Well, if it confused someone with extensive knowledge of Korean history, I'd say it succeeded.
Look to the West: Thread III, Volume IV (Tottenham Nil)!
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Well, if it confused someone with extensive knowledge of Korean history, I'd say it succeeded.
Thande
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Indeed.BTW, I don't recall you commenting on the TL for a while, do you have any thoughts on my recent updates?
Not very specific, but good enough in the fact that the idea was not as fleshed out as it could have been, which was what I expected after browsing various timelines.
Oh okay, that's fine. I'm glad that I helped.
No, not at all. My point was that the details looked extremely anachronistic, and I also voted for several other timelines that mangled Korea by automatically absorbing it into a larger country without paying much attention to the details. I certainly recognize that people have put a lot of effort into constructing extensive timelines, but generally tend to ignore and fudge details that they don't have knowledge of, which is acceptable from a broader viewpoint as long as it doesn't stretch implausibility too much.
BTW, I don't recall you commenting on the TL for a while, do you have any thoughts on my recent updates?
I'm actually in the process of rereading this entire timeline, because it started to get to the point where I was thinking "Wait, when did that happen?" several times an update, because I never refreshed my memory on the Popular Wars period when this timeline came back from hiatus (or at least I don't remember doing so).
I'm almost done with the Jacobin Wars.
Curious happenings in west Africa. Lots of different, opposing forces at work here. I might check out Jonathan's link as I'd love to learn more about western Africa. The continent as a whole seems to receive little attention outside of territory that can be claimed for colonial powers. Your description of Abu Nahda certainly makes it look like he's got a bright future ahead of him, even if that seems to end with him probably ending up something of a sin eater, as it were. Great progress begets even greater violence, or something like that.
Considering that we've got a guy, off the cuff of course, claiming the title of caliph for himself and another saying he's the Mahdi, this looks like it's seriously going to hurt Ottoman legitimacy in the future. The Sunni Muslim world is going to be a very interesting place in LttW, that's for sure.
If had to take a stab at what happens, I'd probably guess that the RAC will achieve something of a Pyrrhic victory against initial Fulani incursions while simultaneously trying to clamp down on Freedom Theology rabble rousers. Both will be beaten back, at least for a while, but the RAC will definitely have its nose bloodied, which starts the process of a (long?) decline in Company power in the region. Philip Lawrence will be the sacrificial lamb, so to speak, to London when it's all said and done.
Sooner or later, Abu Nahda, perhaps after licking his wounds in the initial defeat and efforts at consolidating his holdings, manages to inflict a series of increasing military defeats against the RAC, which ultimately culminates in their expulsion from the region. The issue of Gabriel Brown and his followers is a thornier one. On the one hand, they might survive as a rump Freedonia, surrounded on all sides. If not, then they might get absorbed into the Fulani state where Freedom Theology mixes with the Fulanis' branch of Islam and we have a large, rather strong African state that comes to despise the institution of slavery, perhaps.
How'd I do with that projection?
Considering that we've got a guy, off the cuff of course, claiming the title of caliph for himself and another saying he's the Mahdi, this looks like it's seriously going to hurt Ottoman legitimacy in the future. The Sunni Muslim world is going to be a very interesting place in LttW, that's for sure.
If had to take a stab at what happens, I'd probably guess that the RAC will achieve something of a Pyrrhic victory against initial Fulani incursions while simultaneously trying to clamp down on Freedom Theology rabble rousers. Both will be beaten back, at least for a while, but the RAC will definitely have its nose bloodied, which starts the process of a (long?) decline in Company power in the region. Philip Lawrence will be the sacrificial lamb, so to speak, to London when it's all said and done.
Sooner or later, Abu Nahda, perhaps after licking his wounds in the initial defeat and efforts at consolidating his holdings, manages to inflict a series of increasing military defeats against the RAC, which ultimately culminates in their expulsion from the region. The issue of Gabriel Brown and his followers is a thornier one. On the one hand, they might survive as a rump Freedonia, surrounded on all sides. If not, then they might get absorbed into the Fulani state where Freedom Theology mixes with the Fulanis' branch of Islam and we have a large, rather strong African state that comes to despise the institution of slavery, perhaps.
How'd I do with that projection?
Well, I have next to no idea what's going on in the latest update. My knowledge of that part of Africa (seriously, I don't even know WHICH PART OF AFRICA this is refferencing.) Is quite limited, plus I havn't heard of many of the places and peoples you reffer to. I need a map, more now then ever.
Have we ever had a comprehensive Africa map? I can recall strongly some lovely maps of south America, north America, Europe, Asia, even Australia, but no Africa IIRC.
Not much point in a comprehensive map? Its more sensible to treat West Africa and South & East Africa as separate units, like asking for a comprehensive Eurasia map, its not really the same theatres.
A Eurasian map would be nice to show the situation of Russia, though a world map would be even nicer.
I'm going to be cartographically conservative here and say that claims that many new maps are needed here are unfounded. A lot of the border and stuff on the ground are relatively unchanged from previous updates or even from OTL (in Africa, specifically) and the changes that have happened (Russian Eritrea, the Fulani Empire) are rudimentary enough that it doesn't make sense to make a map now, but rather wait for these developments to reach their peak of effect on the world stage. At that point, it would be necessary to be able to see political borders, but for now Thande's only really hinted at the future of the area.
Thande
Donor
We all do, but you get a different perspective when it's you who has to make them
New part below: some people may find constitutional stuff a bit dull, but personally I've been looking forward to writing this part for, sheesh, must be over a year now...
Thande
Donor
Part #157: The People’s Kingdom
“When entrusted with the reins of state power, each class will exercise them differently according to the different values they live their lives by.
The aristocrat sees a greater picture. He has a sense of history and a broader perspective on the future. He might have grown up in several estates owned by his family and owes no particular allegiance to any geographic place. His rivalries with others are based on individual personalities, not something defined by geographic proximity: his conflicts are fought in a conceptual, nebulous sphere such as hierarchy within a court or jockeying for position in the world of business. One could not predict by a mathematical model whom a given aristocrat might have a conflict with. But the aristocrat may also view his rivalry as a harmless chess game, while dismissing the fact that the ‘pawns’ he and his rival are playing with are real human beings for whom the war is terribly real.
The bourgeois naturally has narrower horizons, more focused on a particular region such as that mistakenly defined as a nation. Nonetheless his rivalries are also predominantly personal in nature: geographic proximity may come in, but expressed in a personal way, such as arguing with his neighbour over the precise position of the border between their properties. This, of course, is manifested on a broader and more terrible scale when the bourgeois is granted state power and transfers the rivalry to one between ‘nations’. The bourgeois also has a sense of history, but a narrower one, and is more willing to manipulate that history to favour his own short-term ends. However, he is also more open-minded than the aristocrat in that he is better able to appreciate the idea of new horizons being opened, and the world he sees not being all that exists: he is not used to living in the aristocrat’s static world. He often lets his rivalries simmer as bitter grudges rather than fighting them out in the open, but they can explode without warning.
The proletarian is focused on his own individual life, yet paradoxically his rivalries are predominantly communitarian in nature: he will reflexively identify with a category such as nation, family, race, region or even street in order to contest with another in order to establish an imaginary sense of ‘superiority’. The proletarian is focused on the ‘now’ and does not plan for the long-term future, indeed in one sense he does not perceive that a long-term future really exists. Because of this he often does not think through the consequences of his actions, and views every individual struggle as being world-changing, failing to realise that it is only one of many similar petty conflicts that happened prior to his birth. Being willing to fight hard for power, he is then all too eager to disclaim it and blame the other classes when something goes wrong. The best thing that can be said about him is that his very ignorance of history can also be turned to advantage—it can make him something of a tabula rasa when one seeks to sweep away the damaging old ideas of the past...”
*
From: “A Brief Constitutional History of the Hanoverian Realms” by Joseph P. Yaxley (1951)—
The Populist government of 1835-1840 arguably represented the biggest shake-up in the constitutional makeup of Great Britain since the Norman Conquest. Never before, not even in the days of Commonwealth and Protectorate or the First Glorious Revolution, had the country been so drastically changed. Under the unlikely leadership of Welsh former miner and revolutionary hero Llewelyn Thomas, the Kingdom of Great Britain would become the Kingdom of the Britons: a line had been drawn in the sand, and no matter what might come later, the voice of the people would never quite be silenced again. Too often our views of the resulting government have been coloured by late nineteenth century accounts which present it as a failed experiment we should be glad to see the back of, a latter-day Protectorate. History is written by the victors, and it is only with the reappraisal of the period with the dawn of Contrasanchezist and Diversitarian historical thinking in the twentieth century that we have come to recognise how important the Populists’ time in power was—and how much modern England still owes to it.
On taking power after the Tennis Court Vote and the sundering with the ‘Green Radicals’, the so-called ‘People’s Alliance’ was organised from most of the remainder of the candidates elected in the 1835 election that had originally been uncertainly classified as ‘Radicals’.[1] Llewelyn Thomas named a cabinet whose key members were his rival Peter Baker as Foreign Secretary and Richard Drawlight, a self-educated accountant from Southend-on-Sea, as Chancellor. The post of Home Secretary went to Edward ‘Ned’ Green of Gateshead, but (as he records in his letters) Green found himself sidelined compared to the other two holders of the Great Offices of State, as Thomas interfered in his department and seemed to view Green as merely deputising over Home affairs in his absence. This is indicative of the introversion of the Llewelyn Ministry, taking an isolationist approach to foreign affairs and only acting on them when they came knocking at the door of Downing House.[2] Conversely Llewelyn focused on Home affairs with a detail some would say bordered on micro-management and foreshadowed what was to come.
What was more shocking at the time was that Llewelyn left many former Cabinet positions vacant, dismissing the men that his predecessor David Thompson had appointed without providing any replacements. Sinecure offices such as the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster were left empty, while officers of the Royal Household were also not appointed. Thomas’ justification for this was “All men on the country’s paylist should have a real job, and let the King look after his own household”. This was actually yielding up a considerable part of influence that the House of Commons had gained over the years and casually returning control over these affairs to the monarch. Thomas and the Populists did not appear to see the relevance. A more cryptic justification for his actions he would give was ‘it is temporary’. The Populists were reluctant to throw around the words ‘state of emergency’ after John Churchill and his vile son had used them to justify any act of monstrosity, so the word ‘temporary’ swiftly became overused—as was noted in The Ringleader, which provided a bogus bingo board based on how often different Populist cabinet members used the word in speeches.
Nonetheless the impression that the Populist government put forward was that everything they were doing throughout the remainder of 1835 constituted a temporary stopgap measure, from a slapdash Budget to very short-term renewals of various laws about to expire. The reason for this became clear when, at the start of the new Parliamentary session in 1836, Thomas announced that the following year a Constitutional Convention would be called so that the country could be reformed under a new, written, constitution. “Britain has been burned to the ground by foreign invasion and domestic treachery: let us rebuild our kingdom according to our own wishes and needs, not according to the obsolete traditions that serve the interests only of those who have been weighed in the balance and found wanting”. Thomas’ announcement naturally became an uproar on the Opposition benches, with Wyndham’s New Tories and the Phoenix Party remnant both condemning it as a naked power grab. Thomas nonetheless assured them that the wishes of all would be taken into account and every part of the kingdom would be able to send dedicated delegates to the Convention which would take part as well as the current MPs. As a consequence of the Convention needing time to act, Thomas applied for the Triennial Act to be temporarily rescinded and the next election scheduled for five years after the last one (1840) rather than three (1838). This met with some opposition from diehard members of his own party who had called for annual parliaments in the past and were suspicious about any attempt to extend the time between elections. However, Thomas got his way, assuring them it would be a...of course...temporary measure.
The decision was made for the Convention to be held in Birmingham—ostensibly because of its central location, but in actuality the Populists had cleverly planned for mass meetings to be held in Sutton Park, where the newly completed memorial to the Sutton Massacre was prominently visible. By doing so, they ensured that the memory of the excesses of the Blandford regime were never far from the memory of those drawing up the Constitutional proposals. Wyndham, who was no fool, criticised this but was unable to get far.
The Constitutional Convention of 1837 is often said to have defined the ideological beliefs of the diverse and shaky Populist Party, but it is equally true to say that it defined those of what would become the Regressive Party, purely by their opposition. At the time, Wyndham’s group was still known as the ‘New Tories’, and although Wyndham was widely respected for his role in foiling the Bond Street Conspiracy, his party was viewed simply as the dregs of history by many. The handful of Whigs who had been elected in 1835 sided with Wyndham’s position of opposition to the very philosophy of calling a Constitutional Convention, and most of them went on to join with the New Tories. (Stephen Watson-Wentworth was an exception, sitting as an independent critic of the government and refusing to side with any party for the present). Wyndham gave several powerful speeches, both in Parliament and eventually at the Convention itself, arguing the very idea of the Convention was fundamentally illegitimate and restating the eighteenth-century reformist’s common saw that the Constitution of 1689 had been the perfect statute of government for Britain, and any problems that had arisen since then were due to deviating away from it. “I need not ask the people of the country what they think would be the best way to govern it, for we all already know.” Wyndham’s speeches were effective at winning over former Whigs but made little impression upon the masses. Thomas generally avoided criticising Wyndham directly, respecting the man after their partnership over the Bond Street Conspiracy, but did call out one of his points when Wyndham cautioned that holding a Convention so soon after Blandford’s reign of terror could lead to knee-jerk and paranoid biased attitudes being enshrined in the new Constitution. Thomas responded that the same was true of Wyndham’s beloved 1689 Constitution, pointing out that terror of Catholics in the wake of James II’s reign had led to the repressive restrictions that had taken over a century to repeal. Thomas was far from knowledgeable about history –this demonstrates that he clearly had excellent advisors.
The Constitution that eventually resulted from the Convention in 1838 and was finalised in 1839 was an eclectic one, borrowing somewhat from earlier ‘Green Radical’ reformist ideas but with a good portion of Populist common-touch thinking as well. Compared to the relatively timid reforms of the Fox government more than three decades before it was impossibly radical. The most important provisions of the British Constitution of 1839 are summarised below:
The Church of England was disestablished (as were the Churches of Scotland and Wales). All remaining remnants of the Test Acts were rescinded and religious discrimination was banned—or to be more accurate, ‘All citizens shall have full rights providing they attest to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, or belong to specifically exempted groups as described in clause 3...’ The wording was influenced by the fact that many Populists were Wesleyans or members of other evangelical groups who were suspicious of the deism or atheism of some among the bourgeois ‘Green Radicals’. However ‘clause 3’ was deliberately left open for the list of exempted groups (currently consisting of ‘Jews’) to be expanded in the future.
The powers of the Crown were more strictly delineated and defined (for which see more below).
The House of Lords was abolished—as, technically, was the House of Commons, although most scholars view the resulting institutions simply as a radical reform of the Commons. The Constitution created a new institution, formally called the House of Representatives but often simply called ‘The House of Members’ as its members were still commonly referred to as MPs. The old House of Commons had consisted of a mish-mash of different types of members, Knights of the Shire elected by counties as a whole and then Burgesses elected from particular boroughs carved out of those counties, and then a variety of different voting franchises used in those boroughs. The new House of Representatives was based chiefly on the Burgess system, getting rid of the Knights of the Shire and instead carving up the rural parts of the counties into large ‘county boroughs’. Radical new boundaries were drawn. Besides a few minor Foxite reforms such as granting borough status to new towns, in 1835 the boundaries defining the boroughs had not changed for centuries, and many cities had expanded to the point where many of their citizens were not eligible to vote in their elections because they did not live within the historic boundaries of the city. More importantly, though, the new boundaries were drawn based on a new philosophy of representative government. The Populists called for ‘one man, one vote, one representative’. Under the old system, a relatively small number of seats had elected only one MP, with two MPs being the norm. The new system standardised all seats as electing one MP each, officially because of Ned Green saying that ‘every man should have one name he can write to when he wishes to have his voice heard’, but actually because of a common perception that the double seat made it easier for substandard MPs to stay in power and for parties to pack the Commons. The latter point became less relevant in any case, as for the first time the Constitution called for seats to be made equal in population: even at the 1835 election with its universal male suffrage, seats had still varied in voting population by a ratio of more than 100 to 1. That universal male suffrage (with the age of majority, 21, as the requirement) was now enshrined into law as the norm. There was no provision for the new boundaries to be revised in the future with population changes, in part because attempts to introduce a Census were resisted by many Populists who viewed such things as a tool of oppressive governments like the Marleburgensian regime they had grown up under: such concerns would have to wait for the future. More controversially, the number of MPs was increased to ‘a thousand’ (as Thomas declared vaguely in a speech; the eventual exact number was 969) to allow representation to be more locally tied to a region. This coupled to the equal-population requirement meant that some MPs’ constituencies were geographically tiny pieces of the more densely populated cities, causing headaches for electoral geographers drawing election maps for the foreseeable future.
The Populists had intended for the new Parliament to be unicameral, with the House of Representatives as its sole chamber, but Wyndham earned a victory in this area by making speeches about the dangers of a single estate of government that could be easily subverted by one charismatic man. He used the National Legislative Assembly in France under Robespierre as an example, and also mentioned Bonaparte and the Grand-Parlement: “Monsieur Bonaparte was a good man, but imagine if he had had the same power with a more malign nature?” Wyndham achieved the rare feat of convincing many Populists of his point through his good choice of examples: a reflexive desire to do the opposite of whatever the French did ran through many of them. In accordance with this, a consultative upper house was re-created with around 500 members, which (as suggested by Wyndham) would be elected on a county basis, restoring some of the voice of the counties that the ‘piecemeal equal constituencies’ approach had silenced. A certain number of upper house representatives were assigned to each county based on population, ranging from 2 for Bedfordshire to 29 for mighty Yorkshire. The representatives were elected at-large across the county, initially by bloc vote but later by percentage representation.[3] The smallest counties in terms of population were combined with their neighbours for purpose of representation: Rutland with Lincolnshire, Westmorland with Cumberland, and so on. This process of consolidation was handled relatively well in England and Wales but often bungled in Scotland, which would have important consequences down the line. The name used for the members of the Upper House was much debated, with some calling for the name Senate but others arguing that that evoked the dusty establishmentarian offices of the old universities, and others suggesting neologisms that failed to catch on. In the end, the idea that the new upper house was the successor to the Knights of the Shire MPs—just as the House of Representatives was the successor to the Burgess MPs—led to it being dubbed, half-jokingly, the House of Knights.
The relative powers of the two houses were set as unequal from the start, with bills being initiated in the Representatives and then being amended and approved by the Knights before being sent back. The Knights were able to block bills, but their veto could be overridden by a two-thirds majority vote in the Representatives. The call for annual parliaments was heeded, with both houses being elected every year. It did not take a mind blessed with a great deal of foresight to see that this was a recipe for trouble, but that lay some years down the line.
The executive also became more formalised. For the first time, it was explicitly stated in constitutional law that the King devolved his own executive power to a Cabinet. The informal Cabinet was transformed into a Council of Government, superseding and obsoleting the old Privy Council of which the Cabinet had effectively been an informal subcommittee. The Populists spoke of a return to a more collegiate form of government but, inevitably, this did not last. They abolished the office of Prime Minister—ironically the bill doing so was the first time the term ‘Prime Minister’ had actually been used in law—and suggested that the new Council would be a group of equal ministers who would periodically rotate roles. However, this optimistic idea was soon quietly allowed to die away, in part due to Thomas’ own thirst for power but also because it was viewed as too risky, with the country still so fragile. The number of ministries was reduced and ‘rationalised’, with the position of Under-Secretary of State being replaced with that of ‘Deputy Minister’, explicitly intended to take over if the Minister was unavailable. The Treasury saw a particular overhaul, with the old committees of the Lords of the Treasury and the centuries-old title of Chancellor of the Exchequer being discarded in favour of the rather colourless title of Treasury Secretary. The supposedly-abolished office of Prime Minister was quietly brought back in the form of building up the former office of Lord President of the (Privy) Council, partly inspired by the way that title was used in the Empire of North America. However, the Populists naturally dropped the ‘Lord’, leaving the formal title of the head of government of the Kingdom of the Britons as ‘President of the Council of Government’. Naturally, many people continued to simply refer to the office as Prime Minister anyway.
With the Law Lords and Privy Council abolished, the judiciary naturally also needed restructuring. A new High Court of State was created in London to act as the last court of appeal. In a rather blasé manner, the Populists casually swept away centuries of Scotland’s independent legal system by establishing almost in a footnote that the new High Court also applied to Scotland. Although this was toned down after an outcry from the Scottish delegates to the Convention, it was nonetheless the chief reason why Donald Black and his colleagues David Urquhart and Andrew Napier walked out of the Populist Party and established their own group in Parliament—which would, of course, eventually become the Scottish Home Rule League and then the Scottish Parliamentary Party.
The new Constitution’s attitude to the armed forces was an example of what Wyndham had warned against, with many Populist delegates bitter about those soldiers who had supported the Blandford regime, even though many more had eventually rallied to their side. The original proposal advocated the capping of the size of the British Army at a tiny 50,000 in peacetime. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed when it was pointed out that the Army could scarcely expand rapidly enough in the event of war breaking out to be of any use. Instead the clause was amended to say that the Army was not permitted to have more than 50,000 troops in Great Britain at any time except by explicit authorisation by a two-thirds majority vote in the House of Representatives. The Army was also reorganised under a more directly appointed high command answering to the King via the War Secretary, and was for the first time given the title Royal Army. As was usually the case, the Royal Navy was seen more favourably and was not subject to the same measures: the armed forces swiftly came up with a crafty way of getting around the Constitution by simply converting excess Army regiments into ‘landborne Marines’ that were, on paper, a part of the Navy, but acted exactly as they had used to.
The memory of Blandford’s PSC browncoats led to the explicit banning in the Constitution of not only paramilitaries, but also any kind of nationally organised centralised police force. The Constitution did allow for police forces to be organised locally, but the consequences of the next paragraph meant that this did not happen until the local government reforms of the 1840s, leading to some parts of the People’s Kingdom being practically lawless and under the control of crime syndicates at times.
Easily the most criticised part of the Constitution was its approach to local government. Most municipal corporations in Britain had long possessed a reputation for ineffectiveness and corruption, usually being self-appointed and often seeking to gain influence or explicit power over the election of their city’s MPs, taking powers from the people. The Marleburgensian years had further seen them often painted as lickspittles of the regime: the Inglorious Revolution had seen Runnymede-sympathetic groups in some cities (such as Chester) actually overthrow and imprison their corporation government. The Populists had no sympathy for the local authorities. However, rather than reform them, they simply abolished them all and did not replace them with anything. Green argued that the increased number of MPs coupled to the higher speed of communication with the Optel system meant that ‘all politics was now local’, but this prediction failed. The collapse of formalised local government—often providing a power vacuum for criminals and local strongmen to seize power—is rightly seen as the biggest failing of the Populists’ time in power.
The general philosophy of the Constitution has been characterised by the term ‘Separation of Crown and State’, but it is important to realise that this was coined sardonically by John Greville, a man who had no sympathy with the Populists. Indeed, the Crown was the one part of the former constitution that actually gained powers under the new one, with the King’s executive override explicitly being acknowledge (though with the unspoken understanding that he would not use it) and the King often being invoked as a stand-in for many offices that the Populists abolished, effectively regaining their powers. A better description would be ‘Separation of Establishment and State’, but that admittedly scarcely rolls off the tongue. Older radical ideologies had had the notion of overthrowing (for example) the House of Lords and executing its members—the Populist approach was more subtle. “If a group of old men who happen to be descended from Norman conquerors want to meet in a big hall and ramble about how the country is going to the dogs, let them do so, but they will have to find their own hall,” as Peter Baker quipped. Few institutions were explicitly abolished by the Constitution, they simply had their powers removed. Nowhere else is this more evident than in the Populist approach to the peerage: “if a man wants to call himself Lord Somebody, let him, but in the knowledge that nobody else is obliged to call him that,” to quote Baker again. Knighthoods survived but were renamed Royal Orders of Commendation (ROCs); ‘Sir’ gradually became less synonymous with ‘knight’ due to the latter term being taken up by the House of Knights, whose members had the suffix KS (Knight of the Shire) rather than a prefix. As a consequence of the decline of the peerage as a measure of authority or prestige, though peerages still formally existed, men typically avoided using noble titles as their given form of address: something which has even reached backwards through time in some historical texts. Stephen Watson-Wentworth is largely held up as an early example of this in how he avoided using the title Marquess of Rockingham after 1839, although it can be argued that this was also to distance himself from his illustrious ancestor and to make a name for himself.
Much blasted by criticism, the Constitution was nonetheless completed and enacted in 1839, with the first election to be held under the new rules coming in 1840. Despite opposition from many quarters, the heroic surgery on Great Britain was successful and the patient survived. For better or for worse, that remains a triumph to be proud of...
*
From: “A History of Political Ideology” by George Grey (1967)—
The date of the founding of the Regressive Party is generally given as April 1839, the date of a speech given by William Wyndham which is known to history as ‘The Way Back’. In reality of course the party label was not formalised until the stricter election procedures came in the following year, and it had already existed as an informal group for some time, with many Whigs joining the New Tories in opposition to the new Constitution. However, it is as good a marker as any, for ‘The Way Back’ certainly summarised and defined the philosophy of the new party. The speech was made in Norwich, a city strongly opposed to the new Constitution due to currently possessing an unusually effective and elected municipal corporation, but was circulated throughout the kingdom by Optel.
Wyndham was not an unintelligent man but it is not questioned that he had assistance with the speech, not only in its style but in its content. Wyndham’s views, at the time at least, were not so sophisticated as those expressed in the speech, though later on he came to be partially convinced by it himself. At the time, though, he was simply saying what he thought would be better received, with the country in its present mood, than his own views—which really were the simple ‘Things were much better in my grandfather’s day’ nostalgia that the Populists accused him of. The fact that the Regressive Party was successful is a measure of how much the Way Back speech was able to redefine its message beyond such platitudes.
Wyndham spoke of the new Constitution and asked the rhetorical question of whether the party was expected to block it, and any other change to the status quo, at every turn. “No! The status quo is a gross and degraded situation, the end result of years of bitter conflict and mismanagement. I do not disagree with Mr. Thomas’ friends that change is needed: the disagreement concerns precisely what form that change should take.”
The next part of the speech is undoubtedly the most important and the metaphor that has stayed with people for generations. “There is no doubt in my mind that the state of our country in the year 1789 was infinitely superior to that which we see now.” (Wyndham presumably chose 1789 because it was a neat 50 years before the present rather than referring to any specific event). “Some may disagree, but I would wager that if they were transported by divine vagary to that era they would come to see that I am correct, regardless of their station or place in life. Alas, we cannot rely on such a miracle: we must return to that superior state through our own hard toil in transforming the country. Yet there are some who question why we do not simply call for every law passed since 1789 to be reversed. That would be foolishness.
“Imagine, if you will, that you live in a fine house perched on the edge of a cliff in some mountainous region. One day, while taking a stroll, you are blown over the edge by a malicious gust of wind, hurt yourself grievously as you tumble over the rocks, and land in a ditch at the bottom of the cliff. As you lie there, aching but clinging to life, you remember the cosy house with the kettle above the fire and the hot meal ready on the stove, your bookcases and your writing-desk, and you think how much you want to be back in that house. So do you think ‘I came to be here by falling down that cliff: I should get back by retracing my steps, climbing with my wounded body up those treacherous rocks until I reach my house? NO! That would be foolishness!
“Instead, you would look for a new path, a more gentle path that will take you back to your house in easy stages up the cliff without going through any of the travails or violence you suffered in your fall from it. It may be a more indirect path. It will be new, it will be a path you have not seen before, for you have never had need to look for it. Many of the places you pass along the path may seem unfamiliar and strange. But it will take you back to your former hallowed state in the end, and as you patch your wounds before your crackling fire and sip from your hot cup of tea, you will be glad that you took it.”
The “Way Back” speech has been placed in the top five most influential speeches in British history by many historians, and as well as defining the ideology of Regressivism, it undoubtedly paved the way for Blue-Gold Cythereanism...
[1] See Part #148.
[2] The residence of the Prime Minister since the rebuilding of Whitehall as ‘Whitehall Forum’ in the 1810s as part of the reconstruction of London.
[3] ‘Percentage representation’ is the term used in TTL for proportional representation, usually a form analogous to OTL’s Single Transferable Vote.
“When entrusted with the reins of state power, each class will exercise them differently according to the different values they live their lives by.
The aristocrat sees a greater picture. He has a sense of history and a broader perspective on the future. He might have grown up in several estates owned by his family and owes no particular allegiance to any geographic place. His rivalries with others are based on individual personalities, not something defined by geographic proximity: his conflicts are fought in a conceptual, nebulous sphere such as hierarchy within a court or jockeying for position in the world of business. One could not predict by a mathematical model whom a given aristocrat might have a conflict with. But the aristocrat may also view his rivalry as a harmless chess game, while dismissing the fact that the ‘pawns’ he and his rival are playing with are real human beings for whom the war is terribly real.
The bourgeois naturally has narrower horizons, more focused on a particular region such as that mistakenly defined as a nation. Nonetheless his rivalries are also predominantly personal in nature: geographic proximity may come in, but expressed in a personal way, such as arguing with his neighbour over the precise position of the border between their properties. This, of course, is manifested on a broader and more terrible scale when the bourgeois is granted state power and transfers the rivalry to one between ‘nations’. The bourgeois also has a sense of history, but a narrower one, and is more willing to manipulate that history to favour his own short-term ends. However, he is also more open-minded than the aristocrat in that he is better able to appreciate the idea of new horizons being opened, and the world he sees not being all that exists: he is not used to living in the aristocrat’s static world. He often lets his rivalries simmer as bitter grudges rather than fighting them out in the open, but they can explode without warning.
The proletarian is focused on his own individual life, yet paradoxically his rivalries are predominantly communitarian in nature: he will reflexively identify with a category such as nation, family, race, region or even street in order to contest with another in order to establish an imaginary sense of ‘superiority’. The proletarian is focused on the ‘now’ and does not plan for the long-term future, indeed in one sense he does not perceive that a long-term future really exists. Because of this he often does not think through the consequences of his actions, and views every individual struggle as being world-changing, failing to realise that it is only one of many similar petty conflicts that happened prior to his birth. Being willing to fight hard for power, he is then all too eager to disclaim it and blame the other classes when something goes wrong. The best thing that can be said about him is that his very ignorance of history can also be turned to advantage—it can make him something of a tabula rasa when one seeks to sweep away the damaging old ideas of the past...”
–Pablo Sanchez, Unity Through Society (1841)
*
From: “A Brief Constitutional History of the Hanoverian Realms” by Joseph P. Yaxley (1951)—
The Populist government of 1835-1840 arguably represented the biggest shake-up in the constitutional makeup of Great Britain since the Norman Conquest. Never before, not even in the days of Commonwealth and Protectorate or the First Glorious Revolution, had the country been so drastically changed. Under the unlikely leadership of Welsh former miner and revolutionary hero Llewelyn Thomas, the Kingdom of Great Britain would become the Kingdom of the Britons: a line had been drawn in the sand, and no matter what might come later, the voice of the people would never quite be silenced again. Too often our views of the resulting government have been coloured by late nineteenth century accounts which present it as a failed experiment we should be glad to see the back of, a latter-day Protectorate. History is written by the victors, and it is only with the reappraisal of the period with the dawn of Contrasanchezist and Diversitarian historical thinking in the twentieth century that we have come to recognise how important the Populists’ time in power was—and how much modern England still owes to it.
On taking power after the Tennis Court Vote and the sundering with the ‘Green Radicals’, the so-called ‘People’s Alliance’ was organised from most of the remainder of the candidates elected in the 1835 election that had originally been uncertainly classified as ‘Radicals’.[1] Llewelyn Thomas named a cabinet whose key members were his rival Peter Baker as Foreign Secretary and Richard Drawlight, a self-educated accountant from Southend-on-Sea, as Chancellor. The post of Home Secretary went to Edward ‘Ned’ Green of Gateshead, but (as he records in his letters) Green found himself sidelined compared to the other two holders of the Great Offices of State, as Thomas interfered in his department and seemed to view Green as merely deputising over Home affairs in his absence. This is indicative of the introversion of the Llewelyn Ministry, taking an isolationist approach to foreign affairs and only acting on them when they came knocking at the door of Downing House.[2] Conversely Llewelyn focused on Home affairs with a detail some would say bordered on micro-management and foreshadowed what was to come.
What was more shocking at the time was that Llewelyn left many former Cabinet positions vacant, dismissing the men that his predecessor David Thompson had appointed without providing any replacements. Sinecure offices such as the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster were left empty, while officers of the Royal Household were also not appointed. Thomas’ justification for this was “All men on the country’s paylist should have a real job, and let the King look after his own household”. This was actually yielding up a considerable part of influence that the House of Commons had gained over the years and casually returning control over these affairs to the monarch. Thomas and the Populists did not appear to see the relevance. A more cryptic justification for his actions he would give was ‘it is temporary’. The Populists were reluctant to throw around the words ‘state of emergency’ after John Churchill and his vile son had used them to justify any act of monstrosity, so the word ‘temporary’ swiftly became overused—as was noted in The Ringleader, which provided a bogus bingo board based on how often different Populist cabinet members used the word in speeches.
Nonetheless the impression that the Populist government put forward was that everything they were doing throughout the remainder of 1835 constituted a temporary stopgap measure, from a slapdash Budget to very short-term renewals of various laws about to expire. The reason for this became clear when, at the start of the new Parliamentary session in 1836, Thomas announced that the following year a Constitutional Convention would be called so that the country could be reformed under a new, written, constitution. “Britain has been burned to the ground by foreign invasion and domestic treachery: let us rebuild our kingdom according to our own wishes and needs, not according to the obsolete traditions that serve the interests only of those who have been weighed in the balance and found wanting”. Thomas’ announcement naturally became an uproar on the Opposition benches, with Wyndham’s New Tories and the Phoenix Party remnant both condemning it as a naked power grab. Thomas nonetheless assured them that the wishes of all would be taken into account and every part of the kingdom would be able to send dedicated delegates to the Convention which would take part as well as the current MPs. As a consequence of the Convention needing time to act, Thomas applied for the Triennial Act to be temporarily rescinded and the next election scheduled for five years after the last one (1840) rather than three (1838). This met with some opposition from diehard members of his own party who had called for annual parliaments in the past and were suspicious about any attempt to extend the time between elections. However, Thomas got his way, assuring them it would be a...of course...temporary measure.
The decision was made for the Convention to be held in Birmingham—ostensibly because of its central location, but in actuality the Populists had cleverly planned for mass meetings to be held in Sutton Park, where the newly completed memorial to the Sutton Massacre was prominently visible. By doing so, they ensured that the memory of the excesses of the Blandford regime were never far from the memory of those drawing up the Constitutional proposals. Wyndham, who was no fool, criticised this but was unable to get far.
The Constitutional Convention of 1837 is often said to have defined the ideological beliefs of the diverse and shaky Populist Party, but it is equally true to say that it defined those of what would become the Regressive Party, purely by their opposition. At the time, Wyndham’s group was still known as the ‘New Tories’, and although Wyndham was widely respected for his role in foiling the Bond Street Conspiracy, his party was viewed simply as the dregs of history by many. The handful of Whigs who had been elected in 1835 sided with Wyndham’s position of opposition to the very philosophy of calling a Constitutional Convention, and most of them went on to join with the New Tories. (Stephen Watson-Wentworth was an exception, sitting as an independent critic of the government and refusing to side with any party for the present). Wyndham gave several powerful speeches, both in Parliament and eventually at the Convention itself, arguing the very idea of the Convention was fundamentally illegitimate and restating the eighteenth-century reformist’s common saw that the Constitution of 1689 had been the perfect statute of government for Britain, and any problems that had arisen since then were due to deviating away from it. “I need not ask the people of the country what they think would be the best way to govern it, for we all already know.” Wyndham’s speeches were effective at winning over former Whigs but made little impression upon the masses. Thomas generally avoided criticising Wyndham directly, respecting the man after their partnership over the Bond Street Conspiracy, but did call out one of his points when Wyndham cautioned that holding a Convention so soon after Blandford’s reign of terror could lead to knee-jerk and paranoid biased attitudes being enshrined in the new Constitution. Thomas responded that the same was true of Wyndham’s beloved 1689 Constitution, pointing out that terror of Catholics in the wake of James II’s reign had led to the repressive restrictions that had taken over a century to repeal. Thomas was far from knowledgeable about history –this demonstrates that he clearly had excellent advisors.
The Constitution that eventually resulted from the Convention in 1838 and was finalised in 1839 was an eclectic one, borrowing somewhat from earlier ‘Green Radical’ reformist ideas but with a good portion of Populist common-touch thinking as well. Compared to the relatively timid reforms of the Fox government more than three decades before it was impossibly radical. The most important provisions of the British Constitution of 1839 are summarised below:
The Church of England was disestablished (as were the Churches of Scotland and Wales). All remaining remnants of the Test Acts were rescinded and religious discrimination was banned—or to be more accurate, ‘All citizens shall have full rights providing they attest to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, or belong to specifically exempted groups as described in clause 3...’ The wording was influenced by the fact that many Populists were Wesleyans or members of other evangelical groups who were suspicious of the deism or atheism of some among the bourgeois ‘Green Radicals’. However ‘clause 3’ was deliberately left open for the list of exempted groups (currently consisting of ‘Jews’) to be expanded in the future.
The powers of the Crown were more strictly delineated and defined (for which see more below).
The House of Lords was abolished—as, technically, was the House of Commons, although most scholars view the resulting institutions simply as a radical reform of the Commons. The Constitution created a new institution, formally called the House of Representatives but often simply called ‘The House of Members’ as its members were still commonly referred to as MPs. The old House of Commons had consisted of a mish-mash of different types of members, Knights of the Shire elected by counties as a whole and then Burgesses elected from particular boroughs carved out of those counties, and then a variety of different voting franchises used in those boroughs. The new House of Representatives was based chiefly on the Burgess system, getting rid of the Knights of the Shire and instead carving up the rural parts of the counties into large ‘county boroughs’. Radical new boundaries were drawn. Besides a few minor Foxite reforms such as granting borough status to new towns, in 1835 the boundaries defining the boroughs had not changed for centuries, and many cities had expanded to the point where many of their citizens were not eligible to vote in their elections because they did not live within the historic boundaries of the city. More importantly, though, the new boundaries were drawn based on a new philosophy of representative government. The Populists called for ‘one man, one vote, one representative’. Under the old system, a relatively small number of seats had elected only one MP, with two MPs being the norm. The new system standardised all seats as electing one MP each, officially because of Ned Green saying that ‘every man should have one name he can write to when he wishes to have his voice heard’, but actually because of a common perception that the double seat made it easier for substandard MPs to stay in power and for parties to pack the Commons. The latter point became less relevant in any case, as for the first time the Constitution called for seats to be made equal in population: even at the 1835 election with its universal male suffrage, seats had still varied in voting population by a ratio of more than 100 to 1. That universal male suffrage (with the age of majority, 21, as the requirement) was now enshrined into law as the norm. There was no provision for the new boundaries to be revised in the future with population changes, in part because attempts to introduce a Census were resisted by many Populists who viewed such things as a tool of oppressive governments like the Marleburgensian regime they had grown up under: such concerns would have to wait for the future. More controversially, the number of MPs was increased to ‘a thousand’ (as Thomas declared vaguely in a speech; the eventual exact number was 969) to allow representation to be more locally tied to a region. This coupled to the equal-population requirement meant that some MPs’ constituencies were geographically tiny pieces of the more densely populated cities, causing headaches for electoral geographers drawing election maps for the foreseeable future.
The Populists had intended for the new Parliament to be unicameral, with the House of Representatives as its sole chamber, but Wyndham earned a victory in this area by making speeches about the dangers of a single estate of government that could be easily subverted by one charismatic man. He used the National Legislative Assembly in France under Robespierre as an example, and also mentioned Bonaparte and the Grand-Parlement: “Monsieur Bonaparte was a good man, but imagine if he had had the same power with a more malign nature?” Wyndham achieved the rare feat of convincing many Populists of his point through his good choice of examples: a reflexive desire to do the opposite of whatever the French did ran through many of them. In accordance with this, a consultative upper house was re-created with around 500 members, which (as suggested by Wyndham) would be elected on a county basis, restoring some of the voice of the counties that the ‘piecemeal equal constituencies’ approach had silenced. A certain number of upper house representatives were assigned to each county based on population, ranging from 2 for Bedfordshire to 29 for mighty Yorkshire. The representatives were elected at-large across the county, initially by bloc vote but later by percentage representation.[3] The smallest counties in terms of population were combined with their neighbours for purpose of representation: Rutland with Lincolnshire, Westmorland with Cumberland, and so on. This process of consolidation was handled relatively well in England and Wales but often bungled in Scotland, which would have important consequences down the line. The name used for the members of the Upper House was much debated, with some calling for the name Senate but others arguing that that evoked the dusty establishmentarian offices of the old universities, and others suggesting neologisms that failed to catch on. In the end, the idea that the new upper house was the successor to the Knights of the Shire MPs—just as the House of Representatives was the successor to the Burgess MPs—led to it being dubbed, half-jokingly, the House of Knights.
The relative powers of the two houses were set as unequal from the start, with bills being initiated in the Representatives and then being amended and approved by the Knights before being sent back. The Knights were able to block bills, but their veto could be overridden by a two-thirds majority vote in the Representatives. The call for annual parliaments was heeded, with both houses being elected every year. It did not take a mind blessed with a great deal of foresight to see that this was a recipe for trouble, but that lay some years down the line.
The executive also became more formalised. For the first time, it was explicitly stated in constitutional law that the King devolved his own executive power to a Cabinet. The informal Cabinet was transformed into a Council of Government, superseding and obsoleting the old Privy Council of which the Cabinet had effectively been an informal subcommittee. The Populists spoke of a return to a more collegiate form of government but, inevitably, this did not last. They abolished the office of Prime Minister—ironically the bill doing so was the first time the term ‘Prime Minister’ had actually been used in law—and suggested that the new Council would be a group of equal ministers who would periodically rotate roles. However, this optimistic idea was soon quietly allowed to die away, in part due to Thomas’ own thirst for power but also because it was viewed as too risky, with the country still so fragile. The number of ministries was reduced and ‘rationalised’, with the position of Under-Secretary of State being replaced with that of ‘Deputy Minister’, explicitly intended to take over if the Minister was unavailable. The Treasury saw a particular overhaul, with the old committees of the Lords of the Treasury and the centuries-old title of Chancellor of the Exchequer being discarded in favour of the rather colourless title of Treasury Secretary. The supposedly-abolished office of Prime Minister was quietly brought back in the form of building up the former office of Lord President of the (Privy) Council, partly inspired by the way that title was used in the Empire of North America. However, the Populists naturally dropped the ‘Lord’, leaving the formal title of the head of government of the Kingdom of the Britons as ‘President of the Council of Government’. Naturally, many people continued to simply refer to the office as Prime Minister anyway.
With the Law Lords and Privy Council abolished, the judiciary naturally also needed restructuring. A new High Court of State was created in London to act as the last court of appeal. In a rather blasé manner, the Populists casually swept away centuries of Scotland’s independent legal system by establishing almost in a footnote that the new High Court also applied to Scotland. Although this was toned down after an outcry from the Scottish delegates to the Convention, it was nonetheless the chief reason why Donald Black and his colleagues David Urquhart and Andrew Napier walked out of the Populist Party and established their own group in Parliament—which would, of course, eventually become the Scottish Home Rule League and then the Scottish Parliamentary Party.
The new Constitution’s attitude to the armed forces was an example of what Wyndham had warned against, with many Populist delegates bitter about those soldiers who had supported the Blandford regime, even though many more had eventually rallied to their side. The original proposal advocated the capping of the size of the British Army at a tiny 50,000 in peacetime. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed when it was pointed out that the Army could scarcely expand rapidly enough in the event of war breaking out to be of any use. Instead the clause was amended to say that the Army was not permitted to have more than 50,000 troops in Great Britain at any time except by explicit authorisation by a two-thirds majority vote in the House of Representatives. The Army was also reorganised under a more directly appointed high command answering to the King via the War Secretary, and was for the first time given the title Royal Army. As was usually the case, the Royal Navy was seen more favourably and was not subject to the same measures: the armed forces swiftly came up with a crafty way of getting around the Constitution by simply converting excess Army regiments into ‘landborne Marines’ that were, on paper, a part of the Navy, but acted exactly as they had used to.
The memory of Blandford’s PSC browncoats led to the explicit banning in the Constitution of not only paramilitaries, but also any kind of nationally organised centralised police force. The Constitution did allow for police forces to be organised locally, but the consequences of the next paragraph meant that this did not happen until the local government reforms of the 1840s, leading to some parts of the People’s Kingdom being practically lawless and under the control of crime syndicates at times.
Easily the most criticised part of the Constitution was its approach to local government. Most municipal corporations in Britain had long possessed a reputation for ineffectiveness and corruption, usually being self-appointed and often seeking to gain influence or explicit power over the election of their city’s MPs, taking powers from the people. The Marleburgensian years had further seen them often painted as lickspittles of the regime: the Inglorious Revolution had seen Runnymede-sympathetic groups in some cities (such as Chester) actually overthrow and imprison their corporation government. The Populists had no sympathy for the local authorities. However, rather than reform them, they simply abolished them all and did not replace them with anything. Green argued that the increased number of MPs coupled to the higher speed of communication with the Optel system meant that ‘all politics was now local’, but this prediction failed. The collapse of formalised local government—often providing a power vacuum for criminals and local strongmen to seize power—is rightly seen as the biggest failing of the Populists’ time in power.
The general philosophy of the Constitution has been characterised by the term ‘Separation of Crown and State’, but it is important to realise that this was coined sardonically by John Greville, a man who had no sympathy with the Populists. Indeed, the Crown was the one part of the former constitution that actually gained powers under the new one, with the King’s executive override explicitly being acknowledge (though with the unspoken understanding that he would not use it) and the King often being invoked as a stand-in for many offices that the Populists abolished, effectively regaining their powers. A better description would be ‘Separation of Establishment and State’, but that admittedly scarcely rolls off the tongue. Older radical ideologies had had the notion of overthrowing (for example) the House of Lords and executing its members—the Populist approach was more subtle. “If a group of old men who happen to be descended from Norman conquerors want to meet in a big hall and ramble about how the country is going to the dogs, let them do so, but they will have to find their own hall,” as Peter Baker quipped. Few institutions were explicitly abolished by the Constitution, they simply had their powers removed. Nowhere else is this more evident than in the Populist approach to the peerage: “if a man wants to call himself Lord Somebody, let him, but in the knowledge that nobody else is obliged to call him that,” to quote Baker again. Knighthoods survived but were renamed Royal Orders of Commendation (ROCs); ‘Sir’ gradually became less synonymous with ‘knight’ due to the latter term being taken up by the House of Knights, whose members had the suffix KS (Knight of the Shire) rather than a prefix. As a consequence of the decline of the peerage as a measure of authority or prestige, though peerages still formally existed, men typically avoided using noble titles as their given form of address: something which has even reached backwards through time in some historical texts. Stephen Watson-Wentworth is largely held up as an early example of this in how he avoided using the title Marquess of Rockingham after 1839, although it can be argued that this was also to distance himself from his illustrious ancestor and to make a name for himself.
Much blasted by criticism, the Constitution was nonetheless completed and enacted in 1839, with the first election to be held under the new rules coming in 1840. Despite opposition from many quarters, the heroic surgery on Great Britain was successful and the patient survived. For better or for worse, that remains a triumph to be proud of...
*
From: “A History of Political Ideology” by George Grey (1967)—
The date of the founding of the Regressive Party is generally given as April 1839, the date of a speech given by William Wyndham which is known to history as ‘The Way Back’. In reality of course the party label was not formalised until the stricter election procedures came in the following year, and it had already existed as an informal group for some time, with many Whigs joining the New Tories in opposition to the new Constitution. However, it is as good a marker as any, for ‘The Way Back’ certainly summarised and defined the philosophy of the new party. The speech was made in Norwich, a city strongly opposed to the new Constitution due to currently possessing an unusually effective and elected municipal corporation, but was circulated throughout the kingdom by Optel.
Wyndham was not an unintelligent man but it is not questioned that he had assistance with the speech, not only in its style but in its content. Wyndham’s views, at the time at least, were not so sophisticated as those expressed in the speech, though later on he came to be partially convinced by it himself. At the time, though, he was simply saying what he thought would be better received, with the country in its present mood, than his own views—which really were the simple ‘Things were much better in my grandfather’s day’ nostalgia that the Populists accused him of. The fact that the Regressive Party was successful is a measure of how much the Way Back speech was able to redefine its message beyond such platitudes.
Wyndham spoke of the new Constitution and asked the rhetorical question of whether the party was expected to block it, and any other change to the status quo, at every turn. “No! The status quo is a gross and degraded situation, the end result of years of bitter conflict and mismanagement. I do not disagree with Mr. Thomas’ friends that change is needed: the disagreement concerns precisely what form that change should take.”
The next part of the speech is undoubtedly the most important and the metaphor that has stayed with people for generations. “There is no doubt in my mind that the state of our country in the year 1789 was infinitely superior to that which we see now.” (Wyndham presumably chose 1789 because it was a neat 50 years before the present rather than referring to any specific event). “Some may disagree, but I would wager that if they were transported by divine vagary to that era they would come to see that I am correct, regardless of their station or place in life. Alas, we cannot rely on such a miracle: we must return to that superior state through our own hard toil in transforming the country. Yet there are some who question why we do not simply call for every law passed since 1789 to be reversed. That would be foolishness.
“Imagine, if you will, that you live in a fine house perched on the edge of a cliff in some mountainous region. One day, while taking a stroll, you are blown over the edge by a malicious gust of wind, hurt yourself grievously as you tumble over the rocks, and land in a ditch at the bottom of the cliff. As you lie there, aching but clinging to life, you remember the cosy house with the kettle above the fire and the hot meal ready on the stove, your bookcases and your writing-desk, and you think how much you want to be back in that house. So do you think ‘I came to be here by falling down that cliff: I should get back by retracing my steps, climbing with my wounded body up those treacherous rocks until I reach my house? NO! That would be foolishness!
“Instead, you would look for a new path, a more gentle path that will take you back to your house in easy stages up the cliff without going through any of the travails or violence you suffered in your fall from it. It may be a more indirect path. It will be new, it will be a path you have not seen before, for you have never had need to look for it. Many of the places you pass along the path may seem unfamiliar and strange. But it will take you back to your former hallowed state in the end, and as you patch your wounds before your crackling fire and sip from your hot cup of tea, you will be glad that you took it.”
The “Way Back” speech has been placed in the top five most influential speeches in British history by many historians, and as well as defining the ideology of Regressivism, it undoubtedly paved the way for Blue-Gold Cythereanism...
[1] See Part #148.
[2] The residence of the Prime Minister since the rebuilding of Whitehall as ‘Whitehall Forum’ in the 1810s as part of the reconstruction of London.
[3] ‘Percentage representation’ is the term used in TTL for proportional representation, usually a form analogous to OTL’s Single Transferable Vote.
It sounds like the Populists have taken many American ideas of government (both OTL and TTL), from the elected House of Members and whole-county representing Knights to a President and a single High Court.
Fascinating read, Thande. Your work keeps skyrocketing up in terms of amazing us all.
Fascinating read, Thande. Your work keeps skyrocketing up in terms of amazing us all.
Alex Richards
Donor
There's an absolutely wonderful mix of ironies and awesomeness in that.
Scotland goes the Way of Mann. I doubt that will last.
Also, 969 MPs? By god that's one unwieldy parliament. I was going to ask for a constituency map when you first mentioned they were redrawing them, but I think I'll stick to just requesting a House of Knights county apportionment map (the Scottish situation is one where I'm trying to work matters out. Ross+Cromaty is pretty obvious, and there's probably some mergers in the North-East and borders, but anything which elimates all exclaves is going to lead to some monstrously huge counties in terms of population).
Scotland goes the Way of Mann. I doubt that will last.
Also, 969 MPs? By god that's one unwieldy parliament. I was going to ask for a constituency map when you first mentioned they were redrawing them, but I think I'll stick to just requesting a House of Knights county apportionment map (the Scottish situation is one where I'm trying to work matters out. Ross+Cromaty is pretty obvious, and there's probably some mergers in the North-East and borders, but anything which elimates all exclaves is going to lead to some monstrously huge counties in terms of population).
It's interesting to note some of the Sanchezist views you've mentioned previously seeping through in the text, particularly Yaxley's rather harsh comments about Llewelyn Thomas even as he describes his time in power as being so important.
On the whole, a really fascinating update - and, as Alex mentioned, some delightful ironies. I liked the shout-out to your observation that we Brits always refer to everything (such as the Head of Government) by its previous name, or preferably the one before that, or even the one that wasn't even the proper one...
On the whole, a really fascinating update - and, as Alex mentioned, some delightful ironies. I liked the shout-out to your observation that we Brits always refer to everything (such as the Head of Government) by its previous name, or preferably the one before that, or even the one that wasn't even the proper one...
I usually don't "get" the parliamentary updates, but this one was fascinating.
I liked the introduction of more depth to Sanchezist thought in the intro. I like how Sanchez isn't completely bashful of the lower classes; at best, they have qualities the aristocracy doesn't, at worst, they're useful tools. I expected some of the latter sentiment, but it's still a bit of a relief to portray a more balanced ideology that (I assume) later gets warped to its extreme.
I liked the introduction of more depth to Sanchezist thought in the intro. I like how Sanchez isn't completely bashful of the lower classes; at best, they have qualities the aristocracy doesn't, at worst, they're useful tools. I expected some of the latter sentiment, but it's still a bit of a relief to portray a more balanced ideology that (I assume) later gets warped to its extreme.
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