Churchill retires in 1945

[Ricardolindo]

The French offered it 1956 and Eden refused... useless piece a... He evokes great anger considering he's the reason why we're in the Brexit cockup. If there is one politician I truly detest with utter contempt it's him, along with Chamberlain and Fairfax of course. Stuck up Oxbridge pr%ick. Don't get wrong Churchill made mistakes, was aristocratic but ultimately had logical common sense which won him the war. I don't care if Eden contributed to the Suez crisis or was the cause of it, there both the same to me. No, it had an equally good chance of succeeding in 1956, after 1956 the French power brokered with Germany and that lives until today. That is the only reason why Europe has not befallen into wars.

Let's just say if the French-German power partition broke, and I was the British Prime Minister, I would offer a British-French Union to the French. The French were basically offering superpower status through marriage and it is something my country is finding difficult to come to terms with, and of course, the union would become a superpower, we made Concorde together.

I'll calm down now...

Here's a BBC article on it: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6261885.stm (Albeit with a clickbait title) I thought it was a reasonably well-known bit of trivia amongst us on here.

It is indeed a bizarre notion, but heads of governments have got some extremely strange blue sky ideas into their heads over the years; it's not necessarily indicative of their realism. It seems like Mollet was letting his Anglophilia fuse with a sort of late fifties French malaise.

I didn't know of that one. I only knew about the 1940 one.

 

[Dunois]

The French offered it 1956 and Eden refused... useless piece a... He evokes great anger considering he's the reason why we're in the Brexit cockup. If there is one politician I truly detest with utter contempt it's him, along with Chamberlain and Fairfax of course. Stuck up Oxbridge pr%ick. Don't get wrong Churchill made mistakes, was aristocratic but ultimately had logical common sense which won him the war. I don't care if Eden contributed to the Suez crisis or was the cause of it, there both the same to me. No, it had an equally good chance of succeeding in 1956, after 1956 the French power brokered with Germany and that lives until today. That is the only reason why Europe has not befallen into wars.

Let's just say if the French-German power partition broke, and I was the British Prime Minister, I would offer a British-French Union to the French. The French were basically offering superpower status through marriage and it is something my country is finding difficult to come to terms with, and of course, the union would become a superpower, we made Concorde together.

I'll calm down now...

Indeed, Suez 1956 is when the last chance of an Franco-British led Europe died ...

 

[V-J]

I've seen a lot of things blamed for Brexit, but Anthony Eden refusing to countenance the notion of merging the country with France sixty years earlier is a new one.

Given it had absolutely zero chance of happening, I think people can spare themselves the pain of emotional investment on the subject.

 

[Deleted member 94680]

I've seen a lot of things blamed for Brexit, but Anthony Eden refusing to countenance the notion of merging the country with France sixty years earlier is a new one.

Given it had absolutely zero chance of happening, I think people can spare themselves the pain of emotional investment on the subject.

Hypothetical Alliance means Hypothetical Alliance

 

[Deleted member 92195]

Indeed, Suez 1956 is when the last chance of an Franco-British led Europe died ...

Yes and that is why I don't agree Churchill should have retired in 1945. Personally, he should have told Eden where to stick it and replaced him with another minister, or he should not have taken on the Foreign ministry in 1951 and this would have avoided Churchill having a brain haemorrhage. Being PM and running a ministry is physically and mentally exhausting and exasperating, you need to be fit, if not really young. This would have not forced his entire cabinet to force Churchill to retire because of his obvious poor physical and mental health. Churchill was actually thinking about running for Prime Minister in 1960 believe it or not (crazy I know) but he was persuaded not to. I can see Churchill as a PM who would die in office, as long as avoids the anxiety, stress, depression and just makes the strategic decisions he could have PM until his death in 1965.

I only say this because he really was the only post-war politician until Thatcher who had any diplomatic and political clout. If Thatcher comes along when she does the difference between them would only be 15 years instead of 25 years.

I've seen a lot of things blamed for Brexit, but Anthony Eden refusing to countenance the notion of merging the country with France sixty years earlier is a new one.

Given it had absolutely zero chance of happening, I think people can spare themselves the pain of emotional investment on the subject.

Brexit is basically a country that was a superpower, that does not understand its place in the world. That's it, nothing more, nothing less. Because the UK is a small country and attained superpower status it has since lost that (1997) in an emerging globalist world of supernational organisations. (EU) I.e the world is getting smaller and smaller and were an average country, not a country leading in the global world. Brexit is an attempt to break out of that organisation in an attempt to regain that status. Post World War II from 1945 - 1965 was crucial, and not just the Suez crisis and French offer but in global and economic terms as well. That is India, Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, UK industrial economy fell by 80% from 1945-2010. It's been termed as the 'the long economic suicide'.

 

[V-J]

Brexit is basically a country that was a superpower, that does not understand its place in the world. That's it, nothing more, nothing less. Because the UK is a small country and attained superpower status it has since lost that (1997) in an emerging globalist world of supernational organisations. (EU) I.e the world is getting smaller and smaller and were an average country, not a country leading in the global world. Brexit is an attempt to break out of that organisation in an attempt to regain that status. Post World War II from 1945 - 1965 was crucial, and not just the Suez crisis and French offer but in global and economic terms as well. That is India, Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, UK industrial economy fell from by 80% from 1945-2010. It's been termed as the 'the long economic suicide'.

I disagree completely on your analysis on Brexit; in so far as vision of the country globally informed things, the forces powering Leave were basically anti-internationalist, retractionist, anti-globalisation, while Remain was internationalist and about power projecton. (Or as the Remain put it themselves, 'punching above our weight') It's not remotely as simplistic as Leave=Wants the Empire back. But anyway, this isn't a political discussion thread.

Decrying the decline of British status doesn't mean union with France was ever going to happen. You can polemicise about the issue of British power, it doesn't make Mollet, a unusually Anglophile French PM, batting around a vague and romantic scheme about merger a realistic proposition. You keep talking in terms which suggets you believe that it's as simple as Eden and Mollet verbally agreeing to Union, and then hey presto, it happens. This isn't how politics works, and it's certainly not how politics works in parliamentary systems.

Pre-Suez in particular, in Britain there was really almost no serious apetite amongst the political class as a whole for European integration - it would require Suez, years more of imperial fragmentation and ecnomic illusions falling away, and the rise of a wartime/inter-war political class which had a substantially different view of Europe to their predecessors, for the notion to even gain a minimal amount of traction in the possibility of EEC entry. (And even that was heavily contested)

So I'm puzzled, given you seem to also have a vague knowledge of the period, how you believe that pre-Suez Britain would have thought not just the intergovernmentalism of the EEC but effectively merging the country would happen, and who would consent to this sceheme. And it would be no more easily accepted in France had Mollet brought the scheme home. If Eden and Mollet had started championing the concept, they might have had the priviledge of sharing the same exile in Ian Fleming's Goldeneye estate in Jamaica, but little else.

Even the diplomatic rapport of the Suez experience was never going to last, because it was based on a passing shared imperial angst. The French had as much if not more historical investment in the canal as Britain did, and like Britain they shared worries about the Nasser effect, in particular what it would cause in North Africa and Algeria. That was really it, it was a shared spasm of imperial decline on the part of the two foremost European imperial powers.

I think there are alternative routes Britain could have taken which would have seen it become a more integrated European force, even relatively late within the fifties, but this isn't it.

 

[Deleted member 92195]

I disagree completely on your analysis on Brexit; in so far as vision of the country globally informed things, the forces powering Leave were basically anti-internationalist, retractionist, anti-globalisation, while Remain was internationalist and about power projecton. (Or as the Remain put it themselves, 'punching above our weight') It's not remotely as simplistic as Leave=Wants the Empire back. But anyway, this isn't a political discussion thread.

Decrying the decline of British status doesn't mean union with France was ever going to happen. You can polemicise about the issue of British power, it doesn't make Mollet, a unusually Anglophile French PM, batting around a vague and romantic scheme about merger a realistic proposition. You keep talking in terms which suggets you believe that it's as simple as Eden and Mollet verbally agreeing to Union, and then hey presto, it happens. This isn't how politics works, and it's certainly not how politics works in parliamentary systems.

Pre-Suez in particular, in Britain there was really almost no serious apetite amongst the political class as a whole for European integration - it would require Suez, years more of imperial fragmentation and ecnomic illusions falling away, and the rise of a wartime/inter-war political class which had a substantially different view of Europe to their predecessors, for the notion to even gain a minimal amount of traction in the possibility of EEC entry. (And even that was heavily contested)

So I'm puzzled, given you seem to also have a vague knowledge of the period, how you believe that pre-Suez Britain would have thought not just the intergovernmentalism of the EEC but effectively merging the country would happen, and who would consent to this sceheme. And it would be no more easily accepted in France had Mollet brought the scheme home. If Eden and Mollet had started championing the concept, they might have had the priviledge of sharing the same exile in Ian Fleming's Goldeneye estate in Jamaica, but little else.

Even the diplomatic rapport of the Suez experience was never going to last, because it was based on a passing shared imperial angst. The French had as much if not more historical investment in the canal as Britain did, and like Britain they shared worries about the Nasser effect, in particular what it would cause in North Africa and Algeria. That was really it, it was a shared spasm of imperial decline on the part of the two foremost European imperial powers.

I think there are alternative routes Britain could have taken which would have seen it become a more integrated European force, even relatively late within the fifties, but this isn't it.

Who said I was writing a 5,000-word essay and using resources from Westminster. I was writing in brief, write to yourself from now on because I am really too tired for childish egotistical puns.

 

[Zen9]

On the other hand, the Tories got lucky by Attlee (at the King's suggestion) going for an October 1951 election at all. Had Attlee held on to 1952, Labour might well have been re-elected. No Churchill after 1945 might mean butterflies in terms of election timing.

Interesting and contradictory to what I've read of the times.
What's the basis for this statement of Labour having the potential to win in '52?

 

[UCB79]

I once did some brainstorming about Eden leading the Tories in the 1945 GE with a more effective campaign that kept Labour’s majority to about 40. Atlee became more cautious in office, leading him to back Herbert Morrison’s model of the NHS, which in turn results in Bevan resigning from the government. Riven with splits the government collapses in around 1948 and Eden leads the Tories to a landslide victory. I gave up on it as an idea because given how much of the electorate blamed the Tories for the disasters of the early war years, and the poverty of the 1930’s its difficult to see a way they could have avoided a total walloping in 1945 no matter who was the leader. An Eden premiership from 1950 might have been very interesting, I read once that he favoured an early version of Right to Buy. If he’d been PM before that operation left him a Benzedrine addicted zombie he’d certainly be better remembered today.

Do you think then Oncoming that ITTL Suez
would have been butterflied away?

 

[V-J]

Who said I was writing a 5,000-word essay and using resources from Westminster. I was writing in brief, write to yourself from now on because I am really too tired for childish egotistical puns.

Sorry. I sometimes forget that this isn't a discussion board, it's just somewhere people want to relax by posting their historical and political fantasises unchallenged.

Still, new user title.

 

[CalBear]

Who said I was writing a 5,000-word essay and using resources from Westminster. I was writing in brief, write to yourself from now on because I am really too tired for childish egotistical puns.

Play the ball.

 

[Deleted member 92195]

Play the ball.

What write a 5,000-word political essay on Brexit, Eden, Churchill and the UK's transition over the last 75 years? I do confess that my thoughts have wondered endlessly on this subject for many years. Funny enough I have just finished watching the Sons of Anarchy season 3. It is tempting to switch to something completely different for a change, yea ok, I'll do it. I just have to focus and not lose interest.

 

[Colonel Grubb]

Well the OTL 1953 botched Gallstone operation is almost certainly butterflied away which, depending on the source was one of the major reasons contributing to his failure in the lead up to/during Suez in '56. I think in every way he's much more of an asset electorally than Churchill is in almost any post-war scenario both according to data and more modern reflections about the man himself and his premiership prospects.

Whilst he's probably in a great spot for dealing with foreign affairs from '50-'51 on-wards - whoever his Foreign Secretary is, they are not going to be driving. However he's going to need a few good hands for domestic and economic policy - which might lead to a few stumbles if the economy gets tricky.

 

[Chrispi]

Not much changes. He'll still be on the Privy Council, of course, even when "out" of power. Maybe more respected than OTL even...

 

[Maeglin]

Interesting and contradictory to what I've read of the times.
What's the basis for this statement of Labour having the potential to win in '52?

Improved economic position, and the Liberals having more time to build up a campaign war-chest (the Liberals at this point were largely sucking votes from the Tories - the better they do, the worse the Tories do). At least one historian has suggested that Attlee called the election at the worst possible time for Labour.

 

[Zen9]

Improved economic position, and the Liberals having more time to build up a campaign war-chest (the Liberals at this point were largely sucking votes from the Tories - the better they do, the worse the Tories do). At least one historian has suggested that Attlee called the election at the worst possible time for Labour.

Thanks for the reply.

If I may...
There are a few problems with this idea as Labour did not relax or remove the controls imposed during WWII.
The public frustration with ID cards for instance.
You might know that during the war Churchill gave quite a speach concerning the emergency powers passed and how he voted for hem on the understanding that these would be repealed after the war.
Labour did not repeal.
Churchill did.

 

[new statesman]

the French power brokered with Germany and that lives until today. That is the only reason why Europe has not befallen into wars.

Dose Europe stop at the Austrian border?
Or did I dream what Harpenden in the 1990s. Or dose it stop at Romania? Or did I dream what has been happening the last few years.

Europe is not France and Germany. And the only thing that has stopped war between the major powers the last 75 odd years is the bomb. Nothing more nothing less.

 

[Deleted member 92195]

I knew when I said 'yes' to do this project it would be big. So big in fact I have to screenshot the structure of the essay because it would take me an age to order the bullet points correctly.

I will probably change the structure and content of the essay because as I study each section in depth it will naturally evolve, but I am not surprised if I have missed something out. But, this is the core.

Each bullet point represents a section. I know what each section completely represents as well because I have had this idea in my head for a while. That is huge.

Condolences to the French people regarding the Notre Dame fire.