The Anglo-Saxon Social Model

Just caught up, I love the outbreak of hostilities you've charted. There's something very grounded in the mistakes made by all involved that causes the war to ignite and spiral out of control.

The Entente thinks they have Germany cordoned off - their information is wrong and past abrasiveness costs them support.

The USSR drastically miscalculates on the consequences of supporting Germany.

If Germany wanted to avoid a general war, they shouldn't have pulled the same stunt people pulled in WW1 - making defensive alliances secret and thus a nonfactor in deterrence.

Thanks, that means a lot
 
Keynes forcefully argued that the overarching reason why financial crises occur is trade imbalances between nations. Countries that accumulate large debts often did so as a result of a trade deficit with other countries, meaning that, as their debts become bigger, it becomes harder for them to generate trade surpluses. This, in turn, creates a class of debtor nations trapped in a state of low development and debt that threatens the entire economic system with periodic crises. In practice, there is very little that debtor nations can do in response to this, reliant as they are on the goodwill of creditor nations.

That seems like a stretch, knowing where crises seem to come from historically. They basically never come from the developing side.

Anyway, good update. There's some hope the integrated global system can avoid the consequences of a drawn out cold war, maybe?
 
The World War, 1945
The End of the Old World: The World War, 1945
VE.jpg Mountbatten.jpg Beijing.jpg
Left to right: Bernard Montgomery reviewing the German instrument of surrender before signature, April 1945; Supreme Commander Mountbatten receives the salute aboard his flagship following the recapture of Manila, March 1945; Beijing the morning after a USAF air raid, June 1945.


In February 1945, Soviet, British and US leaders met for the Cairo Conference. They made general agreements regarding the occupation of post-war Germany, reached a collective understanding on the future of postwar China and agreed when the Soviet Union would join the war in the Far East.

Later that month, Soviet forces entered Silesia and Pomerania, while in March the Anglo-American forces crossed the Ruhr and closed in on the Rhine. In an attempt to protect its last oil reserves, Germany launched an offensive in Hungary that was repulsed by the Soviets, who captured Vienna two months later. In late February 1945, the newly arrived Brazilian Division lead the charge in Asia Minor, finally breaking through the Malatya Line and allowing the Allies to break out of Cappadocia and Armenia and advance towards Ankara. The Allies’ final offensive in Turkey commenced on 9 April with massive aerial bombardments. Kayseri was captured on 18 April, followed by Konya three days later. On 23 April, the Allies reached Ankara and, two days later, the Turkish government agreed to their own unconditional surrender.

In early April, Soviet troops captured Konigsberg, while the American and Commonwealth forces swept across western Germany, capturing Hamburg and Nuremberg. American and Soviet soldiers met at the Elbe river on 25 April. At the same time, Soviet forces had arrived outside Berlin. Preferring to surrender to the Western Allies, the German government abandoned the city and began a headlong rush towards the Anglo-American lines. The bedraggled remains of Goerdeler’s government arrived in Hamburg on 28 April, where they found Montgomery’s Commonwealth First Army in control of the city. Immediately captured by the Commonwealth forces, the government agreed to an unconditional surrender two days later.

Following the surrender of Germany, the Allies launched an amphibious invasion of Sicily on 10 May. The Italian army put up a stronger resistance than anticipated but were nonetheless eventually overwhelmed and evacuated the island on 17 June. Over the course of May, Italy steadily withdrew its soldiers from Serbia in order to counteract this invasion.

In the Pacific, Allied forces continued their advances in the Philippines. Landings were commenced on Luzon in January and Manila was recaptured in March. In May, Commonwealth forces overran the last Chinese defences in Borneo. Japanese naval and amphibious forces captured Iwo Jima and Okinawa by the end of June, ending the bombing threat to the Home Islands. At the same time, the US Navy recaptured Taiwan from the Chinese occupation it had been under since 1940. These gave the USAF the bases it needed to commence vast firebombing campaigns on strategic Chinese cities beginning in June.

By July 1945, Wavell’s forces in Tibet finally had enough resources to mount a full offensive, launching an attack targeting the city of Kangding. The Anglo-Indian-Tibetan army broke through gaps in Chen’s forces and poured in reinforcements that crushed what was left of the Chinese defensive line. On 3 August, Chen and his last 300,000 Chinese soldiers surrendered. Although technically a humiliation for the Chinese, the sheer scale of the POWs caused severe administrative problems for the Allies, who were forced to effectively end their advance. That same day, in Italy, an Anglo-American invasion of the toe of mainland Italy combined with the reverses in the Balkans to convince the Italian government to accept surrender rather than risk a devastating invasion that they would probably succumb to anyway. To that end, Graziani was quietly arrested and a government lead by General Pietro Badoglio signed the terms of surrender in Catanzaro on 25 August.

On 1 July, Allied leaders met in Potsdam, Germany. They confirmed earlier agreements about Germany, and reiterated the demand for the unconditional surrender of China. This call was rejected by the Chinese government, which believed it would be capable of negotiating for more favourable surrender terms. In response to this, and fearing the cost of further invasions of China’s vast mainland, the USAF dropped atomic bombs on the Chinese cities of Beijing and Nanjing on 8 and 11 August, respectively. Between the two bombings, the Soviets, pursuant to the Yalta agreement, invaded Manchuria, quickly defeating what was left of the occupying forces and linking up with the Japanese. These reverses persuaded the previously adamant Kuomintang leaders to accept surrender terms. Chiang died of a conveniently-timed heart attack and Sun Li-jen was released from prison, where he formed a coalition government with Soong Tsu-wen that surrendered aboard the USS Missouri anchored in Hangzhou Bay on 11 September 1945, ending the war.
 
War Cabinet, September 1945
Also, and because I'll be referencing it a bit in the politicking and electioneering in the immediate aftermath, here's the makeup of the War Cabinet on VC Day, 11 September 1945:

  1. First Lord of the Treasury/Prime Minister: Winston Churchill (Liberal)
  2. Lord President of the Council: Clement Attlee (Labour)
  3. Lord Privy Seal: Goronwy Owen (Liberal)
  4. Chancellor of the Exchequer: John Maynard Keynes (Liberal)
  5. Foreign Secretary: Harold Nicolson (Labour)
  6. Home Secretary: William Beveridge (Liberal)
  7. Minister of Defence: Anthony Eden (Conservative)
  8. Minister of Labour and Supply: Ernest Bevin (Labour)
  9. President of the Board of Trade: Sir Archibald Sinclair (Liberal)
  10. Lord Chancellor: Lord Simon (Liberal National)
  11. Chief Secretary to the Treasury: John Anderson (non-partisan)
  12. Minister of Agriculture: Arthur Greenwood (Labour)
  13. Colonial Secretary: Leo Amery (Conservative)
  14. Dominion Secretary: Robert Menzies (non-partisan)
  15. Minister of Economic Warfare: F. Kingsley Griffith (Liberal)
  16. Education Secretary: Hugh Seely (Liberal)
  17. Minister of Fuel: W.T. Cosgrave (Liberal)
  18. Minister of Health: Malcolm MacDonald (Labour)
  19. Minister of Shipping: Joseph Maclay (Liberal)
  20. Scottish Secretary: Ernest Brown (Liberal National)
  21. Welsh Secretary: Gwilym Lloyd George (Liberal)
  22. Irish Secretary: Owen MacNeill (Liberal)
 
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The General Election of 1945
Apologies for the slightly delayed post - I was experiencing some IT problems, which, as you can probably tell by the lack of an infobox, are still continuing. I'll edit this with a proper infobox as soon as I can.

So, as some of you can probably tell, I've taken a rather circuitous route through 70 years of history to get to roughly the same point by 1945. As I've sort of mentioned as an aside, a lot of what has come before was basically a prelude to a post-1945 TL and from here on in we'll be moving further and further away from Kansas.



* * *

A Very British Revolution: The General Election of 1945

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Following the Chinese surrender, it was clear that the country was expecting an election after nearly 11 years without one. Churchill suggested to Attlee that they go into the election promising a continuation of the wartime coalition under a single ‘Country’ banner. However, Attlee, despite having had an effective and close working relationship with Churchill during the war, suspected that the offer was merely an underhand attempt to keep the Liberals in power in response to pollsters suggesting a strong move towards Labour. (Most subsequent biographers have suggested that Churchill’s offer was probably more genuine Attlee suspected, not that it wasn’t an unreasonable conclusion for Attlee to have reached.) On 15 September, Churchill resigned as Prime Minister, dissolving the wartime coalition, and was re-appointed as Prime Minister later that day at the head of a caretaker ministry made up of Churchill’s pre-war Country colleagues and a few non-partisan technocrats. Polling day was set for 5 November, with results to be announced on the 26th in order to allow the votes of servicemen overseas to be counted.

This sudden return of electoral politics prompted bouts of leadership introspection amongst nearly all MPs. In the first place, the remaining MacDonaldites from the 1931-34 period completed their return to the mainstream Labour Party. Although many Labour members continued to mistrust them, the presence of formerly prominent members of the Grand Coalition (notably Harold Nicolson - who had served as Foreign Secretary in the Wartime Coalition - and Malcolm MacDonald - who had served as Minister for Health and, as Ramsay MacDonald’s son, was an influential figure) at the top of the reformed party by 1945 and the conciliatory tone taken by the Labour leader Clement Attlee meant that they were taken back into the fold.

The same could not be said of the Liberal Nationals. John Simon had been kicked upstairs to the Lords in July 1940, as Lord Chancellor. Following that, Ernest Brown - Secretary of State for Scotland in the Wartime Coalition - had taken responsibility for leading the Liberal National caucus in the Commons and they seemed happy enough with him. The real question was whether the Liberal Nationals would make their peace with the Liberals. Negotiations between the two parties looked promising in the last few days of September until, in one of those quirks of fate that seem to spring up now and again in electoral politics, they were torpedoed by the local Liberal Party in Leith. Leith was Brown’s constituency and it was commonly understood that he would be allowed to retain his seat in any merger agreement between the two. However, the split between the Liberals and Liberal Nationals in 1931 had been particularly bitter and the local Liberal Party was adamant that their candidate (John Cormack) would be the candidate. On 1 October, the Liberals and the Liberal Nationals agreed to disagree and commenced separate campaigns.

The Liberals, for their part, were also plagued by leadership questions. Although Lloyd George had, formally, remained the head of the party almost throughout the World War, few of the party’s bigwigs thought it appropriate for him to fight another election (he was kept in place largely because the party’s energies were directed elsewhere) and his death in March 1945 saved them an awkward conversation. Churchill was the natural choice but he turned down the role in March because he wished to devote himself to the final few months of the war effort, meaning that Sir Archibald Sinclair - the Secretary for Air (1940-42) and President of the Board of Trade (1942-45) - took over on an interim basis. Following the end of the Wartime Coalition, Churchill was once more approached about the leadership but he, unexpectedly, turned them down again (although he confirmed that he would be running as a Liberal candidate). Although inexplicable to many at the time, Churchill seems to have been influenced by polling (then still a new art) which suggested that he personally out-polled his party and he apparently foresaw the possibility of remaining in Number 10 at the head of a Labour/Country government. Sinclair, therefore, remained leader on a full-time basis.

The Conservatives too had leadership troubles. Stanley Baldwin had remained leader throughout the War, offering support for the government without ever joining it. The only prominent Conservatives in the War Coalition were Anthony Eden (Minister for Defence) and Leo Amery (Colonial Secretary), both of whom were probably more famous for their ‘Country’ affiliation during the 1930s. The energetic, dashing Eden was in many ways the obvious choice but his unfortunate coming down with a biliary tract infection over the summer of 1945 meant that the veteran Amery became the leader for the election effectively by default.

The Communist Party of Great Britain went into the election confidently. Following the Soviet entry into the War, their long-standing leader Harry Pollitt had returned to the leadership (having been removed from his post in January 1940 over his opposition to Soviet then-neutrality) and they thought they could use the popular lionisation of Soviet soldiers as a springboard to substantial electoral gains.

In the end, the election was barely a contest. Labour scooped up 269 more seats to secure a majority of 91. They did notably well amongst servicemen all over the world, who were particularly attracted to the Labour message of fighting to build a new Britain just as they had fought to build a new world. The Liberals lost virtually all of the seats they had gained under Lloyd George, conclusively not forgiven for their shambolic handling of foreign policy in the 1930s. Both Churchill and Sinclair suffered scares in their seats (although both did survive). The Liberal Nationals managed to hold on to their 13 seats but in many cases only barely and often because they benefited from scooping up votes locally from Liberal voters concerned about Labour. The Conservatives were smashed as a major party, crashing to only 18 seats, condemned to minor party status by memories of their autocratic style and maladroit handling of the economy during the Grand Coalition. The Communists’ pre-election confidence proved to be baseless, with Ernest Bevin (wartime Minister for Labour and still head of the TUC) ruthlessly deploying the trades unions to crush communist organising. The result was that their vote collapsed and they managed to hold only their 4 safest seats (and, then, only by the narrowest of margins in each case).

Churchill’s pre-election plans for himself to remain in Number 10 even if the Liberals lost now seem fanciful but, the day before polling, even Attlee appears to have seriously entertained it. Certainly, in the event of a narrow majority or minority Labour government, the support of Churchill’s Country MPs (perhaps then as a formal party split from Liberals and Tories) could well have been valuable. But the scale of the Labour victory changed all of that: Churchill simply wasn’t needed any more. On the evening of 26 November he telephoned, first, Attlee to congratulate him and, second, the Palace to tender his resignation. The following day, Attlee took a car to Buckingham Palace and after that walked through the doors of Number 10 as the first Prime Minister of a majority Labour government. A new dawn had indeed broken.
 
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Check the seat numbers again, Labour seems to have gained more seats than the other parties lost combined.

The number of seats in the Commons increased from 715 to 740, explaining the discrepancy. (There's also 15 MPs from minor parties which I haven't included above.) Hopefully that'll all become clear when I manage to post the actual infobox.
 
State of the Nation, 1945
I'm still experiencing my IT problems so I'm just going to post a shorter, more impressionistic, essay about the state of the nation in 1945. Next week, when I've got my IT working fully again, we'll cover domestic policy under Attlee, India and the postwar international settlement. Hope you enjoy.

* * *

Britain was the only Allied power to be involved in active hostilities on every day of the World War and the results of this, as Labour began its first majority government, looked to be mixed for the country. On the one hand, the UK singularly and the Commonwealth as a whole were acknowledged as a victor and one of the Allies’ ‘Big Three’, a superpower on a par with the United States and the Soviet Union. But, on the other hand, to walk around the UK in the autumn and winter of 1945, one would certainly be forgiven for thinking that she had been on the losing side. Although the intensity of German bombing of civilian areas had wound down since 1941, the German air force had continued to sporadically bomb the UK in an attempt to break the British people’s will to fight until the loss of their airfields in France late 1944. Furthermore, the experience of fighting the war had loaded the UK government with debt (mainly to the rest of the Commonwealth but also to the United States) and depleted much of the foreign currency reserves she had built up in 1913-17.

Notwithstanding all of this, the UK was still the world’s third largest economy by herself (she had also experienced substantial GDP growth during 1940-45, unlike her allies and opponents) and the Commonwealth, taken together, would have been largest. More generally, the bravery of the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines was praised around the world, with Slim’s valiant defence of Singapore and Mountbatten’s dashing naval victories in the South Pacific being particularly lionised. In addition, Commonwealth soldiers, taken together, formed the majority of the Western Allies’ army of occupation in Germany. The War had forged the various forces of the Commonwealth into a single, unified, global fighting force, complemented by the Military Intelligence Service (the so-called ‘Five Eyes Agency’ named after the five countries of the UK, Canada, Newfoundland, Australia and New Zealand that made it up), which by 1945 was arguably the most effective and advanced intelligence network in the world.

On the financial front, the Chifley Plan and the Lismore Agreements had fundamentally altered the economic model of the United Kingdom in ways that were not, perhaps, fully understood at the time. Many understood the Chifley Plan as a simple handing over of the whip hand to the Dominions away from the Mother Country (this view was especially prevalent amongst left wing Canadians and right wing Britons - a curious coalition if nothing else). In fact, the Chifley Plan had, when combined with the creation of the ICU, bound the Dominions to the Commonwealth in a single financial system. The City of London’s natural markets were now the growing financial industries in Australia and Canada and, in turn, the natural markets for the industrial goods from those countries (and India too) was the UK. Furthermore, Keynes’ achievement in allowing the ICU to count all of the Commonwealth’s net bancor credits and debits in a single account increased the necessities for economic development and relationships within the Commonwealth.

Since the general agreement on tariffs in 1892, the British economy had gradually pivoted away from free trade and towards the Empire. With a mixture of the Chifley Plan and the ICU, this process now looked to be nearing completion. Sterling remained a powerful currency and the Sterling Zone was the largest currency bloc in the world. Its members received the benefits of stable exchange rates and easy access to the financial resources of the City of London, while allowing the Bank of England to use the zone’s pooled resources to back the currency when there was a shortage of foreign currency reserves or gold. In 1940, as part of the Chifley Plan, the Bank of England had set up the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), a body made up of representatives of the central banks of every Commonwealth member state plus India. The MPC would continue to meet after the war to decide common monetary and currency policy, while allowing considerable flexibility for divergent policies by national governments.

It was a brave new world and a brave new Britain would be required to meet its challenges.
 
Hi. Just want to say that I really enjoy reading this TL.

It seems to me that TTL world economy will not be interconnected the same way as OTL in term of global free trade but will be make up of several interconnected trade blocs/custom unions. It'll be interesting how this will manifest when time progress.

Also I wonder whether Thailand joined China in the war after invasion like when they "allied" with Japan during WWII OTL? Or is it full occupation? If so, this might have interesting ramification for the largely integrated and assimilated Sino-Thais in Thailand.
 
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I will admit, events had gotten a bit too convergent at times I felt with the Second World War events, but Britain and the Commonwealth acting as its own faction in a potential Cold War should provide some interesting aspects to it. And, despite my words, the conflict itself was written up well and clearly.
 
Hi. Just want to say that I really enjoy reading this TL.

It seems to me that TTL world economy will not be interconnected the same way as OTL in term of global free trade but will be make up of several interconnected trade blocs/custom unions. It'll be interesting how this will manifest when time progress.

Also I wonder whether Thailand joined China in the war after invasion like when they "allied" with Japan during WWII OTL? Or is it full occupation? If so, this might have interesting ramification for the largely integrated and assimilated Sino-Thais in Thailand.

The postwar economic world is going to be very different (and, if anyone is ever looking for nominations for a really ASB plot point, remember that I put the Soviets in charge of the WTO...) and is really what I was most interested in in this TL - I just had to go back as far as I did to do it satisfactorily.

As for Thailand, it was the kind of 'friendly' alliance as with OTL Japan. I don't have huge plans for postwar Thailand TTL but it might come up periodically.

I will admit, events had gotten a bit too convergent at times I felt with the Second World War events, but Britain and the Commonwealth acting as its own faction in a potential Cold War should provide some interesting aspects to it. And, despite my words, the conflict itself was written up well and clearly.

Yeah, I appreciate that it was a bit similar but I needed it to finish when it did and, to be honest, I don't really have the military history expertise to diverge from OTL for drastically.
 
First Attlee Ministry (1945-1949)
Health, Happiness and Prosperity: Attlee's Britain
NHS.jpg

Tales from the New Jerusalem: Aneurin Bevan visits a patient on the first day of the NHS

Leslie Melville.jpg

Our man in the ICU: Sir Leslie Melville was appointed to be the first chair of the ICU with a secret mandate to protect Commonwealth interests


Stafford Cripps was recalled from India as soon as it became clear that Labour was going to take office, becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer. Keynes, who had lost his seat of Cambridge University, was ennobled as Baron Keynes and given a roving brief as effectively the UK’s representative on all international economic matters. In December 1945, after consultation with Commonwealth partners, the UK appointed the Australian economist Leslie Melville as the first head of the ICU.

Keynes’ and Cripps’ immediate tasks involved managing the UK’s balance of payments and currency problems, ensuring that they did not mutate into full-blown crises. In March 1946, a Commonwealth finance ministers conference resulted in the creation of what came to be known as the ‘Keynes Plan’ (although it was, in truth, effectively a continuation of the Chifley Plan). Under the Keynes Plan the Commonwealth countries not physically touched by the World War would provide funds to help with the rebuilding of those which had been. Although many noted that this was, effectively, a way of ploughing money back into the UK within the rules of the ICU, it should be noted that the UK was not the only country helped (it largely kept the economy of Newfoundland afloat for a number of years, for example). In return, the Bank of England announced a devaluation of the £ against the bancor by nearly 35%, which was designed to help make Commonwealth goods more attractive for export and boost the nascent industrial capacities of Canada, Australia and the Punjab.

Of course, as we now know, the financial position of the UK would be radically transformed very suddenly over the course of October-December 1946 (which will be discussed in more detail later). However, over the first few years of his government, Attlee chose to keep a tight grip on the spending taps. As promised in their manifesto, the government nationalised the energy and rail industries but resisted the urging from some MPs to go further. Ernest Bevin, continuing in his wartime role as Minister of Labour, argued successfully that nationalisations should be limited to only those industries which could be affordably modernised and run in conjunction with the trades unions. With his allies in tight control of the TUC, nationalised companies were organised to be run by mixed boards of industry experts, civil servants and trades union representatives.

Rather than run industries themselves, Labour governments chose to regulate them instead, the idea being to direct their energies down socially useful channels while also allowing the vicissitudes of the market to force them to innovate or die. In 1948, the Iron and Steel Confederation, the largest union representing such workers in the UK, sent a delegation to Downing Street asking for nationalization of their industry. They were rebuffed and instead Bevin rolled out a series of reforms of British corporate governance that were crystalised in the Companies Act 1950. The act contained numerous provisions reforming British corporate governance but, for these purposes, its most important, long-lasting and influential provisions regarded the make-up of boards of directors. Simply put, the Companies Act required boards to contain worker’s representation on their boards (usually in the form of directly-elected trades union officials) and expanded the directives of a company so that a company director’s duty was not to simply increase shareholder value but also the well-being of the workers as a whole.

On the welfare front, the government passed the National Insurance Act 1946, the National Assistance Act 1947 and the National Health Service Act 1946 (the service itself would open in 1948), which provided comprehensive and universal healthcare, social security and sickness and disability benefits. The aim was, in the words of the Home Secretary William Norton, to “decommodify the working man from the market: to make his life one he wishes to live and not one his work forces him to live.” As the Lord Privy Seal Hugh Dalton noted, these policies brought closer to reality the old radical Liberal aim of the ‘free breakfast table,’ further demonstrating the liberal origins of this British brand of sociailism.

On the educational front, a key reform was the Returning Servicemen’s Education Act 1947, which provided funds to universities and other tertiary institutions to take on returning veterans and help them integrate into society. In addition, the education system was rationalised, ending the jigsaw pattern of local and religious education into a single system.

More economic growth was stimulated by the Town and Country Building Act 1946, which provided funds for a vast rebuilding program for cities gutted by German bombing as well as an expansion of public transport and suburban housing. Herbert Morrison, the Lord President, took personal responsibility for the program, using the experience he had gained in Greater London politics (where he had been First Minister 1920-25 and 1935-45). Enormous areas of the country were rebuilt and developed, creating the now-iconic rows of three-story terraced flats and neat shared gardens which populate working class areas of cities such as Coventry, Glasgow and London to this day. Also key to this rebuilding process was the British Nationality Act 1948, which encouraged citizens from the Empire, most notably India and the West Indies, to travel to the UK to work in under-manned services, particularly the building trade.

As the country headed into 1949, the economy was growing and rationing had been fully ended in 1947. In addition, a mixture of Keynes Plan grants and the economic gains from the discoveries in 1946 had more or less ended the monetary problems that the country had faced in 1945. Labour had largely delivered on its 1945 manifesto, even if the ‘New Jerusalem’ it had promised still felt some way away. On the other hand, the international situation remained precarious, with China engulfed in civil war, peace in Europe still only hanging by a thread and the work of continental reconstruction still undone. British troops were also facing a growing insurgency in Malaya and the nation’s hold on many of her colonial possessions was becoming increasingly tenuous. However, a cautious Attlee was counselled by his advisors to go to the country in the summer of 1949. According to legend, he was apparently finally persuaded by the King, who was due to undertake a tour of Australia and New Zealand in the autumn and winter of 1949-50 and wished to have the makeup of his government in the UK settled before his departure.
 
Good to see rationing ended so early - and under the Labour cabinet, too (and in general, it's good to see Attlee in saddle in the UK that hasn't virtually gone broke because of the war). And while we're at it, was TTL's Blitz roughly the same as IOTL?
 
Good to see rationing ended so early - and under the Labour cabinet, too (and in general, it's good to see Attlee in saddle in the UK that hasn't virtually gone broke because of the war). And while we're at it, was TTL's Blitz roughly the same as IOTL?

Probably marginally more devastating as the aerial bombing campaign TTL was more specifically aimed to break the UK's population and industrial capacity so you'd didn't really have the Battle of Britain prelude from OTL.
 
Formation of the SWF, 1946
So this update might be a little ASB for many people, given how far ahead of OTL it is technologically. However, I hope that I've set out previous changes in TTL's engineering teaching and R&D that make it, broadly, plausible.

* * *
Black Gold: The Royal Geological Survey and the Saving of the British Economy
North Sea Oil.jpg

The Montrose Oil Drill - the first offshore rig to successfully draw oil out of sight of land


Since the beginning of its mission in 1926, the British Geological Survey’s search for oil fields in British territorial waters had pottered along with greater or lesser intensity but with nothing to show for it in terms of practical results. Those funny little men with their floating drills and fragile structures in the middle of the sea: to those who remembered their existence they were little more than a quaint monument to English eccentricity. However, that concealed a serious dedication to their task which put their research and engineering several decades ahead of their competitors, a dedication that would pay off dramatically in October 1946, with the discovery of the Montrose Oil Field about 135 miles east of Aberdeen, followed by the vast Forties and Brent Oil Fields in November and December. Using state of the art oil rigs and extraction technologies, the British government became, at a stroke, one of the most oil-rich entities in the world.

A connected, but not necessarily linked, event was the fate of Anglo-Arabian Petroleum, a company founded to prospect for oil in the Arabian Peninsula in 1933. Originally a private company with a mix of British and Arabian shareholders, the company’s shares were progressively taken over by the British and Arabian governments during the course of the World War such that, by 1945, it was effectively a joint-owned venture with the Arabian government.

These two phenomena transformed not only the UK’s energy picture, which until then had been reliant on increasingly inefficient domestic coal production and foreign oil imports, but also its trade balance, as oil revenues (even if they wouldn’t be fully realised until the 1950s) allowed industries to be repurposed from war and exports and towards domestic consumption. However, the promise of a rush of this ‘black gold’ immediately raised questions about what to do with it. The most obvious answer was to plunge this money into the social security programmes the government was trying to undertake, which was the argument made by many prominent people such as Ernest Bevin and Health Secretary Nye Bevan (not people who, otherwise, agreed on much). On the other hand, figures such as Herbert Morrison proposed creating a single nationalised oil and energy company which could be used as a job creator. Finally, Cripps and Keynes suggested the creation of an investment fund for the future.

Attlee, ever the conciliator in these things, contrived to produce a compromise which was amenable to all sides. An investment fund was set up with proceeds to be divided up three ways: the vast majority of profits would be paid directly back to the fund for reinvestment; profits above a certain level would be paid into a nationalised company with certain R&D directives; profits above that would be paid directly into the exchequer. The investment aims of what was named ‘The Sovereign Wealth Fund of the United Kingdom’ (or, more simply, the ‘SWF’) were kept deliberately vague, with the only limit being that whatever investments that were made be made ‘in the UK national interest.’ In practice, the founding charter of the SWF stipulated that the government would have input into what counted as the national interest, even though the SWF had considerable latitude in its investment decisions.

Keynes, who, despite a health scare in 1946 that some conspiracists claimed was a heart attack, remained vigorous, was tapped up to head the SWF. He agreed immediately and would chair the organisation from its formation on 1 January 1948. Under Keynes’ tenure, the value of the SWF grew every year at an astonishing rate, outperforming an average UK and Commonwealth equity index by an average of 12% a year, building up its equity and asset reserves substantially, all the while providing the extra funding for Labour’s ambitious domestic and foreign agenda. By the time of Keynes’ death (at his desk, fittingly enough) on 21 April 1956, the SWF was the largest and most influential investment fund in the world.
 
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Loving this TL.

Closer Commonwealth and a potential Imperial Federation type Superstate? Check
Socialist policies benefiting the average commonwealth citizen? Check
Being smart with energy (for the time) and vigorously investing in finding and exploiting vast oil fields? Check
(Perhaps set up more surveys with any findings being shared 50/50 between the UK and the respective country? I'm think the Norwegian share of North sea oil in particular to realy cement North Sea Oil as primarily British)

Cannae wait for more capt'n :D
 
Loving this TL.

Closer Commonwealth and a potential Imperial Federation type Superstate? Check
Socialist policies benefiting the average commonwealth citizen? Check
Being smart with energy (for the time) and vigorously investing in finding and exploiting vast oil fields? Check
(Perhaps set up more surveys with any findings being shared 50/50 between the UK and the respective country? I'm think the Norwegian share of North sea oil in particular to realy cement North Sea Oil as primarily British)

Cannae wait for more capt'n :D

What he said!!
 
Indian Independence
Before continuing with the narrative, I should say that this update was strongly inspired by @NixonTheUsedCarSalesman 's defunct 'East of Suez' TL, particularly the role of Slim and the different partition borders. I reached out to him/her some time ago to ask whether they minded me borrowing these ideas and didn't receive a reply. Nevertheless, I think the background for India in TTL is sufficiently different for me to use that kernel of an idea as the basis for this update.

* * *​

Freedom at Midday: The Final Struggle for Indian Independence

Slim.jpg

Viscount Slim in his uniform as Viceroy


Contrary to popular belief in the years since and (to a certain extent) at the time, Attlee’s government was not anti-imperialist, seeing itself as continuing the liberal (and Liberal) tradition of reforming and improving the Empire rather than abolishing it. Harold Nicolson continued in his wartime role as Foreign Secretary and Attlee’s old ally Douglas Jay was installed as Colonial Secretary, with Attlee taking a close personal interest. Nicolson would be guided by the dual impulses of cementing good relations with both the United States and the Soviet Union while also preserving a special sphere of influence for the UK wherein she could act independently. The contradictions and tensions inherent in these aims would echo down Attlee’s ministry and beyond.

Nicolson looked for ways to bring western Europe together in a military alliance, signing the Dunkirk Treaty with France in 1947 and the Brussels Pact with Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg a year later. That same year, he openly threatened the US Secretary of State Charles E. Bohlen with British withdrawal from Germany unless the US retained and deepened its military and financial commitment to European defence. Such a threat was absurd on its face (the UK had no strategic interest in leaving Germany, given that they were supervising the ongoing partition of the country and implementation of the Roosevelt Plan) but it was enough to scare Bohlen (especially given that the Olson Administration was facing a tricky re-election fight at home) into acceding to most of his demands. An American commitment to Europe was an essential plank of the creation of NATO in spring 1949, which Nicolson saw as the crowning achievement of Attlee’s first term: an effective acknowledgement by the Americans that western Europe would be an Anglo-American sphere of interest. The balance of the ‘Anglo’ and the ‘American’ in that formulation would echo down the years in surprising ways.

On colonial affairs, while the government was by no means anti-imperialist, they were unsentimental about the Empire and unwilling to spend blood and treasure defending it. They also believed that they had to keep the promises made by previous governments. To this end, when Cripps was recalled to London to become Chancellor, Frederick Pethick-Lawrence was sent out to India to take his place as Chairman and organise the universal suffrage elections that Cripps had promised in March 1941. Perhaps the imperial authorities should have been tipped off about the potential problems when, in the uncontested by-election to give Pethick-Lawrence his seat in the Indian assembly, there were twice as many spoiled ballots as votes for the actual candidate. When the elections were held in April 1946, the Liberal Unionists were reduced to a rump of 9 seats, while the INC won 90 seats and the League won 48.

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Over the course of 1946, civil and military disobedience increased across the Raj and the Viceroy Lord Auchinleck asked for seven extra divisions to keep order. Aware of what such an occupation would look like in practice, Attlee sacked Auchinleck in November 1946 and replaced him with General (now Lord) Slim.

Slim was in many respects the ideal choice, being a graduate of the Indian Staff College in Quetta and a well-respected war hero across the world for his service in Singapore and Malaya, as well as a man of Labour leanings. With Nehru now Chairman of the Assembly and openly calling for independence, Attlee came to accept the inevitable too and ordered Slim to draw up plans for an independent India covering the entire subcontinent. Slim began drawing up plans for a single Dominion of India with a singly military and currency but Hindu-majority and Muslim-majority subdivisions. This raised the obvious question of the fate of Bengal and Punjab, two provinces with only small Muslim majorities and vast Hindu (and, in the case of Punjab, Sikh too) minorities.

The Liberal Unionists, despite their electoral destruction in 1946, remained strong amongst the landowning and ruling classes of the Punjab and were able to band together to defeat a League motion to partition the province. Instead, it was agreed that the entire province would join a single entity named Pakistan (a rather imaginative combination of the five north-eastern regions of the Raj: Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh and Balochistan with the extra ‘i’ added to aid pronunciation). A similar process occurred in Bengal, although here it was the League who were unwilling to be separated from the majority Hindu western regions. Slim combined the Hindu-majorities east of Bengal into the expanded province, creating a single sub-entity with a (roughly) balanced Hindu-Muslim population.

The only outstanding questions were the status of Burma, Ceylon and the princely states. When it became clear that the British government would not be supporting their independence anymore, the vast majority of the princes agreed to accede to the independent Dominion, provided that certain guarantees were given to them with respect to the rulers’ incomes. The only ones which remained outstanding by January 1948 were those of Kashmir and Hyderabad - the two largest states which each maintained their own currencies, postal services and universities - and Sikkim, a small country north of Bengal which fancied ts future as an independent state alongside Bhutan and Nepal. Ceylon and Burma, it was agreed, would go their own way, the former as an independent member of the Commonwealth and the latter as a crown colony for the near-term future.

Fears about a refugee crisis were allayed by the prompt and clear publication of what border decisions had been made, giving people enough time to move if they wished. As it turned out, few were willing to move once the minority rights protections had become known and there were comparatively few internal migrants. Independence finally arrived at midday on 26 April 1948, with Slim travelling to the capitals of the overarching Dominion of India (New Delhi), India Proper (Bombay), Pakstan (Karachi) and Bengal (Calcutta) in an exhausting 24-hour long ceremony. Although there was much fanfare at the time, the problems of the Dominion (namely too much power reserved to the subdivisions, continued simmering interreligious strife and communist subversion) would remain on the horizon. Nevertheless, in Westminster at least, politicians could breathe a sigh of relief that things hadn’t been as bad as they could have done.
 
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