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For China to be in that situation you either need the Civil War to continue on past 1949, or for The Gang of Four to seize power and keep The Cultural Revolution going into the 1980’s. Eventually they’d be toppled and a reformist government would take power. I don’t know enough about India to...

For me this is one of the biggest moments in Britain’s troubled relationship with Europe, the differing reactions of the British and French political classes to Suez laid the foundations for their relations on the 60’s. From what I know of him Macmillan was quite a Europhile but that view wasn’t...

ooc If this China really has the 2nd largest army in the World then there’d be precious little Britain could do to stop a takeover, that’s something that Deng pointedly told Thatcher during the handover talks. Only nuking Beijing or Shanghai might stop them but there’s be serious repercussions

One idea I thought about a while ago was what if Beatty hadn’t had the 5th BS transferred to him but instead still had the 3rd BCS, Invincible, Indomitable and Inflexible? I guess it means that the 3BCS would have been able to keep pace with Beatty instead of being left behind like 5BS was...

Great start! While Thatcher won’t be keen I suspect she’ll won’t try and reverse it, in contrast to the GLC the Scottish Assembly has been endorsed in a popular vote so it has a legitimacy that the GLC didn’t. Thatcher also tended to pick her battles carefully.

Without Iraq he’ll try and join the Euro, that was supposed to be the centrepiece of his second term. I read something recently that apparently he’d told Gordon Brown that if he’d dropped his opposition to a referendum on membership then he’d stand down as soon as we’d joined. Blair at the...

They supposedly acquired some AIM-54’s that way, I read once that the fear that the Phoenix has been compromised resulted in the upgraded AIM-54C. Being developed.

With a willing backer they could last indefinitely, both had a wealth of natural resources and in South Africa’s Case a large, indigenous arms industry that was able to provide everything except fast jets and naval ships. It was the defeat of the SAAF over Angola that is credited with making...

I’m guessing there’ll be a legal argument over the circumstances of his “spirited away,” his lawyers would probably argue that his extraordinary rendition was illegal. If he goes to trial I’d suspect he’d reveal details of his past dealings with the CIA and other western intelligence services...

Oh yes please continue!

One of my pet hates of AH is the idea that KMT victory magically means that China becomes a giant version of OTL’s Taiwan. As mentioned above it’s far easier to stage an economic miracle on a small island that already had decent infrastructure from the Japanese Occupation and was strategically...

Interesting, please continue!

There’s a line Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad about how after the initial German breakthroughs at the start of Barbarossa, Stalin was so desperate he summoned the Bulgarian ambassador and asked if his country would act as a mediator with Hitler. The ambassador refused saying “Even if you retreat to...

Wilson pulled Britain out of the forerunners of Airbus and Ariane in the 60’s, apparently in retaliation for De Gaulle vetoing his application to join the EC. Britain’s aerospace industry was still the largest in Europe at that time had we remained in both of those projects from the start It’s...

Bit of a long shot this but have the Midway class cancelled before the end of WW2 and have Britain build at least one of these https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malta-class_aircraft_carrier

The way to avoid the World Wars is actually to go back to 1870 and tell Napoleon III to ignore the Ems Telegram. That might prevent the issues that led to WW1 taking hold. It’s been speculated that without the WW’s and the Cold War and the boost they gave to technology then we might be at...

While certainly the unions didn’t help, especially in the car industry, the main reason for the problems of firms like BL was bad management and poor products. Contemporary Fords and Vauxhall’s were just as likely to leave you stranded on the hard shoulder and the workforces of Fiat and Renault...

One idea that’s been put forward in previous threads about this subject is that instead of occupying Eastern Europe the Soviets have have Finlandized it into a demilitarised, non-aligned zone. They wouldn’t have made to maintain a huge standing army and could have focused more resources on...

I picked 4, 5, 6 and 14

And without the oilfields in the DEI they probably run out of fuel by 1943 at the latest.