DBWI: Tory victory in 2010

So a Conservative-led government has got back into power after 18 years in the wilderness - but they _did_ come close in 2010. So looking back at the last five years, what would have happened if they'd won in 2010? What would it be like with Liam Fox as Prime Minister instead of Miliband and the Lib-Lab coalition?

[OOC: Started with "Miliband and Kennedy's" - edited Kennedy out, not sure if people will want to put Kennedy in a timeline so soon after his death?]
 
How is this going to happen? Fox beating David Miliband is borderline ASB. The fact that they came as close as they did is crazy. I think OTL is just about the best case scenario for Fox. In order to get a Tory win in 2010, one of the parties or maybe both are going to have to have different leaders than they did OTL. Maybe if Gordon Brown hadn't had that heart attack back in 2004, he might have succeeded Blair and led Labour to a worse showing. He always seemed like a pretty boring guy. For the Tories, maybe Cameron wins the 2005 leadership election and leads the Conservatives to victory five years earlier than he did OTL?
 
So a Conservative-led government has got back into power after 18 years in the wilderness - but they _did_ come close in 2010. So looking back at the last five years, what would have happened if they'd won in 2010? What would it be like with Liam Fox as Prime Minister instead of Miliband and the Lib-Lab coalition?

[OOC: Started with "Miliband and Kennedy's" - edited Kennedy out, not sure if people will want to put Kennedy in a timeline so soon after his death?]

Kennedy would have made a brilliant partner in the Lib-Lab coalition, with him as Deputy Prime Minister, the "No" vote in Scotland would have been bigger and the SNP would have most like not won as many seats in OTL 2015.

I doubt Fox could be Prime Minister after all his gaffs. The only Conservative, I could honestly see running a majority in 2010 is William Hague, with the PoD of him not being elected leader in 1997 but instead 8 years later in 2005.
 
How is this going to happen? Fox beating David Miliband is borderline ASB. The fact that they came as close as they did is crazy. I think OTL is just about the best case scenario for Fox. In order to get a Tory win in 2010, one of the parties or maybe both are going to have to have different leaders than they did OTL. Maybe if Gordon Brown hadn't had that heart attack back in 2004, he might have succeeded Blair and led Labour to a worse showing. He always seemed like a pretty boring guy. For the Tories, maybe Cameron wins the 2005 leadership election and leads the Conservatives to victory five years earlier than he did OTL?


I don't see Cameron managing it - he's had the advantage of everyone being tired of Labour and most of the other potentials burning out, he wins by default. Davis, OTOH, I could see him pulling it off if we have to swap out Fox. He had a lot of cred for his civil liberties stands.

Brown, I agree. If he'd become party leader in 2005 - as the fabled "deal" apparently went - you'd have a PM during the recession who helped cause the problems. If Blair had gone for a third term, you'd have all that toxic Blairite-Brownite feuding screwing them up. Liam Fox could've pulled it off there! If Brown survives and Davis wins? The electoral map would look like a smurf died on it.

OOC: Miliband? Why not Brown?

OOC: Assuming that Brown would need to step down as part of the deal (though Ziemnak's got a good one)
 
Kennedy would have made a brilliant partner in the Lib-Lab coalition, with him as Deputy Prime Minister, the "No" vote in Scotland would have been bigger and the SNP would have most like not won as many seats in OTL 2015.

Agreed. Kennedy was a great Scottish Secretary but he'd have made a great anything else Secretary too - that hampered his work during the No campaign. The Scottish listened to him but they damn well knew he'd been shafted, too many Labour people being pissy about his stance on Iraq and worried he'd be too powerful in Cabinet.
 
It's interesting to ponder what would have happened foreign policy-wise in this scenario. David Miliband was always close to the USA and naturally shared Blair's habits as he was Tony Blair's Foreign Secretary [1], and of course we know from OTL that the Conservatives could make lots of political gain from standing against New Labour's bellicose gung-ho military interventionism fighting beside the Americans in their wars in Libya and Syria. [2] I daresay that if we had Fox instead of Miliband we wouldn't be stuck with the Libyan and Syrian Wars today.

Socially, though, things would have been a complete disaster. It was a long, hard slog, but everyone knows the economy couldn't have recovered if not for the strong stimulus approach taken by the government. Fox's 'austerity' idea that if the government cut the amount of money it was spending then the economy would somehow boom in spite of the decreased investment… well, any economist with a background in Keynes or who has ever looked at the OTL history of the financial crisis could tell you how idiotic that was. It's a damn good thing they never got a chance to test that out and Cameron saw the idea was unpopular and quietly dumped it after the election.


[1] Presumably David Miliband didn't become Prime Minister out of nowhere, and, me being unimaginative, I chose to imagine that his big Cabinet position before he took the premiership was Foreign Secretary. I think it's something of a stretch to imagine him as Blair's successor when he only gained a big Cabinet position so recently, but David Miliband's Labour leadership is already established as canon now.

[2] The idea being that TTL's Cameron (who became Leader of the Opposition after the Labour victory in 2010) would have to be a complete idiot to repeat Iain Duncan Smith's at-the-time-very-recent mistake of supporting an unpopular Middle Eastern war started by New Labour.

Brown was seen as a liability. I'm guessing that the idea is Brown resigns and Miliband (I'd hope Ed) wins the leadership. This manages to give Labour enough of a boost to make a coalition with the Lib Dems viable.

OOC: Contrary to what one might imagine by just thinking of what people say today, the Conservative narrative that Gordon Brown was at fault for causing the financial crisis was not so widely implanted and accepted in 2010; at the time it was just a Conservative contention, not an "everyone knows" truth as it has retroactively become since then. Brown certainly didn't accept it; nor did the Labour Party in general. Many Britons on the political left don't accept it even now, let alone then. It's difficult to see how Brown could have been so easily forced out; and it's truly bizarre to suggest that in the 2005-2010 term, when Labour was still governing the country, a Labour leader who had very recently taken charge would be forced out for no apparent reason and a new leadership election held. There was no environment in the Labour Party to create an alt-Redwood, especially with a less electable, more right-wing Conservative Party led by Fox instead of Cameron.

Frankly, the 'Brown must have had a heart attack or something' rationalisation by Ziemniak—which I applaud—is necessary to make this make sense. If Labour won the general election in 2010 in OTL, due to a different Conservative leader (which is what the OP implied that this scenario was), Gordon Brown would undoubtedly have remained Prime Minister as John Major did.
 
It's interesting to ponder what would have happened foreign policy-wise in this scenario. David Miliband was always close to the USA and naturally shared Blair's habits as he was Tony Blair's Foreign Secretary [1], and of course we know from OTL that the Conservatives could make lots of political gain from standing against New Labour's bellicose gung-ho military interventionism fighting beside the Americans in their wars in Libya and Syria. [2] I daresay that if we had Fox instead of Miliband we wouldn't be stuck with the Libyan and Syrian Wars today.

I'm half with you there. Libya would've been wiffed on, it was too close to Iraq (and during Afghanistan) and yeah, the Tories aren't going to want that. Syria the Tories would've had to do though, once Assad went chemical. "We are obliged to respond to the use of chemical weapons on children," as Cooper said[1] - it's like the Falklands, a government would have to respond or reveal itself as toothless. Whether someone else would've done it better or not, we can only speculate - those bastards in Da'esh lost their shot in Syria but moved to Iraq so that one's a no-score draw - but you'd need Foreign Secretary Galloway to have nothing.


[1] Miliband made her Shadow Foreign Secretary so she's got the equivalent job here and keeps it


Fox's 'austerity' idea that if the government cut the amount of money it was spending then the economy would somehow boom in spite of the decreased investment…

Urg, don't remind me. That shit was catching on all across Europe too, you have to hope that they'd have wised up even if we'd gone with it too. it'd have been Occupy Strasbourg.

OOC: Contrary to what one might imagine by just thinking of what people say today, the Conservative narrative that Gordon Brown was at fault for causing the financial crisis was not so widely implanted and accepted in 2010

OOC: It was a pretty widespread belief back then too and I saw a lot of lefties go with it, though not for the same reasons as the Tories. "Brown's debt!!" has grown as a belief but that one doesn't survive contact with debt stats, which show a rise during wartime (not Brown) and a sharper rise during an economic crash (the whole Earth got that one).
 
I'm half with you there. Libya would've been wiffed on, it was too close to Iraq (and during Afghanistan) and yeah, the Tories aren't going to want that. Syria the Tories would've had to do though, once Assad went chemical. "We are obliged to respond to the use of chemical weapons on children," as Cooper said[1] - it's like the Falklands, a government would have to respond or reveal itself as toothless. Whether someone else would've done it better or not, we can only speculate - those bastards in Da'esh lost their shot in Syria but moved to Iraq so that one's a no-score draw - but you'd need Foreign Secretary Galloway to have nothing.


[1] Miliband made her Shadow Foreign Secretary so she's got the equivalent job here and keeps it

Really, really not. The Falklands were an invasion of British territory. A government is obliged to protect its own territory. A government is NOT obliged to march into another country just because of the totally crucial and all-important difference between some guy using one type of weapon (a method of killing people) and another type of weapon (a different method of killing people), which matters because… because… because…

Was that worth the several hundred British military deaths and billions of pounds spent because Obama and Miliband regarded themselves as the saviours of the world and couldn't allow a conflict to happen in the Middle East without diving head-first into it to try and save the day (and actually just screw things up)?

We were under no obligation whatsoever to get ourselves involved in that ongoing war in Syria. It's Iraq 2.0. The problem being, of course, that we still have Iraq 1.0—and Afghanistan, which we could call Iraq 0.0, and Libya, which we could call Iraq 3.0, and they all keep going.

That's why I voted Conservative. Their economic policies might leave much to be desired, but New Labour's endless militarism in the Muslim world in the name of interventionism—Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the list goes on and every single one of those interventions has gone catastrophically wrong—is a far less sensible policy than the Conservatives' pragmatic Realpolitik of "only fight wars for British national interest". Ultimately, it's always a bad idea to have a country's foreign policy run by ideology instead of common-sense.

OOC:

Foreign Secretary Galloway

Whatwhatwhatwhatwhat…?

A famous anti-war activist who isn't even a member of the Labour Party, taking one of the Great Offices of State in a militaristic Labour-Lib Dem coalition government?

Urg, don't remind me. That shit was catching on all across Europe too, you have to hope that they'd have wised up even if we'd gone with it too. it'd have been Occupy Strasbourg.

Nah, I don't think Europe was ever in real danger of sinking for a long time into that 'austerity' fad. They don't have the culture behind it, as I shall explain in the next few paragraphs; it was only the United Kingdom that did. Not that the United Kingdom ever would have fallen for it, because Fox couldn't have won, nor any other Conservative leader with his platform.

To sum up, the essential problem that Fox faced was exactly the same problem that Howard faced, and Hague before him. All three of them ran on an essentially Thatcherite platform that the British people had rejected in 1997. They were basically self-deluding; they ran campaigns that were pitched to the Conservative Party, not to the United Kingdom as a whole. And everyone with half a brain knows that you can't win an election by only appealing to people who are always going to vote for you anyway. Thatcher, in spite of her reputation, didn't win votes by just playing to the right; she won by getting people who would ordinarily vote Labour to vote Conservative instead (the so-called 'Essex Man')… and also by the fact that she faced Labour opponents as astonishingly stupid as Foot-In-Mouth who ruined Labour's credibility as a party of government for more than a decade by running Labour in 1983 as a basically Trotskyist party, but still, the point stands. No-one votes Labour because they think the Conservatives aren't right-wing enough, so the Conservatives can't win many new votes by going excessively right-wing. It's the same reason why Foot-in-Mouth himself was doomed in '83; no, Michael, funnily enough the British people weren't voting for Margaret Thatcher because Labour wasn't being left-wing enough for them.

It's a bit like what would happen in the USA if the Republican presidential candidates actually did the things they said they would do in primaries. There, of course, potential presidential candidates have to go way to the right to get chosen as the presidential candidate and then they run back to the centre in time for the actual election. All the Conservative leaders between Major and Cameron did the whole 'run to the right to become the candidate in the first place' thing, but forwent going back to the centre—and, therefore, lost hideously.

The Conservative Party could not have taken power until it recognised that it had to appeal to the British people as a whole and it couldn't win by just hoping the British people were naturally right-wing. The 'austerity' madness was, I think, a peculiarly British phenomenon of men who refused to admit that it wasn't the 1980s any more and were desperately trying to pretend that it was. Thank God that Cameron got the Conservatives out of that and we now have a credible right-wing party in this country; I didn't especially like 18 years of our country being a Labour one-party state because its other main party was refusing to engage with reality.

OOC: It was a pretty widespread belief back then too and I saw a lot of lefties go with it, though not for the same reasons as the Tories. "Brown's debt!!" has grown as a belief but that one doesn't survive contact with debt stats, which show a rise during wartime (not Brown) and a sharper rise during an economic crash (the whole Earth got that one).

OOC: I didn't see it among Labour supporters. Lib Dems and Conservatives, sure, they hated Brown and wanted him to go. Labour? After the election, sure, everyone "knew all along" that Brown should have gone. In the same way that, judging by what people are saying nowadays, one might think that "everyone knew all along" that Ed Miliband was going dangerously far to the left, or "everyone knew all along" that Scottish Labour was going to suffer hugely to the SNP, or "everyone knew all along" that "the Tories had this one in the bag" for the 2015 election (as I heard it put). But I didn't notice great lots of Labour supporters wanting Brown gone at the time.

The idea that Labour would throw out their own Prime Minister, when he had only just become Prime Minister and hadn't even contested a single election yet (which, contrary to Conservative propaganda, is perfectly legitimate under the British constitutional system; just look at John Major) is bizarre. Brown wasn't taking the party radically away from what it had been under Blair, as Major could be seen as moving radically leftward compared to Thatcher, which gave us the Redwood challenge. There was not going to be a Labour Redwood in the 2005-2010 term.
 
That's why I voted Conservative. Their economic policies might leave much to be desired, but New Labour's endless militarism in the Muslim world in the name of interventionism—Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the list goes on and every single one of those interventions has gone catastrophically wrong—is a far less sensible policy than the Conservatives' pragmatic Realpolitik of "only fight wars for British national interest".

Ha, the Tories like to pretend they didn't vote for Iraq in 03 when they call every war "Iraq Number" (Afghanistan too). It's adorable of them. They've never been very clear about what "British national interest" means, or if it'll differ from the "it's in our national interest for Libya not to melt down and ooze over the Med/for Da'esh to not stick around in Iraq"[1] that Miliband claimed. Hell, a bunch of Tories voted in favour of Syria too and some of them are in the Cabinet now. Cameron doesn't get to say "Iraq Three" when he's promoted Hammond and Rabb.[2][3]

[1] Assuming he'd be making the same claims that were done OTL

[2] ITTL, the Tories being opposition and Labour being in government will be altering how many of them voted but I'd expect some Tories to still vote for it.

[3] Dominic Rabb (who did vote intervention ITTL) feels like an MP who'd have ended up as a minor cabinet member if the cabinet wasn't already full.



Whatwhatwhatwhatwhat…?

A famous anti-war activist who isn't even a member of the Labour Party, taking one of the Great Offices of State in a militaristic Labour-Lib Dem coalition government?
'twas a joke.

Though if I'd said "Lord High Protector Galloway", that one wouldn't be a joke but the fantasies inside Galloway's head.


OOC: I didn't see it among Labour supporters.
OOC: You weren't going to see it with Labour supporters, no, but not all lefties are Labour supporters (different to voting for it).

If anyone's claiming "everyone knew the Tories would win 2015", they better damn well be from another timeline themselves. That's like saying "we all thought Savile was dodgy", we have live filmed evidence that this is not true!
 
On the Lib Dem side, you think it mattered who was in charge or would there have been a coalition anyway? Ming did look a bit shaky in his first few months, especially when Oatengate happened - but I guess if you can get through your Home Affairs Spokesman turning out to like coprophilia with rent boys, you can get through anything.[1] Revamping the media approach certainly helped.


[1] For foreign posters: this actually happened. OTL he wasn't still Foreign Affairs Spokesman but worse, he'd just made a failed bid for party leader!
 
Ha, the Tories like to pretend they didn't vote for Iraq in 03 when they call every war "Iraq Number" (Afghanistan too). It's adorable of them.

David Cameron openly repudiated that. It was Iain Duncan Smith's great mistake.

You can hardly judge the Conservative Party of 2015 by the Conservative Party of 2003; that would be like pretending that Tony Blair's Labour Party was like Michael Foot's. Both of them moved far to the centre in those time-intervals.

They've never been very clear about what "British national interest" means, or if it'll differ from the "it's in our national interest for Libya not to melt down and ooze over the Med/for Da'esh to not stick around in Iraq"[1] that Miliband claimed.

British national interest means things that affect the British economy, British resources, and British ability to retain British territorial integrity. It would mean we would intervene if, say, France became unstable; we do NOT need to intervene if the Middle-Easterners keep killing each other. They always keep killing each other, regardless of what we do.

The American, French and British governments have assuredly tried the tactic of "bomb the shit out of them and hope this somehow makes things better". They've given more than a fair hearing to the possibility. It didn't work; it just made them hate us, and it created a power vacuum for Islamic extremists to fill. I would far, far rather we have stable nationalist dictatorships in the Middle East than unstable conflict-ridden hellholes where Islamic extremists spring up. Obama and Miliband got rid of the former in the name of 'freedom' and 'democracy', and thus created the latter.

Libya wasn't "melting down" by the time we went in; it only melted down because we went in. The government—albeit (gasp) an EVIL DICTATOR's government (as Miliband's propaganda was happy to inform us), but a government that had lasted for decades—was winning. Then we chose to intervene on the side of the rebels, who were allegedly democratic heroes, and they won. Then it turned out, of course, that the rebels were actually a disunited bunch of lots of different factions only united by the fact that they hated Gaddafi, and most of them hated both us and each other, and the country became so unstable that it could literally have its Prime Minister kidnapped.

Islamic State wasn't a powerful force before we stuck our noses in. It was the consequence of our actions, not the reason for them. At the time we stuck our noses into Libya, it was Gaddafi vs rebels, we funded the rebels and it turned out that lots of the weapons ended up going to Islamic extremists. At the time we stuck our noses into Syria, it was Assad vs Sunni rebels, we funded the rebels and those weapons ended up going to Islamic extremists too. And now we're stuck with even more interminable guerrilla wars.

It is beyond all doubt that Blairite/Milibandite interventionist foreign policy in the Middle East has been a complete, utter, total and unmitigated failure.

Hence why I—and 38.9% of the people of this country—voted for the Conservative Party. Say what you will about 'toffs', they aren't bloody idealist idiots who start useless wars we should never have got involved in because they believe it's their job to save the world. Newsflash: the job of the government of the United Kingdom is not to save the world, it's to govern the United Kingdom.

Hell, a bunch of Tories voted in favour of Syria too and some of them are in the Cabinet now. Cameron doesn't get to say "Iraq Three" when he's promoted Hammond and Rabb.[2][3]

[1] Assuming he'd be making the same claims that were done OTL

[2] ITTL, the Tories being opposition and Labour being in government will be altering how many of them voted but I'd expect some Tories to still vote for it.

[3] Dominic Rabb (who did vote intervention ITTL) feels like an MP who'd have ended up as a minor cabinet member if the cabinet wasn't already full.

OOC: Fair deductions.

Back in character: Oh, yeah, sure there are some Conservatives who voted for the war, and Cameron had to throw a few bones to the Foxites, but it's not as though any of them have been given important positions. All the Great Offices of State have been reserved for Cameronites. [1] Hammond can't do too much from his position as Secretary of State for International Development.

[1] The idea being that this is a term equivalent to 'Blairite'/'Brownite' in OTL. The Cameronites are the left of the Conservative Party, the Foxites the more militaristic and UKIP-esque right.

'twas a joke.

Though if I'd said "Lord High Protector Galloway", that one wouldn't be a joke but the fantasies inside Galloway's head.

OOC: Ah. Sorry. I thought you were saying that, in-universe, Galloway was Foreign Secretary. Hence my incredulity.

OOC: You weren't going to see it with Labour supporters, no, but not all lefties are Labour supporters (different to voting for it).

OOC: At risk of sounding harsh…

…relevant ones are.

(Unless you consider Lib Dem supporters lefties, that is.)

If anyone's claiming "everyone knew the Tories would win 2015", they better damn well be from another timeline themselves. That's like saying "we all thought Savile was dodgy", we have live filmed evidence that this is not true!

OOC: Doesn't stop people from claiming it, or at least implying it. Seriously, look at the election thread and lots of the election response threads on Chat; it seems that, since Miliband was such an unpopular and un-Prime Ministerial figure and Labour had gone way to the left and people didn't trust Labour on the economy and a whole variety of other reasons provided, the Conservatives were always going to win.

I entirely agree that such sentiments are stupid, but people say them anyway.
 
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