions, and eased off the coercive acts of the Balfour and Bright years, he was more concerned about the growing organisation of the Morrisite rural unions. In places like Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Dorset, the union membership amongst the labourers was as high as 90%. Gladstone also pulled back the Balfour interventionist policies, claiming that the rapid infrastructure investments had enlarged the debt and extended the Depression.

The composition of the Liberals was shifting. The alliance of the Liberals and Conservative Unionists had become more formal and permanent, but the old Radicals of the Bright era had taken over the party, and were no longer considere radical, but part of the establishment. A new Radical force was emerging within the Liberals, led by Joseph Chamberlain. Chamberlain was increasingly concerned about poor infrastructure investment, a lack of engagement with the areas outside the big cities or even a London-centric focus, and was especially worried about Liberal dogma. The Irish were becoming more militant as the Depression dragged on, and while they had remained quiescent under Balfour were getting louder. Gladstone didn't listen, he was too worried about losing the Conservative Unionists. Chamberlain had his own plans for Ireland.

From 1891 to 1893, Chamberlain's Radical faction repeatedly rubbed Gladstone up the wrong way. He ruled his Birmingham heartland like his own little fief, and it was from place like this that he built the Unauthorised Programme. He set out a plan to redistribute land to workers as smallholdings, paid by the public purse. He also set out a plan of Tariff Reform, to support the depressed agricultural sector and build a stronger relationship with the wider Empire. His Liberal colleagues were outraged. His plans differed only in detail from some of the more ambitious plans of the Balfour ministry, and his ideas of tariff reform amounted to bringing back the Corn Laws and destroying the Liberal principle of free trade.

Gladstone underestimated Chamberlain's popularity within the party. It was when a march in Dublin got out of hand and it was put down with force, and Gladstone termed it an anarchist riot, that Chamberlain's hand was forced. He resigned his seat in the Cabinet and led his Radicals from the Liberals into the waiting arms of more like-minded men like Arthur Balfour and Randolph Churchill. Following his radicals came chunks of the Conservative Unionists who supported Chamberlain's plans for tariff reform if not his more radical schemes.

Gladstone had not lost so many seats that his government was in danger, for now. But the alliance of the Tory Democrats, and the Chamberlainite Radicals were a potent force, and the Liberals were shut out from the countryside ever more, and even from their heartlands in the cities. Under Randolph Churchill, an altered version of the Unauthorised Programme became the Conservative vision. Social and electoral reform were put on the table, a sign of how much the Conservatives had changed since the last Reform Act of almost thirty years before. Chamberlain kept his party separate, but just as the Conservative Unionists had been more and more absorbed into the Liberals, so would his Radicals become more and more absorbed into the Conservatives.

In 1896, the Liberal were turfed out of power, much reduced and the Conservative Unionists were formally absorbed into the party, now rebranded as the Liberal and Unionists. Randolph Churchill led a new Cabinet with Arthur Balfour and Joseph Churchill into power. A few newcomers were on the Government benches, notably a vigorous Welshman and a bastard son of a crofter. The Conservative party was changing rapidly, becoming almost unrecognisable from the party of thirty years before. They had a long way to go yet though, and there were rumbling noises from the House of Lords.
 
War. What Is It Good For?

Randolph Churchill was a divisive figure from the moment he took office. His behaviour, and that of his predecessor as Leader of the Conservatives, had led to the collapse of the Conservative party in the Lords, and the aging Lord Salisbury had forged what was known as the Moderation Party out of the Conservative and many Liberal peers, in opposition to what they saw as quasi-socialists and near-liberals in the Commons. Churchill was an aristocrat himself, but was keenly aware that the party could not survive by remaining sealed in the Disraeli era. In the Lords was a strong majority opposed to almost all of his manifesto. So he decided to cripple them.

First he tried to pass a Budget which contained many of the Chamberlain proposals such as the 'Three Acres and a Cow' plan of land redistribution, as well as the beginning of social welfare. It passed in the Commons, but failed in the Lords. A vote of confidence failed in the Commons, and Churchill tried again. Again, it failed in the Lords but by a narrower majority. Now Churchill set out a new Bill of Lords Reform which would substantially reduce the powers of the Lords and make the Commons the supreme power in the land, by limiting the number of times the Lords could block legislation from the Commons in most cases excepting the extension of the term of the Parliament.

Salisbury was presented with a fait accompli. If he passed Churchill's Bill it would castrate the Lords and allow him to pass his radical Budget. If he didn't it would be obvious to the voting public that he and the Moderates were doing nothing more than protecting their own privilege and that, they would not survive. He agreed to pass the legislation and Churchill agreed to a few alterations in his plans.

The Radical Budget set up the first old age pensions and unemployment benefits, and also set out Chamberlain's Unauthorised Programme, now rolled out across the country. The next thing on Churchill's list was Home Rule. With the Lords much weakened, this was the best hope in a generation for change. The Budget also set up a system of Imperial tariffs that privileged Canadian wheat over American, and fed the profits of the tariffs into infrastructure aimed at relieving the poverty in the cities.

But it was a different form of Home Rule to what Balfour and Disraeli had tried to pass. It devolved power not to an Irish Parliament, but increased the powers of counties, while creating 'Central Boards' over the country where the counties could co-ordinate their decisions. The Central Boards also allowed Westminster considerable oversight, and acted as a body which controlled the funds that Westminster doled out. The country was still one, but it was more democratic than ever before. There was some outrage in Ireland from the more radical nationalists but the Irish Central Board had quite wide powers. Home Rule Acts were prepared for Wales and Scotland also, with plans for full federalisation at some point in the future. Many Irish nationalists were outraged but most moderates were appeased by the ability to make a great deal more choices about their lives at a local level. The devolution to the county level also avoided the possibility of conflict between a Catholic South and a Protestant North.

What Churchill is probably best remembered for, unfortunately, is the entanglement of Britain into the European alliance systems. By aligning with Germany, tensions rose with France, over the solidification of European control in Africa, and with Russia in Central and Eastern Asia. The alliance with Japan bound together Germany, Britain and Japan against the Franco-Russian Entente with some more nebulous powers on the outside of the Greater Powers. War almost broke out in 1898 when Britain and France clashed in the Sudan, and again when Russia and Japan clashed over spheres of influences in Korea and China. War was brewing, it was only a question of time.

War finally came in 1901, with the rise of nationalism in China brought on by the interference of foreigners and the fall in status of the country, as well as the weakness and incapacity for change in the Imperial government. The various powers with an interest in China helped put it down. In the post-conflict chaos, the fighting over spheres of influence led to war amongst the Great Powers. Churchill had pulled Britain and her Empire, now more closely united than ever before, into an international conflict unseen in scale since the Crimean War, or even back to the Napoleonic Wars. The world of the 20th century would be forged in the crucible of war.
 
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The New Dawn

Out of the darkness came light. After five years of war, fought in the mud of Flanders and the ice of the Baltic, in the sweltering heat of tropical Africa and the frigid seas of the Atlantic, in the balmy islands of the Pacific and cold hills of Manchuria, Britannia alongside Japan and Germany emerged triumphant. The war had been long fought and had seen both the venerable Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires come close to collapse, surviving as puppets propped up the Triple Alliance. Italy had swung to the Triple Alliance toward the end of the war and had helped defeat France in the Mediterranean. Russia had fallen to revolution which even now descended into civil war. The United States had come very close to getting involved but thought better of it, continuing to speak softly and carry a big stick in their own hemisphere.

After the war, Churchill's government was weak. They had bungled several campaigns, in particular the Shanghai Landing master-minded by the Prime Minister's son General Winston Churchill. Many said that the young man's experience of warfare in the Sudan as a young man had gone to his head and he had only got as far as he had thanks to nepotism. But while Randolph Churchill was personally unpopular in many circles, his government had achieved victory, and in a khaki election stormed back into power with a landslide majority, with the new Socialist Labour Party, a Marxist organisation that had emerged out of the chaos, picking up a couple of seats.

While Churchill and his fellow Tory Democrats, and even former Radical Liberals, felt somewhat uncomfortable with the excesses they had been forced to go to at the height of the war, with authoritarian measures like the Defence of the Realm Act, mass conscription, and the total mobilisation of the populace for war. However, the younger members who had gained valuable experience during the war, saw a toned down version of what they did during the war as the future. David Lloyd-George, the Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries during the war, had built a strong relationship with the farmers unions which had agglomerated into the National Farmers' and Affiliated Workers' Union by the middle of the war, which had allowed him to stop Britain from being starved into surrender, even at the height of the French blockade. Ramsay MacDonald had served as Minister for Labour and had overseen the mobilisation of the urban trades unions for war production with a little less effect. His actions in getting women into work was key to the anger which many union men held him in when they returned from the front.

Churchill implemented the Elysian Fields Programme, which alotted land to the soldiers returning from the front if they wanted it. The cities were becoming hollowed out, and a class of proletarian farmers was emerging. Lloyd-George's relationship with the NFU turned groups of these smallholdings, either the Chamberlainite 'Three Acres and a Cow' ones or the post war Churchillite Elysian Fields into co-operatives working with the NFU, working on at county level. By the end of 1911, the counties of the British Isles were crammed with interconnected co-operatives. It was one of the largest social engineering programmes in British history. Ramsay MacDonald established the Rural Labourers' Representation Committee, which took in the smaller farmers' unions and affiliated them officially to the party. From Ireland, the agrarian socialists were absorbed into the party and so Catholic distributionist ideals became an undercurrent. The Morrisite plan had almost come to fruition, the seeds had been laid and were now germinating.

The radicalism of the 1906-1911 Churchill ministry came at a cost. They had diverged dramatically from the base of the Conservative party and were now an agrarian socialist-cooperative party in all but name. With the various authoritarian measures of the government, along with support for more radical social reforms like votes for women, they bled out their support in the cities and amongst the large landowners. In 1911, they were defeated by the Liberals under Asquith.

The Churchillian legacy transformed British society and economic structure, and utterly changed the Conservative party. From 1912 onwards, they became known as the Country Party and became far more explicit about their leftist credentials. Many old style Conservatives left the party and remarketed themselves as Moderates to link themselves to old Salisbury's Moderates in the Lords, but this simply exacerbated the shift. The split did stymie Country's attempts to get back into power after 1911 however.
 
Interesting, it does sound a bit mad with role reversal but then when you boil down to actual policies, not so much.

Yeah, this last update probably is the one which stretches reality the most. There only a couple more updates after this one.
 
Years of Towers and Lolly

Under Asquith's and then John Simon's Liberal governments of the 1910s and 1920s, Britain staggered out from the post-war recession and became a rich country. Nominally. While the cities boomed and became glittering edifices of the Jazz Age, with tall fluting super-towers and mass consumption, there was very high inequality. The Liberals did nothing to combat the highly unionised countryside, where membership rarely fell below 50% and could be as high as 90% in the Country Party heartlands. Red Lincolnshire was particularly notorious, as a den of quasi-Marxists.

The post-war global order was volatile. China was divided into British, German and Japanese sphere of influence with concessions to other countries like the United States, Belgium, the Netherlands, etc. while the interior remained dominated by warlords. A shaky republic nominally ruled the whole country. Japan had conquered French bits and bobs in East Asia and the Pacific and had bitten off a good section of Pacific Russia during its civil war from which a rather authoritarian republic had emerged. Europe was dominated by Germany, via her direct vassals in the Baltic and her puppetisation of Austria-Hungary and the Balkan states, while the extended a more informal economic sphere over the Latin countries. Germany and Italy had both expanded their empires in Africa at French expense, and in the Middle East, a tired Ottoman Empire lives on, an Anglo-German (tm) production. The Americas are dominated by the ol' US of A, but business remains very much America's business. Neither the US or Germany was interested in founding a League of Nations, and a kind of global Congress system dominated the 20s, with Britain, Germany, Japan and the United States forming the principle powers of the world.

The Liberals didn't do away with the Imperial Tariff system but instead used it to fund tax reductions and lower the national debt. Sensible decisions which led to an economic boom. The infrastructure investment of the Churchill years allowed Britain to take full advantage of the Second Industrial Revolution and while she continued to lag behind the US and Germany economically, she was a heavy global hitter in her own right. The Liberals also withdrew much of their involvement in private business (outside the rural co-operatives, which competed with one another in their own way). Expanding businesses often played the stock market to increase their value, and high growth seemed to deliver returns as credit expanded.

Some consider the 1910s and 20s a Golden Age of culture, and point to the music, art and architecture of the age. While these were all valuable, and there is no doubt the time is legendary for producing the sexual permissive attitudes which contrasted sharply with the buttoned up Victorian Age. Sexual and racial discrimination came under a scrutinising eye as non-white people became more visible in every day society. One of the consequences of Churchill's Elysian Fields was that many cities suffered a labour shortage, and men and women from the colonies of Africa, Asia and the Caribbean came to the semi-mythical motherland to answer the call for workers.

But at the same time, the cities became very stratified socially and racially. The glamourous individuals of the age were the minority and while the middle classes also enjoyed great opulence and unemployment was low, the very rich were those who gained most, and the urban workers clashed considerably with their non-white counterparts who were often employed for a much lower wage by bosses who could get away with it. The union movement in the cities weakened as solidarity broke down, and the ability of bosses to call on workers from overseas gave them the ability to bypass strikes and carry on work.

The first sign of weakness in the booming economy of Britain was the sudden revelation of how much the big cities relied on the pit villages. These small colliery communities had been socialised alongside the farming unions, and had taken a while longer than the farming unions to affiliate to the Country Party due to their inherent distrust of the old Conservative party. Coal prices had become depressed due to the influx of French and Russian coal as reparations, and these communities had gotten the short end of the stick. While the Russians had mostly recovered, and reparations now came in the form of cash, the price of coal had remained artificially low.

The coal-miner's strike began in 1925, and was followed by the Farmer's Strike in solidarity. The farmers of the shires refused to bus their food into the cities. A chilling mirror image of the French blockade of Britain took place. Within weeks, the price of coal was readjusted to a higher price. The Liberal government had taken a thrashing, and the coal-miners now swung behind the Country Party. The economy of the shires was developing a service sector of its own, with many small farmers diversifying their business and new co-operatives being set up to deal with other services.

The killer blow came in 1928 when the German stock market crashed and all economic dominance over Europe came down. The French Kingdom collapsed into a new republic, Austria-Hungary finally disintegrated. The ripple effects spread out across the world, plunging the world into a repeat of the economic trials and tribulations of the Long Depression.

A deflating economy was bad for the commodity producers as the value of money rose and the value of their product fell. Simon's government tried to fill the gap with some kind of state interventionism. It was too little too late. In 1930, they fell below a majority and a vote of confidence brought in a general election. The almost two decades of dominance by the Liberals was at an end. The Blue Primrose was to have its turn, under a radical new leader, a synthesis of the kind of men the Country Party was born from and the ideals of the voters of the co-operatives. The man they called the Red Bull.
 
Red Bull Gives You Wings

Oswald Mosley was born from the aristocracy of Staffordshire, and was in fact the 6th Baronet of his line, almost all of whom had been Oswalds. Physically, he took after his grandfather, Oswald Mosley, 4th Baronet. His grandfather had been nicknamed John Bull for his appearance, a thick, stocky sort of fellow with reddish brown and a flushed complexion, the very image of the John Bull who had stood against Napoleonic perfidy. His grandson was similar, albeit with darker hair he inherited from his Irish mother. He initially joined the Moderate Party out of a sense of familial obligation and because he had little to no experience of any other sort of life, having spent his youthful years fighting in the Great War.

But after a time, he developed his own ideas and became bored of the archaic, stick-in-the-mud Moderates. He crossed parties, joining the Country Party. And it was here he found his calling. Amongst the coal miners of Wales, crofters of Scotland and cooperativists, he became a firebrand socialist. His ruddy complexion was a common sight from the backbenches, calling out the Liberal front bench for their supposed corruption and lick-spittling to the corporate interests. In the mid 20s, he took control of the party, and set out a radical vision for how Britain would go on into the 20th century. Ironically, it was the Socialist Labour Party, with whom the Country Party did not get on, who gave him the idea. The welfare state of course was already there but it had done little to truly relieve the misery of the working man. Mosley set out to change that.

Leading the Country Party into government in 1930, he appropriated the work of the SLP, and published a report that has since become semi-legendary as the Mosley Memorandum. He proposed the nationalisation and mutualisation of key industries, in a similar fashion to what had been carried out with the farmers. He proposed the foundation of a national health service and the setting up of a range of other social provisions including National Insurance, and protective benefits to keep the poorest above the poverty line. Mosley aimed for nothing more than the elimination of unemployment and poverty, and unlike the proposals of Arthur Balfour forty years before, he made no bones that his ideas amounted to state socialism.

As Germany flailed in Europe, Russia and France militarised, troops were pulled out of China expanding the civil war, Japan attempted to annex chunks of the country while it writhed, America fell into the doldrums of Depression, and the glories of Empire seemed to fade away, Mosley offered a new vision. A Britannia liberated, given wings to leave behind the muck and filth of capitalism, to achieve all she believed she could. How true that would prove was a question for the future...
 
Done in... just under thirty hours. Not too bad.

Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

1874: Benjamin Disraeli (Conservative)
1880: Benjamin Disraeli (Conservative-Home Rule League Coalition)
1881: John Bright (Liberal-Conservative Unionist Coalition)
1887: Arthur Balfour (Conservative with supply and confidence from the Home Rule League)
1891: Benjamin Gladstone (Liberal and Conservative Unionist)
1896: Randolph Churchill (Conservative-Radical Liberal Coalition)
1901: Randolph Churchill (War Government)
1906: Randolph Churchill (Conservative and Radical)
1911: Herbert H. Asquith (Liberal and Unionist)
1916: Herbert H. Asquith (Liberal and Unionist)
1920: John Simon (Liberal and Unionist)
1925: John Simon (Liberal and Unionist)
1930: Oswald Mosley, 6th Baronet (Country)


Parties in the present Parliament

Country
Liberal and Unionist
Moderate
Socialist Labour
Irish National
British Action
 
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Not even an epilogue about the future? :( Ah, well, it was an interesting read, I was just left wanting more.
 
Really interesting stuff; I always felt some kind of co-op-type party could do well amongst farmers. Nice to see it explored!
 
The impact on the white empire could be interesting too.

You may have sucked away a lot ofnthr migration to such places or, changed the character. NZ for instance was a key destination of the defeated agricultural unions, who allied with NZ government migration agents after the collapse and this introduced many thousands of activist farm labourers to NZ. Which, as you'd expect, helped make the new farmer class of NZ decidedly different from that of England. The legacy of crofting in Scotland also helped here.
 
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