Right, just spit-balling something that's been going round my head today in between episodes of the West Wing.
Suppose that the Common Wealth Party is able to successfully maintain a Parliamentary presence in the immediate post-war era, and are able to build on it to the extent that by the 1960s they are approaching the same level of seriousness as the Liberals. At about the same time (i.e. postwar consensus era), there is some kind of crisis within the Labour Party that leads their junior electoral partner, the Co-Operative Party, to break off their unusual electoral pact and sit in Parliament as an independent grouping. In the process, the Co-Op manage to take all or most of their sponsored MPs with them, so they have a ready-made parliamentary party of about 10 from the get-go.
So, by the mid-60s, we have three parties 'of the left' where once we had one. Assuming both Common Wealth and the Co-Op can survive, and leaving butterflies to the reader's discretion, what does this mean for the development of British political discourse?
(Yes, I know Common Wealth was never a part of Labour; 'Labour/Co-Op split combined with successful Common Wealth development' wasn't going to fit...)
Suppose that the Common Wealth Party is able to successfully maintain a Parliamentary presence in the immediate post-war era, and are able to build on it to the extent that by the 1960s they are approaching the same level of seriousness as the Liberals. At about the same time (i.e. postwar consensus era), there is some kind of crisis within the Labour Party that leads their junior electoral partner, the Co-Operative Party, to break off their unusual electoral pact and sit in Parliament as an independent grouping. In the process, the Co-Op manage to take all or most of their sponsored MPs with them, so they have a ready-made parliamentary party of about 10 from the get-go.
So, by the mid-60s, we have three parties 'of the left' where once we had one. Assuming both Common Wealth and the Co-Op can survive, and leaving butterflies to the reader's discretion, what does this mean for the development of British political discourse?
(Yes, I know Common Wealth was never a part of Labour; 'Labour/Co-Op split combined with successful Common Wealth development' wasn't going to fit...)