The Anglo-Saxon Social Model

[Rattigan]

Power to the People? Elections to the Commonwealth Assembly

The expulsion of South Africa from the Commonwealth both confirmed the power of the individual states and also stimulated demand for greater democratic representation within the organisation’s institutions. Naturally, the focus of this became the Commonwealth Assembly. Although it sounded like an organisation that should be elected, no provisions were made in the Treaty of London or Ottawa Declaration for Commonwealth elections and all members were appointed by national governments on a (broadly speaking) non-partisan basis. The Assembly had thus become a technocratic regulatory body, populated largely by diplomats and civil servants of various stripes. Michael Collins, the veteran Irish politician, had lead the institution capably and in a non-partisan manner, with most regulations being passed by consensus (with the exception of the highly divisive ones regarding Rhodesia and South Africa’s expulsion itself). The high level deliberative body remained the Commonwealth Cabinet in collaboration with the Prime Ministers’ Conferences and/or the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee.

Following the expulsion of South Africa, the number of seats in the Assembly was reorganised to reflect the new balance of power within the Commonwealth, resulting in the following division of seats by country:

As can be seen, the distribution represented pure power politics rather than any attempt towards an accurate representation of the populations. Thus Canada (population: 17.9 million) and Australia (10.3 million) had more than three times as many Assembly Members (known as ‘AMs’) than Bengal (85.2 million). Pakistan took a large share of the new AMs, recognition of its equal ranking as a member of the ‘Big Four'. The Big Four were nervous about the possibility of diluting their power in the event of ending the old appointments procedure but agreed to let elections take place in 1962 provided that the previous distribution of seats remained in place.

There were no rules on the system of election to be used. The Big Four and New Zealand all used their first past the post system. Bengal used a proportional system but divided up between different religious franchises, as was the case with their domestic voting arrangements. Ceylon, Newfoundland and Puerto Rico all used proportional representation, albeit with different methods of seat allocation.

When the elections rolled around, the different intensity with which the political movements in each country competed were key to deciding the results. The left wing and/or progressive parties campaigned together under the banner of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists (“PAS”). Progressive politicians such as Lester Pearson and Walter Nash conducted a Commonwealth-wide campaign taking in stops in every member state. Right wing and centrist parties, however, were more circumspect in their campaigns: the Australian Liberal Party, for example, campaigned largely on domestic issues, attacking the incumbent Labor Party. The Commonwealth’s communist parties also banded together as the Communist Free Alliance under the chairmanship of the Anglo-Indian-Swedish intellectual R. Palme Dutt. More disconcertingly, a coalition of far right parties (some of which explicitly campaigned opposing South Africa’s expulsion) formed under A.K. Chesterton.

Making use of lessons learned from Labour’s ruthless election-winning tactics, PAS won the most seats in the assembly with 153. The grouping of miscellaneous parties of the Commonwealth’s centre and centre-right together had 171. However, both were short of the 206 seats required to make up a majority. Over the course of a series of cross-party talks, a majority of the centre and centre-right AMs agreed to support PAS’s nominee for Speaker, Anthony Crosland. These 107 individuals, under the leadership of Davie Fulton, would later form the Liberals and Democrats grouping in 1963, while the remaining 64 AMs would form the Conservatives and Reformist grouping under Arthur Fadden.

Crosland thus took office as Speaker of the Commonwealth Assembly in June 1962. Although this position allowed him to control the Assembly’s business, he was aware that his arrangement with the Liberals and Democrats was some way short of a full coalition. He thus prepared to manage Commonwealth business in the same consensual manner as Collins had done, even though he and his chief of staff Peter Shore had ambitious plans for the future of the organisation.

Under Crosland, the Commonwealth Assembly emphasised its powers to admit new members and went on a throughgoing recruitment drive. Under his watch, not only did Crosland make good on the promises of various prime ministers and grant full membership to Rhodesia (31 December 1963), Sarawak (16 September 1964) and the East Indies (9 August 1965), but decolonisation was fast-tracked and membership extended to the West Indies (31 May 1963) and East Africa (12 December 1964). Further down the line, Crosland’s tenure would also see membership expanding to include the Bahamas (10 July 1968), the Pacific Islands (4 June 1970), Papua New Guinea (16 September 1975) and, on the last day before he retired from the role, Belize (8 June 1981).

 

[Rattigan]

The Rise of the Red Queen: Gaitskell to Castle

With things developing very quickly on the Commonwealth-front, the UK’s domestic politics were thrown into chaos in December 1962, when Gaitskell fell ill with the flu. Although he was initially passed fit enough to travel to an arms-control summit in the Soviet Union just after Christmas, his condition rapidly deteriorated on his return to London and he died on 18 January 1963 from complications of lupus. He was 56. The abrupt nature of his death, combined with his recent travel itinerary, gave rise to a speculation that foul play might have been involved. A popular conspiracy theory involved a supposed KGB plot to assassinate Gaitskell in order to see him replaced by a figure further from the party’s left. (It is believed that Five Eyes did conduct an investigation but what resulted from that, if anything, has never been released to the public.)

Following the death of Bevan in 1960, the unofficial leadership of Labour’s left had been taken by Harold Wilson, who immediately announced his candidature. Opinion was split, however, as to who was Gaitskell’s natural successor would be, with the frontrunners generally thought to be George Brown, the Lord President, and Jim Callaghan, the Chancellor. (Of course, Gaitskell’s actual natural successor would have been Evan Durbin but he had left Parliament in 1960 to chair the Bank of England.) Both had acres of cabinet-level experience and were respected by MPs in their own way but also had large drawbacks: Brown’s excessive drinking troubled many people and his pro-American, anti-Soviet views were increasingly out of step with the national mood; Callaghan, on the other hand, was very closely associated with the right wing of the party, too closely, some argued, to be the unifying candidate the party needed with an election expected in the next couple of years. Wilson, too, was a very different candidate from what Bevan would have been: liked but not trusted, few outside of the party’s left would have been happy with him leading them, even if they were quite happy to work with him as a minister and MP.

With all three men seemingly set on standing, many feared a grueling internecine fight between them which would have damaged all three. This was a particularly big worry given that the Liberals finally looked to have their act together and, under Macleod, seemed like a party that wouldn’t have been out of place in power. It was in this context that a coterie of MPs who were associated with neither the party’s left or right wings began to cast around for a moderate unity candidate. The candidate who eventually emerged from this was Barbara Castle: she had begun her career firmly on the left of the party and was still trusted by them but had, over the course of her parliamentary career, established her cross-factional appeal by working closely with Cripps at the Treasury. Her handling of the 1961 educational reforms, in particular, were fresh in everybody’s mind and had established her as a politician of substance and gravitas.

In the initial ballot of MPs, Brown’s and Callaghan’s campaigns split the Gaitskellite vote. Castle, however, managed to peel off more moderate Gaitskellites (who simply wanted to end the internal warfare, which by this stage was of very little substantive policy difference) and Bevanites who simply did not trust Wilson. Castle got 4 more votes than Callaghan to enter the final run-off against Wilson, where she was able to portray herself as the unity candidate rising above petty factional squabbles to grab an extra 80 votes to get herself over the line.

Although she was not the first female prime minister in the Commonwealth (Sirimavo Bandaranaike had that honour, having become prime minister of Ceylon in 1960), Castle’s appointment as the first ever female head of government of a recognised superpower was considered a significant moment and attracted a large amount of interest from the world’s media. In her first speech as prime minister, on the steps of Number 10, Castle called on Britain to become a global beacon of freedom and fairness. She also announced a snap election for a month’s time, arguing that she wished to have her own personal mandate.

In one of the more boring elections in British electoral history, Labour won its sixth successive election with a small increase in seats, fiercely attacking the narrowest marginals and effectively reversing the Liberals’ gains of the previous elections. The Conservatives and the National Liberals stood still (more or less), results that served to underscore the total failure of their parties to retain (or return to) relevance since their collapses in 1945. While the Liberals retained confidence in their leader, they looked to be stagnating once more. This stimulated a fresh round of talks between the three opposition parties with regards to a potential alliance. In the end, the Liberal Nationals formally took the Liberal whip from September 1963, something they had been doing informally anyway for a number of years. The Conservatives, however, had deviated too far from the postwar orthodoxy to be easily absorbed into the Liberals. Under their leader, Jo Grimond, they headed off down a quixotic furrow which was a mix of libertarianism and ‘radical centrism’ (an expression of Grimond’s coining) that acquired a certain kind of niche audience but no more (even if Grimond’s loquacious, charming personna guaranteed the party an outsized media profile).

From Labour’s point of view, though, the election was a near-total success, with Castle having cemented her control over the Parliamentary party and Labour’s control over the Westminster government. The only real downside was a slight personal one for her, as George Brown resigned his seat and instead stood for, and won, election to the Midlands Assembly in 1965. For the next few years, Brown would use his position as the Midlands’ First Minister to turn Birmingham Town Hall into a bully pulpit criticising the Westminster government. Frustrating though this was, amidst Castle’s and Labour’s successes, it was little more than a flea bite on an elephant.

 

[Rattigan]

Wait, so the next Labour leadership contest would be in 1976?? Okay....

That doesn't mean that there won't be another leader in the meantime though. Maybe the next leader doesn't have any competition, so they just get a coronation instead of an election.

I really should think about redacting the 'next' dates on those infoboxes. I just always thought it looked ugly when people did that.

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Yet Another Brave New Commonwealth: The Launch of the Single Currency

Father of Commonwealth Capitalism: Evan Durbin at his desk at the Bank of England, c.1965


Under the terms of the Lismore system, the Commonwealth had been entitled to count its bancor credits and debits in one net account. Among other effects, this had necessitated the continued pegging of the various Dominion currencies to sterling, something which had been further cemented by the 1946 devaluation and the creation of the Monetary Policy Committee (“MPC”). However, the currencies remained technically separate and each government adopted separate fiscal policies, with governments raising or weakening the value of their currencies (in each case against the UK pound) as suited their political needs. A notable successful devaluation was that of the Pakistani government in 1955, which substantially helped that country’s export industries.

However, the feeling in British circles was that this situation was ultimately unsustainable and, more than anything else, messy. Instead, it was argued that the risk sharing of a fiscal union would maximise economic efficiency. Over the course of a joint MPC-and-Prime Ministers meeting in 1956, the various governments and finance ministers agreed to fix their exchange rates for a period of seven years in advance of the launching of a new common currency. A further conference in 1959 agreed that this new currency would retain the name (and symbol) of the pound sterling in order to retain international market confidence. It was also agreed that the single currency would be decimalised, to bring it into line with international standards.

The remaining few years were devoted to technical negotiations about how the currency would work. The Bank of England would act as the central bank of the whole currency, with the beefed up MPC acting as its governing body. A complicated series of mechanisms were worked out whereby the idea of a multi-national currency could squared with the Keynesian (or Keynesian-adjacent) impulses of most of the member states’ macroeconomists. Each member state would be given an account at the Bank of England (similar to the Commonwealth’s account at the ICU), giving each country a limited power to order the Bank to print money. This would allow countries to conduct expansionary monetary policies if and when necessary.

Nonetheless, the establishment of the single currency did mark a significant break with previous Commonwealth economic orthodoxy, which had stressed the importance of national control over monetary supply. It was hoped that the beefed up Bank of England, with Commonwealth member states having their say, would be able to retain national control while gaining the benefits of supranationalism. But only the future could tell whether this hope would turn out to be a false one. Evan Durbin - first while Chancellor and then as Chairman of the Bank of England after 1960 - was the driving force behind the single currency, to the point that up until its launch it was informally known in economic circles as ‘the Durbin.’

The newly decimalised pound was introduced in non-physical form (traveller’s cheques, banks’ accounting etc.) on 1 January 1963, with coins and notes for the new currency being introduced on 1 January 1966. National currencies ceased to be legal tender on 1 March 1966, although after that they continued to be accepted for exchange by national central banks for different periods of time. The longest such period was the Newfoundland pound, whose banknotes remained exchangeable until 1983.

 

[Rattigan]

When Barbara Castle Invented Sex: Social Change and Political Reform in the 1960s

Swinging London: The cultural changes of the 1960s confirmed London's place as a great world city and a centre for art, fashion, music and film.


Almost from the beginning of her time in office, Castle’s premiership was significant. In a small cabinet reshuffle, she promoted Alice Bacon from her position as Castle’s able lieutenant at the Ministry of Education to become Home Secretary. From a country that had never previously had a woman in one of the great offices of state, the UK suddenly had two. Castle’s first term would not be known as a period of substantial economic reform - with her government leaving the economic settlement of the 1940s and ‘50s, based on a combination of private enterprise, Commonwealth-cooperation, SWF investment and a technocratic cradle-to-grave welfare state, largely in place - but would instead become well known for its impressive record on social reform.

Bacon’s time at the Home Office included the final abolition of capital punishment for all crimes except treason (1964), full decriminalisation of homosexuality and the institution of civil partnerships for gay couples (1966) and the introduction of ‘no fault’ divorces (1967). The Health Secretary Roy Jenkins also oversaw the establishment of at least one NHS abortion clinic in every city and county in the United Kingdom (in the teeth of fierce church (Catholic and Protestant) opposition). None of these changes were completely out of the blue and, as many Liberals pointed out, they were largely building on or the culmination of the reforms instituted by the Chamberlain Lib-Lab coalition of the 1920s. But they served the wider point of portraying Britain to the world as a bastion of fairness and progressive values.

Also significantly, the government made significant advances on race issues. Since the end of the World War, the UK had seen significant immigration from the West Indies and Pakistan, mostly to work in the construction industry. This had set off a series of racial tensions that occasionally burst to the fore. A particular example was the Bristol bus boycott of 1963, over the refusal of the bus board in Bristol to hire black or Asian bus drivers. Rather than ducking the question (as Gaitskell and Attlee had preferred to do when the issue arose) Castle responded to it directly. Paul Stephenson, the organiser leading the boycott, was invited to a meeting at Downing Street, after which Castle made a speech defending racial integration as a “process of equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity.” The Race Relations Act 1965 was passed two years later, outlawing discrimination (including for employment and housing) on the grounds of race and setting up the Race Relations Board (of which Stephenson was a member) to help enforce it.

With the economy healthy and her government continuing to be popular, Castle was encouraged to go to the polls in the summer of 1966, to take advantage of what was predicted to be a British victory in that year’s World Cup. Over the past few years, the introduction of an all-Britain Premier League had revolutionised the British Game, as had the appointment of Vic Buckingham as coach of the Great Britain national team. Buckingham, following a six-season tenure at Arsenal and three years at Ajax, had been appointed head coach in 1962 and had impressed his innovative brand of ‘Total Football’ on his charges. Being tournament hosts and boasting a mobile front three of George Best, Denis Law and Jimmy Johnstone, the British team were many people’s favourite.

In the final against Portugal, Britain went 0-1 down to a well-taken goal by Mario Coluna but roared back to take the lead with a goal each from Law and Johnstone. However, when victory looked certain, Portuguese forward Eusebio equalised in the 89th minutes. Eusebio went on to score twice more in extra time, becoming the first person to score a hattrick in a World Cup final and securing the trophy for Portugal in the first tournament they’d ever qualified for.

Plans for the election were shelved but, perhaps predictably, ended up leaking to the press. Tabloids making making fun of Castle’s perceived cowardice dominated the ‘silly season’ coverage for the rest of the summer. The new(ish) Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe skillfully took advantage of this weakness, hammering Labour for its staleness and cowardice in the face of the electorate. Thorpe was able to portray himself as comfortable with the social changes rapidly sweeping through the UK and his party’s qualified support (with notable individual rebels) for Castle’s social reforms meant that he was finally able to shed the Liberals’ old fashioned and out of touch image.

In the end, Castle announced a dissolution of Parliament in February 1967 and an election for March.

 

[Rattigan]

Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall of the Anglo-American Alliance, 1941-1965

The Enemy Within: then-Senator Richard Nixon spy-hunting in c. 1955

As with so many things during his many decades of public service, the fate of world geopolitics in the years after the World War seemed to hinge on the opinions and actions of Franklin Roosevelt. As well as masterminding the American war effort, Roosevelt also invested a lot of political capital in designing the skeleton framework for the postwar world. In February 1946, he shocked the world when he announced that he would be resigning the American presidency (the first person ever to do so) in order to take up the role of the first Secretary General of the United Nations (Gladwyn Jebb having previously served five months in that capacity on an interim basis), to which he was elected unanimously by the General Assembly.

Being the first person to hold the position enabled Roosevelt to put his stamp on the role, which was otherwise loosely defined in the UN Charter. Roosevelt interpreted his role as that of a world mediator and he was energetic in attempting to solve global flashpoints. He is credited as being key to preparing the Geneva Conference, mediating between the three sides of the Franco-Vietnamese conflict and bringing about a peaceful resolution of the dispute between Italy, Austria and Yugoslavia over control of the Istrian Peninsula. Furthermore, he was instrumental in arranging for the (relatively) orderly partition of Europe and the Middle East, as well as supervising the population transfers in those regions after partition.

Aside from all of this, Roosevelt’s personality, especially his role in brokering the wartime alliance between the United States, Commonwealth and Soviet Union, made him unique. During his tenure, Roosevelt skilfully worked to keep relations between the three superpowers peaceful and, to this extent, he was successful. Even the creation of the Anglo-American dominated NATO and the Soviet-dominated Bucharest Pact in 1949 and 1950 (respectively) were, while superficially statements of great power rivalry, in fact agreed in a relatively transparent manner and with Roosevelt’s tacit agreement as part of the world’s new multi-polar security structure. While there were many potential flashpoints during the Chinese Civil War - where the Anglo-Americans and the Soviets both deployed troops on opposing sides - all sides were careful to prevent them from ever taking to the field opposite each other and he was generally regarded as being very successful in this attempt (he was reelected to his position unanimously in February 1951) until his sudden death in November 1952. V.K. Wellington Koo was elected to complete Roosevelt's second term but, while an admirable figure in many ways, he lacked the authority and charisma of his predecessor.

While it would be simplistic to assert that this single event was totally decisive in and of itself, it does seem to have contributed to a moment of rupture. With a keystone in their relationship knocked away, the three superpowers began to move further apart from each other, with the Soviets going one way and the Anglo-Americans another. For example, even though it would not be true to say that the Soviets had not been supporting the communist insurgents in Malaya and the East Indies before this point, after 1952 they did step up their support (at least until a private agreement with the Commonwealth in 1958).

The most notable expression of this split was in the United States, where the so-called ‘Red Scare’ of 1952-56 was spearheaded by Senator Richard Nixon’s Committee on National Security, catapulting the Californian to global notoriety. Nixon was eventually selected as the Vice Presidential candidate by the Republican presidential hopeful Everett Dirksen and this trio (Charles Halleck was the GOP pick for Speaker) ended up defeating President A. Philip Randolph’s bid for re-election in 1956. Despite being the first GOP team to win the presidential election since 1928, the popularity that ushered the Dirksen-Nixon-Halleck ticket into power would not prove lasting. Dogged by revelations about his bullying and borderline-illegal actions while heading up the Committee on National Security, Nixon was almost forced to resign as early as 1957. A sharp economic downturn in 1959-60 put paid to their reelection hopes and they went down to the Progressive candidate of Estes Kefauver (along with his running mates Vice President John F. Kennedy and Speaker Roy Wilkins) in 1960. The anti-Soviet hysteria went down with them and American foreign policy towards the Soviets continued to be dominated by the ideas in George Kennan’s ‘Long Telegram,’ which had argued that the Soviets were ultimately a defensive and not an expansive power and that coexistence with them was possible.

During this time, however, the alliance between the Commonwealth and the Americans seemed to hold: the political leaders of both countries had a close personal rapport and a shared understanding that their nations’ interests were best served together. Key to this was the personal role of Clement Attlee, whose geopolitical view was strongly shaped by the War, viewing the Americans as friends and the Soviets as allies of convenience. In the decade after Roosevelt’s death and the cooling of relations with the Soviets, however, Anglo-American relations too began to cool. Partly this was an ideological split about who should lead the organisation variously referred to as the ‘English-speaking world,’ the ‘West,’ the ‘capitalist world’ or the ‘First World.’ But, more prosaically, it had to do with a growing geopolitical belief, on the part of both the Commonwealth and the United States, that, maybe, their strategic aims were no longer as united as they had once been.

Following Attlee’s departure in 1955, the British cabinet was left denuded of its old pro-American figures. Of the prominent Labour members of the old wartime coalition most were either dead (in the case of Ernest Bevin, Arthur Greenwood and Stafford Cripps) or retired (in the case of Attlee and Nicolson).* This left a cadre of ministers whose experience of the War involved either fighting it or generally living through it rather than politically managing it. As a result they had a more cynical attitude towards the Americans. After Gaitskell died in 1963, the Big Four were now led by men and women (Barbara Castle, Lester Pearson, Ayub Khan and George Cole) whose attitudes towards the Americans were, at best, ambivalent. The President of the Commonwealth Council, Robert Menzies, had a romantic attachment to Britain, which he still called the ‘mother country’, that overwhelmed any love he might have for America. Tony Crosland, the Speaker of the Assembly, had his own plans for the organisation and the United States was of far less interest to him.

Thus, when the split came, it came as a result not of active hostility but due to the fact that there really was nobody left to defend the idea of continuing close cooperation. In January 1966, the Commonwealth formally withdrew from NATO and ordered all foreign military personnel to leave Commonwealth territory by the end of the year. A furious G. Mennen Williams, the US Secretary of State, asked whether this removal should include the exhumation of the American war dead buried around the world on Commonwealth territory. The proximate cause of the split was the American government reaching an agreement with the Spanish monarchical government to station a US naval detachment in Guantanamo Bay, giving the Americans another major toehold in what the Commonwealth had traditionally considered their lake. In truth, however, the split had been coming for some time, as we have seen. The fact was that, by 1965, there were not enough people left in positions of significant authority to argue in favour of a close alliance with the Americans.

Despite the hyperbolic predictions of some at the time, the weakening of cooperation between the three superpowers did not presage the collapse of the postwar order. The tripartite Reykjavik conference of March 1967 was held in good spirits and is generally agreed to have laid the grounds for the signing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Afterwards, the supposed ‘spirit of Reykjavik’ animated the cordial and cooperative relations between the three superpowers, even if they shied away from the close cooperation of the war years. Although the summit communique referred to the principles of non-interference, many analysts saw this as a thinly-veiled reference to spheres of influence. However, with Dag Hammarskjold still at the helm of the UN, the institution retained a certain kind of informal primacy and the three superpowers were relatively happy to carry out their diplomacy within it, at least for now.

*The only one of that coterie still around in frontline politics was Malcolm MacDonald, whose post-1945 career had seen him serve in junior ministerial positions at the Ministry of Health (1945-49), Transport (1949-51) and Supply (1951-53), before becoming a Commonwealth AM (1953-62) and from then on the head of the Commonwealth secretariat until his retirement in 1966. In these later two roles he took a generally pro-Commonwealth (if not fully anti-American) line.

Secretaries General of the United Nations

1. Gladwyn Jebb; United Kingdom; September 1945 - February 1946
2. Franklin Roosevelt; United States; February 1946 - November 1952
3. V.K. Wellington Koo; China; November 1952 - February 1956
4. Dag Hammarskjold; Sweden; February 1956 - present

Nuclear-Armed States (with date of first weapon)

1. United States; 1945
2. Soviet Union; 1949
3. Commonwealth; 1951
4. Sweden; 1964
5. French Union; 1966

 

[Rattigan]

A Certain Idea of France: The French Empire under the Fourth Republic

Le grand Charles: the last-known photograph of Charles de Gaulle, taken shortly before his assassination in November 1946


The French surrender in 1940 and the subsequent ‘Vichy’ regime lead by Philippe Petain brought the curtain down on the Third Republic, a regime which, while it was the longest-lasting constitution since the fall of the ancien regime, had never commanded unqualified support nor quelled the doubts of many elements of society, both reactionary and revolutionary, about the viability of democracy as a governing system. Charles de Gaulle had been the leading figure of the Free French forces during the War and was widely expected to take a senior position in the government of the new Fourth Republic. As head of the provisional government set up in 1944, de Gaulle had declared war on the Axis and chaired the subsequent constitutional convention.

The convention produced a constitution with a unicameral legislative assembly elected every four years. Presidents were elected via an electoral college to a maximum of two five-year terms, on a joint ticket with a Vice President whose main job was to chair the council of ministers. Despite his domineering presence at the convention, de Gaulle was not wholly satisfied with its results - in particular he was dissatisfied that the presidency would not be subject to direct elections - and he was initially minded to withdraw from public life. However, he was prevailed upon by his allies to stand for the presidency, for which he was generally regarded as a shoe-in, on the assumption that he could make whatever amendments he regarded as necessary down the line.

However, whatever dreams de Gaulle may have had for the future would come to nothing. In November 1946, only eleven months after he won the first presidential election, he was assassinated in Paris by the right wing activist Paul Touvier. Into the vacuum, the Vice President Georges Bonnet ascended to the presidency. Bonnet’s presidency would be troubled and dominated by the question of the future of France’s colonial empire. Bonnet was unwilling to make concessions to nationalist leaders, an attitude which had begun a war in Indochina in December 1946 and which was causing trouble to brew in Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria. His equivocation on the issue, combined with the continued failure of French forces to control the growing insurgency in Indochina and the victory by Pierre Mendes France’s Radical Party in the 1948 elections, resulted in his attempted impeachment in 1949. Although the vote failed, Bonnet was left as a lame duck and did not stand for re-election in 1950.

This vote was won by Philippe Leclerc, a hero of the World War who had urged reconciliation between imperial and nationalist forces in Indochina during his tenure in command there (1944-46). In March 1951, a tentative agreement was reached between Leclerc and the two senior Vietnamese leaders: Emperor Bao Dai and the communist leader Ho Chi Minh. While the Emperor and Ho had no love for one another, the Emperor had earned the revolutionary’s respect owing to his activity in the anti-Chinese resistance during the war. Furthermore, while Ho was no fan of French power, he saw it as being in long-term decline and feared it less than the Chinese or the Japanese. Under the terms of the Leclerc-Ho-Bao Agreement, French Indochina would be disestablished and divided into the kingdoms of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam (the last of whom would have Ho as its prime minister) and the Republic of Cochinchina (the region around Saigon and the Mekong Delta that was dominated by white French merchants and plantation owners). They would all be independent members of the French Union.

Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia would agree to join in this putative union in 1954 but the organisation would not take its full form, with a bureaucracy and decision-making forum, until 1958, with the accession of Guinea, Senegal, West Africa and Equatorial Africa. However, hopes that the FU would emulate the example of the Commonwealth seemed fanciful almost immediately: in the first place, only residents of certain communes of Senegal (since 1879) had been French citizens prior to 1958; secondly, none of the French colonies (including Senegal) had undergone the process of building up civil society institutions or a Francophilic elite that would make the transition easier. As Harold Nicolson (who, as Lord Nicolson, was not above a bit of continuing freelance diplomatic work) rather dismissively noted in his diary after leaving a Commonwealth-FU conference in 1959, “the French simply haven’t put the work in.”

The first elections to the FU assembly took place in 1958 and the campaigning season was marred by violence and disruption and, on polling day, rioting broke out across a number of colonies. Allegations of voter intimidation were rife, both in the former colonies and in Metropolitan France. During his final years in the Elysse, Leclerc worked to try and ensure that there were free and fair elections along the lines of universal suffrage that was (theoretically) guaranteed, as well as making big gestures towards including black and Muslim members of the FU assembly in its decision making process.

But the reality was that a large minority of his party (the Union of Democrats (“UD”) founded by de Gaulle) were not with him on this, instead favouring the pieds-noirs (where they were a relevant minority) and/or French business interests at the expense of native Africans, Muslims or Indochinese. The pieds-noirs in north Africa caused a particular problem, working to try and minimise Arab turnout through a mixture of violence and bureaucratic maneuvering. A veneer of free and fair elections open to all had been maintained only by the heavy presence of French and Foreign Legion soldiers and it was clear that this would have to be the case for the foreseeable future. Even notwithstanding this, a great deal of communal violence still occurred and it was particularly bad in Oran and Algiers, where 133 Muslims and 56 pieds-noirs were killed in political violence over the course of 1958-59. In an attempt to evolve the empire into something more just, Leclerc looked to have accidentally increased French military commitments to its colonies.

Leclerc’s relatively progressive attitude towards France’s former colonial subjects, as well as his willingness to use French troops to enforce voting rights for non-whites in the FU, caused a backlash amongst conservative-minded opinion in metropolitan France itself. Many thus deserted the DU and found their voice in the Union of Independent Republicans, a party led by a mix of social conservatives and, some pointed out, those who had collaborated with the German occupation. A particular source of outrage for many was the decision to make Algeria a member of the FU separate from France itself.

By the mid-1950s, therefore, France had developed for itself an almost unique party-political structure. Rather than two competing parties of the centre-left and centre-right with assorted smaller parties milling around, as was the case in most western European countries, France instead developed a tripartite party division. The DU became a mainly rural party advocating a small but protective state, mixed in with a support for the FU and anti-socialism. The Independent Republicans (who shortened their name to simply the Republicans in 1960) also took a right wing perspective but their political base was drawn mainly from the business class and those who felt strongly about French grandeur and the empire. Many of their supporters were also unreconstructed white supremacists and anti-democrats, although these messages were often kept quiet. The French Communist Party had been discredited after the failure of a minor Soviet-backed coup in 1947, leaving the Radical Party as the supposed voice of the French left. But it did so in a unique way. The easiest way to describe its political position is somewhere around the left wing of the Liberal Party and the right wing of the Labour Party in the UK. Representing a belief in a protective and proactive state, the party drew much of its support from the urban working classes and the trades union movement. However, it was never the only party advocating for state direction or intervention (both the DU and the Republicans did so to differing degrees) which stopped it holding this territory to itself and becoming the kind of fully social democratic party seen in the Commonwealth or the United States.

Well funded and with close ties to the business community and the military, the Independent Republicans became the largest party in the assembly in 1956, forming a minority coalition under General Raoul Salan. In the elections of November 1960, they went one better and managed to form a majority government. This posed huge questions for the presidential elections only a month later. The Republican candidate, Said Boualam, failed to fully capitalise on the breakthrough of his party in the legislative elections (partly because of the anti-democratic sentiment he espoused repeatedly on the campaign trail) but was still left with enough electoral college delegates to block either the Radical candidate Felix Gaillard or the DU candidate George Pompidou from receiving the necessary 50%+1 to win the presidency. In negotiations between Salan and the DU, Salan agreed that Republican votes would go to the DU on three conditions: that a pieds-noir exclave be carved out of independent Algeria and governed as an autonomous part of metropolitan France; that French troops be withdrawn from monitoring the next FU elections in 1962; and that the constitution be amended to grant greater budget-setting authority to the legislature. Pompidou agreed to the terms and, with the votes of the Independent Republicans, he won the presidency on the next ballot of the electoral college.

The partition of Algeria (without consultation with the Algerian government, of course) took place on 3 May 1961, with the city of Oran and the area around it returning to French control as the Department of the Maghreb. The partition, appearing as it did with little to no foreknowledge, immediately initiated a widespread refugee crisis as pieds-noirs and Francophile Muslims (often former or present harkis) sought to enter the Maghreb and many Muslims sought to flee to independent Algeria. In the resulting civil violence, the numbers of killed and missing has been estimated from anywhere between 5,000 to 30,000. With all sides overwhelmed, in July the government of Algeria and France together forcibly shut the border and banned movement of peoples between Algeria and the Maghreb.

Over the next few years, the Republicans began to work with various political factions around the FU to draw together an alliance of co-opted colonial elites and French business interests which triumphed in the 1962 FU elections. With France no longer going to send troops to enforce elections, these various colonies all began systematic voter suppression exercises designed to entrench their own power. In November 1963, Ho was turfed out of power in Vietnam following elections marred by widespread vote-rigging. Responding to this, Ho retreated to the countryside where he declared Vietnam’s secession from the FU as a republic and began a guerilla campaign against royal forces.

Presidents of the Fourth Republic

1. Charles de Gaulle; Union of Democrats; December 1945 - November 1946
2. Georges Bonnet; Union of Democrats; November 1946 - December 1950
3. Philippe Leclerc; Union of Democrats; December 1950 - December 1960
4. Georges Pompidou; Union of Democrats; December 1960 - present

Premiers of the Fourth Republic

1. Charles de Gaulle; Union of Democrats; August 1944 - December 1945
2. Robert Schuman; Union of Democrats; December 1945 - November 1948
3. Pierre Mendes France; Radical Party; November 1948 - November 1952
4. Robert Schuman; Union of Democrats; November 1952 - November 1956
5. Raoul Salan; Union of Independent Republicans; November 1956 - April 1962
6. Maurice Faure; Radical Party; April 1962 - November 1964
7. Edmond Jouhaud; Republicans; November 1964 - present

 

[Rattigan]

Leaving the Feudal Age: Political Reform under Castle and Jenkins

It remains a matter of contention amongst historians as to what extent Castle was bounced into an election in the spring of 1967 by Thorpe’s campaign over the previous summer and autumn. As many have pointed out, just after the four-year mark was a relatively common time for government’s to go to the country. One the other hand, it is certainly true that, when they did finally go to the country, Labour failed to get on top of the narrative and Castle was dogged throughout her campaign by questions of whether or not her government had been ‘frit’ by the Liberals. When Jeremy Thorpe ended his final address to his MPs before the campaign by commanding them to “go home to your constituencies and prepare for government,” many believed that he was right. As polling day came closer, some within Labour even began to voice concerns privately that they were going to lose.

While the wilder predictions of Labour defeat proved unfounded, nobody could deny that the election had dealt the party a severe bloody nose. Labour had governed with small majorities before and their sleek election-winning machine had prevented the Liberals from getting over the line but they had been taught a serious lesson about the dangers of taking the electorate for granted. Perhaps the worst night, however, was had by the Conservatives, who were reduced to only eight seats. Jo Grimond resigned the next day, his vision of a libertarian, centrist party in tatters. In his place the party elected Robert Carr in October 1967. Carr was an experienced hand but it was unclear in which direction he was going to lead the party.

Thorpe, on the other hand, could claim a moral victory, if not a psephological one. The contrast between a bubbly Thorpe and the more subdued-looking Castle at the state opening of Parliament in 1967 lead one sketch writer to describe the former as “the real Prime Minister.”

As Labour had done before when it had operated on small majorities, the government turned its primary attention to matters which could plausibly be conducted on a crossparty basis. In this case, Castle’s government chose to focus on constitutional reform.

A by-product of the heated debates about Irish Home Rule in the 1880s had been a reduction in the power of the Lords through the Parliament Acts. The concept of ‘Life Peers’ had subsequently been introduced in 1920, further curtailing the powers of the hereditary aristocracy. The Sankey-Beauchamp-Salisbury Agreement - a by-product of the agreements over the Chamberlain Doctrine in 1929 - had further limited the Lords’ power by agreeing that they would not oppose a government’s manifesto promise. However, the impression remained that there was unfinished business with Lords reform. In 1967, Roy Jenkins was moved from Health Secretary to head up a new ministry operating out of the Cabinet Office known as the Ministry of Constitutional Reform. The first target he took aim at was the second chamber.

Jenkins’ white paper appeared in 1968, proposing the removal of the hereditary peers and their replacement by an entirely elected body. This occasioned much negotiation both within and between the parties, with Labour’s tricky electoral position perhaps occasioning greater compromise than might have occurred otherwise. The resulting House of Lords Act 1969 kept 92 hereditary peers (elected from amongst their number), 16 bishops of the established Church of England (selected by the Archbishop of Canterbury) and the Law Lords (who formally lost their right to vote and attend ordinary sittings until they retired).

The remaining life peers were to be phased out in thirds through a series of elections, to be replaced by peers elected for a single term of 18 years with no possibility of re-election. A prospective elected Lord could only be elected if they had served ten years or fewer in the Commons. This would preserve the less partisan nature of the Lords and, hopefully, encourage non-political experts from industry and/or academia to put themselves forward for election. (Although it should be noted that buy-in from academia, science and industry is not something the British political class had traditionally struggled to receive.) An exception was made for former prime ministers - who, it was agreed, would be offered life peerages when they left the Commons - and the Lord Chancellor - who would continue to sit as a member of the Lords but would no longer be given a peerage, would continue to be a member of the Commons (even if they could not sit in it or vote in its divisions) and notionally represent their constituents in Parliament.

The first such election would be in 1970, for the first third of elected peers, the second third would be elected in 1976 and the final third in 1982. Those seats elected in the first election in 1970 would then be up for election again in 1988 and so on. On each occasion 120 Lords would come up for election, with 12 being elected from each of the 10 nations of the UK via the single transferable vote. At each election, a third of the pre-existing life peers would retire. This would leave the Lords, by 1988, with at least 481 members (depending on the number of former prime ministers who took up the offer of a life peerage).

Following on from Lords reform, Jenkins also turned his attention to the make-up of the House of Commons. His white paper on this topic appeared in September 1969 and suggested a system known as the ‘top up system.’ This reduced the number of constituency MPs from 735 to 635, who would be elected by a preferential voting system (a slight tweak on the traditional first past the post system). The remaining 100 MPs would then by selected via party lists on the proportional representation system. This would have introduced an element of proportionality into the British political system, while retaining the relationship between constituents and their MPs. It also allowed the parties to retain considerable control over the electoral process.

However, the thin balance of the Parliament caused severe problems for this second proposal. There were too many MPs worried about the reduction in constituency seats (not all of them guaranteed to get anywhere near the top of a party list) for such a reform to pass without controversy. While the Labour and Liberal whips were able to cobble together enough pro-reform MPs to send it to committee, Castle understood the difficulties the bill would face on a final reading and so made sure that enough of her backbench loyalists were on the committee to see that it was quietly put on ice, at least until after the next election.

 

[Rattigan]

The Bear and the Eagle: The Bucharest Mutiny and the Crisis of the Soviet Empire

Mutineers attack Soviet soldiers in Bucharest


Since their takeover of eastern Europe in the 1940s, Soviet power had been remarkably untroubled. The Soviet client states had governed with a reasonable amount of competence (notwithstanding their general corruption and authoritarianism) and the countries in question had all experienced economic growth in the subsequent two decades. While these improvements were, it is now generally believed, the result of the ‘peace dividend’ post 1945 Europe rather than anything specific about the Soviet planned economy (similar economic booms were experienced in such varied countries as Italy, the Benelux and Yugoslavia) they nonetheless served to tamp down demands for political reform, at least for a while. However, this changed when Mikhail Tukhachevsky died suddenly of a heart attack in June 1968.

Tukhachevsky’s death came as a surprise (despite his relatively advanced age, he had remained vigorous and seemingly in good health) and left a power vacuum within Soviet politics. While Nikolai Bukharin remained hegemonic at the Finance Ministry and the position of General Secretary had come to be subject to a loose kind of performance review every five years at a Party Conference, the role of Premier had no defined line of succession and there was not an obvious figure to step into the role. Georgy Zhukov, who had held a variety of civil and military posts in the Soviet government since his participation in the World War, stepped in as Premier but few observers thought that this would be a long-term solution (if nothing else, he was nearly 72 at the time).

With the iron face of Soviet repression now out of the way, a variety of local grievances coalesced with a general dissatisfaction with the state of the political system (now ironically exacerbated by the economic improvements which had tamped down these concerns in the past) to create a dangerous political cocktail for the Soviet administrators in eastern Europe. The first sign of the troubles began in July 1968, in the form of a mutiny of Romanian soldiers at the mixed Soviet-Romanian garrison in Otopeni, about 10 miles north of Bucharest. Further rebellions (consistently referred to as ‘mutinies’ of local troops by the Soviet authorities, even if this wasn’t strictly true) then erupted in Czechia, Hungary, Brandenburg and the Polish regions of Poland-Slovakia.

Lurid tales of the massacre of Soviet soldiers and their families by a Romanian mob were reported back in the Soviet Union and the initial prevarication of the Soviet government caused an outbreak of genuine anti-government hostility in the Soviet media. Zhukov was quietly pensioned off in December 1968, replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, who adopted a hardline approach towards the rebels. With only Prussia, Saxony, Bulgaria and the Slovakian regions of Poland-Slovakia remaining loyal, the rebellion posed a considerable threat to Soviet power in the region. However, the generally disorganised nature of the various mutinies (not to mention the lack of direct support from NATO or the Commonwealth) meant that they were unable to construct a united front and were instead crushed piecemeal by the overwhelming force of the Soviet military machine and their Bucharest Pact allies (whose role in the suppression played an important propaganda role).

On 1 January 1969, the Soviets granted amnesty to all rebels “not involved in murder” (a suitably elastic term) but hostilities did not finally end until September 1969. This amnesty, however, did not seriously preclude widespread reprisals from Soviet forces, many of whose officers adopted a ‘no prisoners’ policy. An estimated 100,000 civilians are believed to have been killed during the uprising, either during the military campaign or as part of the subsequent crackdown as the Soviets reasserted their control.

As the campaign wound down, Soviets planners turned their mind directly to how to reorganise their European domains. In August 1969, the Soviet legislature passed the European Development Plan, which formally dissolved the ‘independent’ governments of the Bucharest Pact countries and transferred their control to the Soviet Union. A new Soviet department, the European Ministry, was created to handle the governance of the region, with a new Politburo position created for its head. The Soviet ‘advisors’ to the Romanian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Brandenburger governments were given the new titles of ‘governor’ and given the job of implementing the policies devised by the European Ministry. The governments of Prussia, Saxony, Slovakia and Bulgaria remained in place but were now subordinated to the Soviet governors of the other eastern European provinces. The countries then withdrew their missions from the UN (most diplomats claimed asylum in New York) and were replaced by one single mission representing the ‘Commonwealth of Independent States,’ complete with a brand new flag and anthem. The Bucharest Pact, a dead letter anyway, was dissolved and a separate mutual defence treaty was signed between the Soviets and the CIS. The other members of the UN protested but, with the Soviets threatening a veto over any Security Council actions, there was little that could be done about what was, in strictly legalistic terms, the voluntary amalgamation of independent states.

This reorganisation of their domains overlay a number of dramatic changes to the structure of Soviet control of the region. For the two decades since the seizure of eastern Europe, defence of the region was, from the Soviet point of view, conducted on the cheap: local soldiers outnumbered Soviet ones by up to nine to one. The Mutiny, which came as a severe shock, altered the mixture. The various armies of the former eastern European nations were amalgamated into one CIS army, with the ratio of CIS soldiers to Soviet ones being held at something closer to two to one. The preference was for recruits to be drawn from poor peasants or urban workers and deployed around the new country so that they developed as few regional attachments as possible. Native officers were removed, either returning to the ranks (their prospects for advancement severely restricted) or being arrested.

Mustering a roster of around 250,000 soldiers available for active service and an estimated support network of nearly 10,000,000 men, the army was by far the largest employer in the new CIS and absorbed around a third to a half of its revenue. This created a formidable source of cannon fodder (for which the Soviet Union did not have to pay directly) for potential overseas deployments but its primary function would be domestic intimidation. Laid out at regular intervals across the country, its garrisons were a permanent reminder of who was really in charge. A large police apparatus, numbering around 100,000 men by 1980 would serve as the forward screen of repression. Down to the end, the CIS would remain a garrison state.

Coercion, of course, could never be sufficient in and of itself: it always required a degree of collaboration as well. This came from two main areas. In the first place were the rulers of Prussia, Saxony, Slovakia and Bulgaria, who had remained loyal during the Mutiny and were allowed to remain in their government offices. While they were now, as we have seen, de jure as well as de facto subordinated to the Soviets, they remained beneficiaries of the imperial regime and enjoyed its protection in their exploitation of the tenants and workers underneath them. These forces were natural Soviet subordinates. Less so could be said of the petit bourgeois businessmen who became the beneficiaries of the economic reforms after the Soviet reoirgnisation (which, with minor national changes, had largely mimicked the Soviet market socialist reforms of the ‘20s). Many were resentful of the limitations imposed by Soviet domination, including a tariff system which prioritised trade to and from the Soviet Union at the expense of local economic growth. But they nonetheless generally understood that Soviet rule guaranteed them access to each other’s markets and most seem to have regarded Soviet hegemony as the underpinning of stability.

 

[Rattigan]

Reaching for the Stars: The General Election of 1971

In February 1971, the mood of the nation and the whole Commonwealth was brightened with the successful launch of the Salute-1, the world’s first permanent space station. Since the failure of the Sol-1 in 1956, the manned-flight programme had been quietly downgraded and the CSA had not performed their first human spaceflight until Lee Jones orbited the Earth on the Sol-3 in May 1965. While this was a significant achievement, the Soviet and American space programmes had achieved similar feats in April and August 1958, respectively. The CSA’s research, on the other hand, had instead concentrated on unmanned satellites. Megaroc-8 successfully orbited the moon in October 1956, Megaroc-16 had flown by Venus in February 1958 and Megaroc-23 had flown by Mars in November 1959. While in the long term probably of more scientific value, these probes and the subsequent launch of weather and communications satellites were not as sexy as manned flights and the organisation rapidly dipped from public view. Indeed, by 1962 the CSA had been seriously threatened with defunding (which had stimulated the restart of the Sol project in the first place and explains the long gap between Sol-1 and Sol-2 and Sol-3) and the CSA was not a serious player in the race to the moon, which was won when the American astronauts Gus Grissom and Ed White first walked on the lunar surface in February 1967.

Salute-1, however, was a serious step up from all previous space missions and was a huge propaganda coup for the CSA and, by extension, the Commonwealth. The three-man crew of Ray Hanna, Mervyn Middlecoat and Jerry Bowler became international celebrities, with their nationalities of New Zealander, Pakistani and British (respectively) further emphasising that this was an international effort.

The success of the Salute-1 lead to a bump in the opinion polls for Labour, something and encouraged by a minor scandal around investments in a property company that lead to the resignation of the Liberal Shadow Home Secretary Reginald Maudling. The poll boost was not confined to the UK alone: Canada, Australia, Pakistan and New Zealand would all go to the polls in early 1971, with the sitting governments all experiencing positive results. Encouraged by these developments, Castle dissolved Parliament and went to the country in the autumn of 1971.

The election campaign itself was a boring one, with Labour running on its now-traditional ‘steady as she goes’ message and the Liberals attempting to make their ‘one more heave’ (in Thorpe’s words) for power. This time, however, the Labour electoral machine worked smoothly, ruthlessly hammering away at the Liberals most vulnerable seats. The end result saw the Liberals’ 20 most marginal seats all fall to Labour, plumping up the Labour majority to a more comfortable size once more. Under Carr, the Conservatives managed to hold steady on 8, not a particularly exciting result but a decent one for them under the circumstances.

Castle had now not only become the first female prime minister but had also matched the achievement of the legendary Clement Attlee in winning a third term in office. What happened in her third term, however, raised the question of whether she was really all that fortunate to have won. Not for nothing have the 1970s come to be known as ‘the dark decade’ as the financial and diplomatic house of cards on which Britain and the Commonwealth had constructed their postwar prosperity threatened to come crashing down.

 

[Rattigan]

The Tragedy of Errors: The Bengali War of Independence

Naxalite insurgents in Bengal, November 1971


Since elections in 1964, the centre-left Bengali League (the “League”) party had governed Bengal in coalition with the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (“CPB”), an arrangement that was effectively designed to lock the Hindu-dominated People’s Party (“PP”) out of power. Mujibur Rahman of the League served as Prime Minister and Moni Singh of the CPB as Finance Minister (and effective deputy). This situation, although it had persisted for a number of years, satisfied nobody: the CPB were frustrated that they couldn’t go further and the PP were frustrated that they were locked out of power. In addition, the country struggled with a low-level insurgency concentrated in its west, by marxist militias known as Naxalites which had refused repeated CPB calls for them to stand down. It was a kind of open secret amongst security experts that the Naxalites real support came from India. The government had originally asserted that they would deal with the insurgency themselves and the Bengali government had refused Commonwealth and UN support on this point. However, by 1971 this refusal was beginning to look pig headed rather than proud. When combined with economic stagnation, the situation in Bengal only looked worse as Bengalis looked on jealously at the soaring living standards in Pakistan and Ceylon.

The proximate cause of the outbreak of 1971, however, lay in a very simple tale of government corruption. On 13 October 1971, the Bengal Observer published an expose in which Moni Singh was caught soliciting donations from individuals he thought were Soviet agents. Although the very fact of him soliciting money from these individuals rather suggested that the CPB’s relationship with the Soviets wasn’t as close as the reporting made it out to be, Rahman was still put in the political position where he had to sack Singh and the other CPB ministers, which in turn precipitated a vote of confidence on 23 October on which the PP and CPB teamed up to oust the League. However, rather than call for fresh elections, the Bengali governor general Uday Chand Mahtab (a Hindu whose appointment in 1970 had been a sop to the PP) urged the PP and the League to form a cross-sectarian coalition to lock out the CPB. The following day, the CPB began an insurrection (obviously pre-planned) to overthrow the government.

The initial coup failed but it caused the PP leadership to flee Calcutta and, despite the notionally non-sectarian character of the CPB, the League were required to turn to Muslim militias to put them down, which in turn unleashed a wave of anti-Muslim pogroms which soon wracked the country. Over two months of violence in November and December, approximately 4,500 Hindus were killed and countless more driven from their homes. A week later, various CPB militias allied with the Naxalites to launch another attack on the capital, in response to which Rahman made a formal call for Commonwealth forces to come and restore order to the country.

The country which took most notice of this call was Pakistan. Although the prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was notionally a non-sectarian politician, he and everyone understood that his People’s Party relied for much of its support on Muslim peasants and factory workers. As such, he immediately announced that he intended to deploy peacekeepers to Bengal. Almost before the rest of the Commonwealth could respond, Pakistani troops began to arrive in March 1972. Although the Commonwealth forces were initially welcomed by all sides of the political-sectarian divide, this feeling rapidly melted away as the Commonwealth military (mostly made up of Muslim Pakistanis and lead by the Pakistani general Zia-ul-Haq) severely bungled their response and rapidly came to be associated with anti-communist, anti-Hindu feeling.

Forces from other Commonwealth countries began arriving in May and tensions de-escalated over the course of the year but the damage had been done. An official Commonwealth fact-finding mission headed by Norman Kirk concluded in August 1972 that Commonwealth forces had lost trust to such an extent that it would be impossible to re-assert order through military means. Matters were not helped, admittedly, by the fact that the leadership of both the League and the PP had fled Bengal and were refusing to return unless the Commonwealth military gave them guarantees that would, in practice, be impossible to keep. Things then went from bad to worse in October, when the provinces in eastern Bengal (which were lightly populated and had always enjoyed significant cultural differences from their western Bengali compatriots) declared their own independence. In response, Bhutto rapidly reversed his position and won re-election a month later on a platform of an exit from Bengal and peace in the region.

In one of the more shameless and cynical episodes in twentieth-century diplomatic history, the Soviet and Commonwealth representatives colluded behind the scenes at the UN to decide the fate of Bengal. The Soviets’ prime aim was conditioned by a number of domestic and geopolitical factors. On the domestic front, the Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev was looking for a foreign policy win in order to help him in his internal struggle with General Secretary Alexei Kosygin (Kosygin was due to retire at the Party Congress in July 1975 and the fight was on for each faction to put up their candidate as a successor) and the Finance Minister Nikolai Bukharin. Geopolitically, the Soviets were desperately looking for allies in Asia, with their client states in Turkestan, Mongolia and Manchuria being little more than drains on the Soviet exchequer than genuine allies.

From the Commonwealth’s point of view, they wanted a way of withdrawing from Bengal with the minimum of embarrassment. Furthermore, by this stage Commonwealth strategists were still fundamentally more concerned about the Americans than the Soviets. A military alliance between the Japanese and the Americans by the 1960 Washington Naval Treaty had allowed the US Navy access to Japanese naval bases, effectively making the entire Pacific Ocean north of the equator (and arguably south too) an American lake. Although the Commonwealth maintained a formidable presence in the Pacific (mainly concentrated around Australia and Singapore), it was understood that it was basically a defensive one and it was considered important not to abandon the Indian Ocean as well. A Soviet presence there was considered less dangerous, given the minimal Soviet naval capacities in the Pacific.

When Siddhartha Skankar Ray, the PP’s leader, made a public plea for the American’s to come to his party’s assistance, the choice was made for the Commonwealth. Under a secret agreement, Commonwealth forces turned a blind eye as Soviet forces began arriving in Bengal towards the end of summer 1972. This was followed by Operation Searchlight in October 1972, under which the CPB, with Soviet aid and Commonwealth connivance, seized control of strategic transport and governance points across the country. A full ceasefire was declared in November, which was observed by Commonwealth and CPB forces if not the various Hindu and Muslim militias, followed by a UN-backed one in December. Later that month, Bengal adopted a republican marxist constitution and formally withdrew from the Commonwealth on 1 January 1973. Concomitantly, the rebellious eastern provinces of Bengal reached an agreement to secede on 25 March 1973 as the Northeastern Federation. The leaders of this country studiously and skilfully managed to avoid Commonwealth and Soviet overtures and over the next few years would gradually move into the Chinese orbit.

Despite the pretence that the secret agreement with the Soviets was a way of negotiating an ‘honourable’ departure from Bengal, amidst the diplomatic rubble of January 1973 there was no way of interpreting it other than as both a complete humiliation for the Commonwealth and a hugely damaging blow to its credibility as a liberal and fair global actor. Not only had Commonwealth diplomats, with their reputation for smoothness, intelligence and competence, connived in the handing over of one of their allies to one superpower for fear of handing it over to another but they had also betrayed the emerging democracy in Bengal. Whatever the failings of the Bengali state (and there were many - undermined by venality, corruption and sectarianism as it had been) it had been one staggering, unevenly but gradually, towards democracy and this had now been crushed. Democratic Bengali politicians were detained or exiled by the Soviet-backed dictatorship, effectively with the connivance of their supposed allies. The UK/Commonwealth had a reasonably good record at setting up democracies in former colonies (Pakistan, Rhodesia and East Africa being notable examples) but all of that was called into question by this failure in Bengal.

The damage, however, would soon be compounded but from a very different direction.

 

[Rattigan]

Burying Marx: The Final Years of Nikolai Bukharin

A patrol boat in use during Nikolai Bukharin's Black Sea tour


In November 1973 Nikolai Bukharin publicly announced his resignation as People’s Commissar for Finance, a position that he had held, with various immaterial changes of precise title, since 1922. However, despite the public pomp around Bukharin’s supposed retirement from public life, he remained a member of the Presidium and he continued to be regarded by outside observers as the “paramount leader” of the country, with the CIA and the Five Eyes Agency believing him to have continuing backroom control.

The truth, of course, was a good deal more complicated. On the one hand, he was held up in internal CPSU conflicts as a good example for communist cadres who refused to retire of old age. But, on the other, Bukharin’s resignation had not been as willing as it had been portrayed to the public. Bukharin’s power had been significantly weakened by the fiasco of the Bucharest Mutiny, which conservative elements of the CPSU used as a wedge issue to organise a campaign against his rule in general. To reassert his economic agenda, in the spring of 1976, Bukharin began a tour of the southern Soviet Union, visiting Kiev, Donetsk, Volgograd and spending the New Year in Samara.

On his tour, Bukharin made various speeches and generated large local support for his reformist platform. He stressed the importance of what he called the ‘managed, socialist market’ in the soviet Union and criticized those who wished to roll back the system he had designed. His southern tour was at first ignored by the Petrograd and national media, which were then under the control of Bukharin’s political rivals. Leonid Brezhnev, the Premier, showed little support and even Alexei Kosygin, the General Secretary and formerly close ally of Bukharin’s, kept tight lipped.

Challenging this wall of silence, Kiev’s Ukrainian-language newspaper ‘Soviet Truth’ published several articles supporting reforms authored by Yuri Usmanov, a pseudonym which many suspected to be Bukharin himself and which quickly gained support amongst local officials. This new wave of policy rhetoric gave way to a political conflict within the Politburo, which was eventually solved when Brezhnev was outvoted in a private meeting and the national media began to report Bukharin’s tour several months after it occurred. The tour aided Bukharin’s proteges’ climb to the apex of Soviet power, with the eventual result that Bukharin remained the most powerful man in the Soviet Union, even into his late 80s.

 

[Rattigan]

Crashed: The Commonwealth Economic Crisis

The Red Queen is Not Amused: Castle makes her point to a journalist at a press conference discussing the creation of the Financial Stability Fund


The second crisis of the early 1970s to afflict the Commonwealth struck at the single currency. This would dominate Castle's third term, for obvious reasons and the only major domestic reform that it undertook was a largely technical one that went under the radar until over a decade later. In 1973 the government rolled out a programme of connecting every Westminster to the NPL Network (now renamed the 'inter-departmental communication network' or 'internet'). The programme would subsequently be rolled out to the devolved assemblies in 1976 and local government institutions in 1979.

But, of course, this was not the main story of Castle's third term, which would be the beginning of a dramatic crisis in the Commonwealth. Beginning in 1972 but reaching a climax in 1973 and 1974, the Commonwealth-wide housing boom that had been proceeding since 1945 began to deflate. This resulted in a severe credit crunch and widespread bank insolvency, particularly with regard to Canadian and British banks, which were the largest suppliers of credit in the Commonwealth. In the interconnected economic world of the Commonwealth, things rapidly spread to other countries. As a result, the UK and the Commonwealth entered a recession for the first time since the Great Depression (there had been negative quarters of growth in 1958 and 1961 but not consecutively to count as a technical recession) in the second and third quarters of 1973.

Consumer prices went up, house prices down and wages stayed flat while unemployment increased. In late 1973, under pressure from financial speculators, the Bank of England briefly raised its target rate to 500% in an effort to defend the pound on financial markets. Nevertheless, the effort failed and in September 1973 the Bank announced plans for a devaluation of sterling which, in turn, exacerbated the banking crisis.

The various governments of the Commonwealth immediately went into crisis-fighting mode but their efforts did not seem to have a noticeable effect on consumers. With Commonwealth governments falling left and right in response to democratic disappointment at their handling of the crisis (the Rhodesian, Newfoundlander and Puerto Rican governments all lost reelection fights in 1973, while the New Zealand National Party abruptly changed leader in an internal coup) and there being no immediate end in sight, the Bank of England was forced to embark on an ambitious rescue package. Somewhat ironically, the Commonwealth response may have been helped by the death of one of their great statesmen: Lester Pearson, Chairman since 1970, had been seriously ill when appointed to the position and the stress of the job took its toll on him and he rapidly declined, falling into a final coma in November 1972 and dying a month later. In his place, the Commonwealth hurriedly appointed Peter Shore to the position. Having previously worked as Crosland’s chief of staff, Shore worked well with the Speaker and the two of them stood shoulder to shoulder with national governments to agree a bail-out package.

In November 1973, the Commonwealth and member states announced that they would guarantee not only all the bank deposits but also the debts of all of the banks’ creditors. To cover these issues, two new Commonwealth institutions were set up, both made up of a mixture of Commonwealth and national officials: the Recapitalisation Trust Bank was given responsibility for supervising institutions that needed recapitalisation; and the Asset Management Agency, which was responsible for selling off the assets that banks were holding as collateral. This, in effect, nationalised the bad assets of the Commonwealth’s banking system. In return, banks were required to write down losses and issue an ownership interest to the relevant national government. Remaining shareholders were diluted by private recapitalisations but bond-holders were all protected. When the Asset Management Agency sold the assets it had taken on, the proceeds flowed to the Commonwealth (and, from there, to national governments), meaning that it rapidly began to turn a profit. The Commonwealth as a whole returned to growth in the second quarter of 1974 and Crosland’s left-of-centre coalition retained their majority at the Commonwealth Assembly elections that summer.

While these moves rapidly saved the Commonwealth banking system and made money for the treasury, the unusual legal structure of the Commonwealth meant that a banking crisis was accidentally turned into a sovereign debt crisis. While the funds raised by the Asset Management Agency flowed directly to the Commonwealth (which set up and ran the organisation), a quirk of international law meant that the Commonwealth itself did not have the legal capacity to assume the liabilities of financial institutions registered in nation states. Thus, while money from the sale of distressed assets did find its way back to the individual member states from the Asset Management Agency, in the meantime countries could find themselves on the hook for potentially huge (and, indeed, open-ended as the countries couldn’t get rid of them themselves) liabilities.

While this was not necessarily an issue for countries with large populations and/or GDP, such as Canada, the United Kingdom and Pakistan, it could have potentially disastrous consequences for smaller countries with oversized banking industries. Unfortunately, this was the case in Newfoundland and Puerto Rico, two countries whose highly over-heated construction industries and over-extended banks created a recipe for disaster when the bad assets of those banks were transferred onto those governments’ balance sheets. In the first quarter of 1975, just as the Asset Management Agency was beginning to turn regular solid profits, yields on Puerto Rican and Newfoundland bonds suddenly jumped to historic highs and both countries fell back into recession under concerted attack from international speculators.

Under ordinary circumstances, a country would have handled such attacks by devaluing its currency and attempting to ride out the storm. Indeed, some sort of equivalent of this is what the Puerto Rican and Newfoundland governments attempted to do by calling on their drawing rights at the Bank of England. However, the belief that the Chinese walls they had put in place around drawing rights would prevent the contagion of Commonwealth-wide inflation turned out to be wrong. Both countries fell into disastrous recessions and inflation across the Commonwealth jumped into double digits. Debts in the crisis countries mounted rapidly (Puerto Rico’s public debt reached an enormous 105% of GDP by the end of 1975 while Newfoundland’s touched an astonishing 127%) and government bonds in all Commonwealth countries came under attack from a mixture of bond hawks and inflation.

The decisive moment, however, seems to have been the old reliable source of political partisanship. As in 1973, governments began to go down, resulting in Commonwealth leadership losing allies and gaining critics. In the autumn of 1975, the Labour government of Frank McManus lost in the Australian elections to the Liberal Party under Malcolm Fraser, who advocated a more punitive and austere strategy towards Newfoundland and Puerto Rico in order to bring inflation under control. With Castle and Bhutto both facing Liberal insurgencies from the neo-Gladstonians Margaret Thatcher and Muhammad Khan Junejo respectively (both of whom advocated measures like Fraser), they called an emergency summit in January 1976 to hammer out the Financial Stability Fund (“FSF”). The FSF was an institution that could issue bonds or other debt instruments on the market in order to raise funds needed to provide loans to sterling-zone countries in financial trouble. In theory, this would allow Puerto Rico and Newfoundland to have access to debt markets at non-punitive prices. In response, the markets calmed and there was a notable reduction in bond yields and inflation rates, although not enough to full take either of those fully out of a crisis.

Not confident but reasonably happy with this sticking plaster, both Castle and Bhutto went to their respective countries in the summer of 1976. Both, however, had miscalculated.

 

[Rattigan]

The Fall of the Red Wall: The General Election of 1976

Odd as it may seem in hindsight, going into the election in June 1976 Castle and her party held a degree of confidence that they might be able to cling on to the barest majority, or at least remain the largest party in the Parliament. Despite the generally disastrous economic and diplomatic events of the previous five years, a number of events had occurred which gave sustenance to this theory.

The first of these was the Thorpe Affair, the sensational story that the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe had conspired to murder his former lover Norman Scott in November 1971, following Scott’s years-long on-off attempt to blackmail Thorpe. Amidst the drip-drip of newspaper revelations, Thorpe had been forced to resign from office in February 1972. He was eventually arrested in August 1974 on a charge of conspiracy to murder. At the trial in May 1975, Thrope’s defence initially looked good when it became clear that the prosecution rested on the testimony of the alleged (attempted) assassin and Thorpe’s old crony (and Liberal MP until 1971) Peter Bessell, both of whom had financial conflicts of interest. However, Thorpe’s defence was left in tatters when he was eventually cross-examined over two days. He was caught in a number of lies by the prosecutor Norman Skelhorn and generally came across as dissembling and untrustworthy. Following a damning summing up by the judge, Thorpe was jailed for twenty years for conspiracy to murder.

Not, one would have thought, the best circumstances in which to fight a general election campaign. Fortunately for the Liberals (and unfortunately for Labour), they were not going into the 1976 election as the party of Thorpe. Instead, the choice of Margaret Thatcher as leader was the culmination of a bitter internal fight within the party and represented a (qualified) repudiation of the accommodations that successive Liberal leaders had made with various Labour reforms in an (ultimately) futile attempt to buy electoral success. Instead, Thatcher lead a ‘neo-gladstonian’ insurgency within the party which stressed free markets and personal responsibility. Thatcher had become an MP in 1961 (having previously been a London AM since 1950) and had worked her way up through various Shadow Cabinet positions, mostly in the economic sphere, during the 1960s. Her appointment as Shadow President of the Board of Trade, along with Alfred Suenson-Taylor as Shadow Chancellor, in 1967 was regarded as a major factional victory for the neo-gladstonians. During this time she had also become known nationally as a prominent (if, once again, qualified) opponent of Alice Bacon’s social reforms.

Although the British economy was, in strict GDP terms, out of recession by the time of the election, that could not hide the slowdown over the past few years and the flatlining of wages, as well as the worrying state of the Commonwealth as a whole. In this context, the Chancellor Denis Healey's off-the-cuff remark to a journalist in April 1976 that people had “never had it so good” came across poorly and he probably only kept his job because Labour was just about to formally launch its campaign. Thatcher’s campaign promising a fresh start therefore came across as bold and exciting, touching the pulse of a nation that was beginning to look for something else. During the course of its 30 years in power, Labour had successfully managed to renew itself on multiple occasions but, now, more and more people began to think that they had run out of road.

Amidst a backdrop of economic turbulence at home and diplomatic humiliation abroad, many have since argued that Labour’s electoral machine actually fought a reasonably successful rearguard campaign this year. In the end, however, they lost 82 seats, losing their majority in Parliament for the first time since 1945. The Liberal gains, 60 seats, and their majority, 25 were solid and represented a decisive fall from grace for Labour. As a further representation of the popular rejection of Labour, the Conservatives made major gains, more than trebling their parliamentary representation despite what was regarded as a generally lacklustre campaign under Robert Carr.

However, while it was a rejection of Labour’s record (or, at least, their record over the past five years), the result did not seem to be offering the Liberals carte blanche to pursue radical, transformative change. There is a lot that a politician can do with a majority of 25, as various Labour governments had proved recently, but to do so would require careful party management. Although Thatcher had skillfully managed to work herself and her faction to the top of the Liberals, it remained to be seen what they, with none of their ministers having any experience in office, could or would do in government.

 

[Rattigan]

Just a quick update today on another one of my personal hobby-horses: sport (this time football). After that I'll post a longer essay tomorrow giving a general overview of British society post-1945, which might go into some more details about how TTL's UK differs not only from OTL but from the kind of country that the OTL losers (mostly Labour) would have created. Next week, I'll be posting a long(ish) essay on Pakistani politics because I don't think I've explained that enough beyond the level of their involvement in the Commonwealth and also providing lists of various political leaders around the world to give some idea of how other things are going on. I'll do a separate update later today which lists the countries I'm going to cover. A bunch of people have got in touch on here and over PM mentioning which countries they'd like to see but if you spot a country you'd like to see on this list which isn't then feel free to let me know.

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Brilliant Blue: The Neurotic Genius of British Football

On 10 July 1973, the Dutch star Johan Cruyff left Ajax for Arsenal in a transfer worth £900,000, then a world record transfer fee. Although the transfer itself was a closely guarded secret, there was a lot of sense in the move: Arsenal had long been a proponent of attacking, flexible football and were one of the fixtures of the top of the British game. They had established themselves as a tactically sophisticated and competitively dominant side during the long tenure of Herbert Chapman (1925-48), under which they won six First Division titles, two FA Cups and five Community Shields before Chapman retired following the victory in the 1947-48 First Division. In addition, the club established itself as a forward thinking organisation with regards to transfers, of which the signing in 1933 of the Austrian players Rodolphe Hiden and Matthias Sindelar were notable examples.

Sindelar would take over management of the team following Chapman’s retirement. However, in a five-year stint, Sindelar’s team would only manage three trophies (the league in 1952-53, FA Cup in 1950 and the Community Shield in 1948) and there was an unmistakable air of staleness about the club. When he took the opportunity of the league victory in 1953 to resign, the board decided to head off on a new tac by appointing Vic Buckingham, whose only previous experience had been with Bradford Park Avenue. However, Buckingham was an innovator and quickly imposed a new style on the team, something helped, admittedly, by the all-Hungarian front three of Laszlo Kubala, Sandor Kocsis and Zoltan Czibor he had inherited from Sindelar. Practicing his innovative brand of ‘Total Football,’ Arsenal won the Double of league and FA Cup in Buckingham’s first season, becoming the first English side to do so since Aston Villa in 1896-97.

The rest of Buckingham’s tenure was fallow in terms of trophies, however, as Arsenal could only finish second or third in a three-way tussle with Stan Cullis’ Wolverhampton Wanderers and Matt Busby’s Manchester United. When Buckingham left to manage Ajax in 1959, many Arsenal fans were not sorry to see him go, even as most observers judged him to have been tactically innovative and simply unlucky to have not won more after 1954. In his three-year stint in Amsterdam, Buckingham’s Ajax team would be major players in the Benelux league, inculcating his ideas into the club which would later bear dramatic fruit under the management of Rinus Michels and Stefan Kovacs in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Buckingham would return to Britain in 1962, when he was appointed manager of the national team. Walter Winterbottom, the manager of the England national team 1946-60, had been enobled as a Labour peer in 1960 and drafted into government as the first Minister for Sport, where he was granted near-dictatorial control over the football league system across the UK. In the teeth of strong opposition from the UK’s four different football associations, Winterbottom had amalgamated them into a single United Kingdom Football Association and a single United Kingdom national team (although it was often referred to as ‘Great Britain’). Winterbottom also re-drew the league system, with a series of regional leagues in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland feeding into the two top tiers which were played with a mixture of teams from across the UK. The first season of the United Kingdom Premier League was played in 1963-64 and was won by Liverpool, who secured the title with a final-day victory over Heart of Midlothian. However, Celtic soon established themselves as the dominant team, winning four consecutive league titles between 1965-66 and 1968-69.

Arsenal, meanwhile, would enter a fallow period and did not seriously challenge for the league in its first decade under Rudolphe Hiden (1959-62), Billy Wright (1962-66) and the early years of Bertie Mee (1966 onwards). Of course, the club retained a level of cultural and sporting cachet as the ‘aristocrats of the British game’ (in the words of Brian Glanville) because of their grand history, attractive play, marble-lined stadium and a trophy cabinet bare of recent wins. However, by the time Cruyff arrived, many were complaining that that’s all they had left.

Meanwhile, Buckingham had worked hard to transfer his ‘Total Football’ ideals to the British national team. He built his team around a flexible front three of Jimmy Johnstone, Denis Law and George Best of Celtic, Torino and Rangers (respectively), mimicking the Hungarian frontline of his Arsenal days. Although the team failed to win the World Cup on home soil in 1966, Buckingham dusted himself down to produce arguably a better side that won the European Championships in 1972 (reaching the final again in 1976, only to lose on penalties to the CIS) and the World Cup in 1974.

Meanwhile, Cruyff himself endeared himself to Arsenal fans when he chose the British name, Jonathan, for his son when he was born in February 1974. On the pitch, he was a key figure as the club marched to their first Premier League title (and their first league title since 1954) in 1973-74, defeating their fierce rivals Tottenham Hotspur 5-0 at their home of White Hart Lane to clinch the title. In 1974, he was crowned European Footballer of the Year, the first Arsenal player to be so honoured.

List of winners of the United Kingdom Premier League

List of FIFA World Cup finals

List of UEFA European Championship finals

 

[Rattigan]

Seeking a Role: The United Kingdom, 1945-1976

The 1976 election marked a crucial break point in British history and is a useful vantage point from which to look back on over thirty years of uninterrupted Labour rule. Had the party, as it had promised in its 1945 manifesto, managed to build a ‘New Jerusalem’? The answer, as with all of these things, is both yes and no. While there could be no doubting that the premierships of Attlee, Gaitskell and Castle had, in their own ways, wrought profound changes on British society, there could equally be no denying that the hopes of a fully anti-capitalist and socialist society (held by a few leftist intellectuals and figures on the hard left of the party in 1945) had been dashed. Instead, Labour had presided over the creation and development of a technocratic state, a cooperative consumer culture and a synergistic and liberal class compromise that formed a distinctive Anglophone model of social democratic capitalism that would be the basis not only for the societies in the Commonwealth but also around the world.

One of the first Attlee ministry’s great disappointments, for many on the left, was the limited number of services and institutions which were taken into public ownership. Rather than embarking on the wholesale nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy, along Soviet lines, Herbert Morrison had instead limited what was brought into public ownership. Although he had formerly been one of the strongest advocates for statism in the party, Morrison’s time as First Minister for London in the 1930s had changed his views and taught him the values of mutualism and coordination between different societal sectors. Therefore, Morrison forcefully argued that only industries and sectors which could affordably be managed and improved using government funds should be nationalized. In practice, this meant that the railways and the energy sector were brought under public ownership, whereas other major candidates for nationalization in the pre-war era – notably shipbuilding, steel making and automobiles – were not. This had a number of specific effects – not least of which was the privileging of the railways as a method of personal transportation and nuclear energy as cheap electricity, as we have seen – but also a general one in the nature of the state.

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. Perhaps the most notable innovation in this context was the Companies Act 1950, which enshrined in law a kind of class cooperation and a degree of workplace democracy which had not traditionally been a feature of left wing thought outside of the Anglophone world. This idiosyncratic mix of regulation, direction and class compromise made British (and, by extension, the Commonwealth) private corporations some of the most stable and successful in the world and came to be known by the moniker ‘Anglo-liberalism.’ The net result of this was a technocratically-minded regulatory state quite distinct from the vast managerial bureaucracies seen (each in their own way) in the US, USSR or France.

Alongside new regulations on private companies, Labour governments assiduously promoted cooperative operations and the benefits of mutualisation (as opposed to nationalization) where desirable. This drew on a longstanding tradition in British liberal and progressive thought, with the Cooperative Wholesale Society (CWS) already boasting just under 13 million members in 1945 – equivalent to just under 25% of the population. By 1976, this figure had expanded to an astonishing 40 million people, reflecting over half the population. While other countries saw growth in cooperatives, particularly Hanover, France and other Commonwealth countries like Pakistan and Australia, none saw numbers anything like these. Indeed, by 1976 almost the entirety of the British food industry was sold via decentralized cooperatives, with the exception of highly specialized providers or legacy companies such as Fortnum & Mason’s. Traditional company structures remained dominant in the production and sale of retail products, although these were coming under more pressure from increasingly innovative cooperative structures by the time Castle left office. (This competition between cooperatives and traditional corporations is one of the main reasons behind the consistently inventive and cutting-edge British advertising industry during this time, as is well captured in the CBC series ‘Mad Men’ staring Martin Sheen.)

Amongst the traditional companies that were doing well were new high tech industries. As the base of heavy industry in the Commonwealth shifted to the export economy of Pakistan over the course of the 1950s, many had worried about the potential for long-term mass unemployment to emerge in the industrial cities in Scotland and the north of England. This certainly occurred in some places and lead to ugly scenes, including race riots in Bradford, Manchester and Coventry. But overall the story of British economic development was of the steady replacement of heavy industry jobs by new ones. Of particular note was the computing industry, which benefited from SWF funding to produce a vibrant industry based around the ‘Keyboard Canal’ linking Manchester and Liverpool that was the envy of the world. This region was the site of Tommy Flowers’ company Colossus Computers Limited (the owner of the dominant computing platform in the 1960s and 1970s) and also the upstart Apple Computers (founded by Alan Turing after his break from Flowers and CCL in 1952).

Britain remained one of the largest energy exporters in the world, exploiting its technological advantage in offshore drilling to generate vast profits for the SWF from the sale of North Sea oil and gas. Within the UK, however, the story of the Labour government was one of increasing weaning off of fossil fuels. Under the imperative of long-term energy security and independence, successive Labour governments had focused on not only promoting the nuclear industry but also, as the decades wore on, promoting investment and research into hydroelectric, wind and solar energy. A key figure in this was David Attenborough, who served as Energy Minister from 1965 to 1976. Under Attenborough’s tenure, the Energy Ministry worked closely with industry, trades unions and the Supply Ministry to ensure that new energy-producing facilities (be they nuclear or renewable) were placed as closely as possible to older coal mines or gas fields to minimize the effects of unemployment. While the results were not always perfect (and, indeed, Attenborough’s name is not an uncontroversial one amongst many communities in the north of England), they are generally thought of as a success, making the UK the world leader in nuclear and clean energy by 1976 while not resulting in long-term unemployment in former coal-producing areas.

Under Labour, British society became, by any measure, a more egalitarian society but it did so in a distinctive manner that left, in its own way, class distinctions in place. During the Hanoverian period (1714-1872), Britain had been, in the words of David Cannadine, a “competitive oligarchy” between Whig and Tory factions of the aristocracy. Crucially, unlike comparative European societies, merchant and traditional aristocratic cliques were closely enmeshed and, while they did not benefit from the legal privileges extended to the German and French counterparts, there were (in general terms) no poor British aristocrats. With increasingly democratization of land use over the Edwardian period and of the economy since 1945, the aristocracy had conclusively lost their grip over the commanding heights of the economy. However, they managed to successfully reinvent themselves as a class on the basis of public service and leadership in sport and the arts. Thus the British aristocracy in the postwar period came increasingly to look like its European counterparts, although in this case with a broad acceptance of democratic (and even, on some occasions, socialist) politics and without the extreme reactionary conservatism that bedeviled European societies like France, Spain and Catalonia.

Although they were an interloper into the Edwardian Conservative-Liberal divide, the Labour Party too found itself incorporated into a distinctly British governing tradition. In the first place, class war (never, in truth, all that big a part of the Labour tradition) was abandoned and selected elements of the old ruling class were incorporated seamlessly into the new Labour Establishment. A particularly notable example of this was the defection, in 1960, of the 11th Duke of Devonshire (a descendant of the Edwardian prime minister, Lord Hartington) from the Liberals to Labour, where he served as Under Secretary in the Foreign and Commonwealth Offices over the course of the 1960s. The other major Labour aristocratic family were the Dukes of Westminster (Robert Grosvenor served as Under-Secretary for Health in the 1950s and 60s), who had donated Grosvenor House in London to serve as the party’s lavish main base in 1929. Similarly, when he died in 1968, former Foreign Secretary Harold Nicolson donated his country house Sissinghurst for use as the Labour leader’s summer residence.

Since its donation, Grosvenor House had served not only as offices for the party but also as a hotel and social club for its members. In this way it continued the British tradition of associating membership of parties with membership of London gentlemen’s clubs, a tradition that came, over the years after 1945, increasingly idiosyncratic. Over the course of the Labour hegemony, the Liberals and Conservatives had formalized pre-existing relationships with the Reform and Carlton Clubs (respectively), with the membership of the two effectively becoming coterminous. Despite the elitist nature of these clubs originally, in the political culture of the post-Edwardian period they became increasingly egalitarian and communitarian-minded, helping to create cultures around these parties that stimulated mass memberships among each of them and gave them deep roots in their local communities. As many agony aunt columns of the period advised, sending daughters to events at the local party was a good way for parents to find nice future sons-in-law.

However, these deep social roots, while essential to the continued vitality of many communities, did not always translate into widespread political activism. In the 2018 Julian Barnes novel ‘The Only Story’, the protagonist is asked about his politics while joining a local tennis club, to which he replies “I don’t really have any.” The tennis club official noted down ‘Labour’ in response. Although obviously a joke, it does get across the point that, despite the exact political content of some of these local political parties, they retained deep roots and loyalties in their communities.

The increasingly egalitarian nature of British society during this time should not be mistaken for an increased provincialism. Rather, this was also a period where the British public seems to have adopted an increasingly global outlook, illustrated in things such as an increased incidence in foreign travel, with destinations in the Commonwealth and the Scandinavian countries proving the most popular. The cultural links between the UK and the rest of the Commonwealth was particularly pronounced, with the institution of the CBC playing a particularly important role in drawing the different cultures of that institution together. Sport was a notable vehicle for this project, with the stereotype that everyone in the Commonwealth had their favourite British UKPL team, Canadian NHL team and New Zealand Super Rugby team having more than a degree of truth to it. Elsewhere, the daily Commonwealth-wide CBC news bulletins played an important role in creating the sense of a shared, global political community.

Labour had developed into a progressive, technocratic movement that didn’t quite have a simple analogy in the rest of the world, leaving the Liberals and Conservatives to respond in their own ways. The Conservatives, chastened by their hiding in 1945, were forced to grapple with their collapse as a major party and answer the question of who they spoke for. It seemed that the competing class interests that various Conservatives had tried to speak for – be they the landed interest (Lord Salisbury), the conservative working classes (Randolph Churchill), Anglicans and other Protestants (Edward Carson) or the petit bourgeoisie (Stanley Baldwin) – had either rejected the party or been insufficiently large to create a viable electoral coalition in a democratic age. Under Anthony Eden, the pretense was kept up that the Conservatives were on the road back but this belief was increasingly delusional by the mid-1950s. Instead, under the leadership of Jo Grimond, the party developed into an increasingly libertarian position, adopting a stance of ‘live and let live’ on social issues. On economic issues, this involved an emphasis on individual liberty, stressing small scale business. In practice, this saw the party attracting a moderate swathe of support across socially liberal minded individuals, with particularly high levels of support amongst small-business owners, agricultural smallholders and certain parts of the intelligentsia. However, Grimond’s new direction was, in psephological terms, a failure and saw the Conservatives reduced to only 8 seats in the 1967 election: support was spread too thin and not sufficiently concentrated. Although the party would stage a moderate recovery under Robert Carr, the choice of the self-described ‘tory socialist’ Ferdinand Mount as leader in 1976 would be a watershed moment for the party: combining traditions of noblesse oblige with a broad-based social and economic liberalism and a sentimental conservatism, the party would have few counterparts in the modern world. However, it would take the full implementation of the electoral reforms of the 1960s for this support to kick in electorally.

The Liberal party was dominated by recurrent infighting over the course of the period, with Labour effectively exploiting divisions to portray the Liberals as weak, indecisive and not to be trusted with power. Over the 1940s and 50s, the party was pushed and pulled between leaders – Sinclair, Churchill and Gwilym Lloyd George – of vastly different temperaments and priorities. They never settled into a consistent rhythm of opposition: at different times they castigated Labour’s reforms as a threat to individual liberty, as dangerous overreach of the Liberal reforming legacy or even, occasionally, as not going far enough. Iain MacLeod’s rise to the leadership in 1956 marked the beginning of a transformation of the party and the return of a Gladstonian ideology which would finally attain electoral victory under Margaret Thatcher. MacLeod’s focus on cutting regulation and loosening the strings of monetary policy while retaining much of the welfare state found a certain kind of audience in the 1960s but it was not until 1967, when the party leadership had changed course once more under Jeremy Thorpe, that the Liberals would regain much of the ground lost since 1945. Thorpe’s subsequent disgrace and incarceration, however, opened the way for the Gladstonian faction to once again seize the leadership, this time in the form of Margaret Thatcher. Although personally a radical figure, with a clear idea of returning Britain to the economic and moral conditions of the early Edwardian period (her views on trade represented the biggest break with the settled policy of Commonwealth preference, for example), the fact was that her party had been entrusted with power very much provisionally and that it would be a challenge to retain that trust.

 

[Rattigan]

List of Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom

1. William Ewart Gladstone; Liberal; December 1868 - February 1874
2. Benjamin Disraeli; Conservative; February 1874 - April 1880
3. Marquess of Hartington; Liberal; April 1880 - July 1888
4. William Harcourt; Liberal; July - August 1888
5. Joseph Chamberlain; Liberal; August 1888 - August 1895
6. Lord Randolph Churchill; Conservative; August 1895 - February 1905
7. Joseph Chamberlain; Liberal; February 1905 - July 1906
8. Sir Charles Dilke; Liberal; July 1906 - January 1911
9. David Lloyd George: Liberal; January 1911 - November 1921
10. Lord Hugh Cecil; Conservative; November 1921 - October 1924
11. Sir Austen Chamberlain; Liberal; October 1924 - May 1929
12. Ramsay MacDonald; Labour; May 1929 - October 1930
13. Ramsay MacDonald; National Labour 'Grand Coalition'; October 1930 - November 1934
14. David Lloyd George; Liberal; November 1934 - June 1940
15. Winston Churchill; Country 'Wartime Coalition'; June 1940 - November 1945
16. Clement Attlee; Labour; November 1945 - November 1955
17. Hugh Gaitskell; Labour; November 1955 - January 1963
18. George Brown; Labour; January - February 1963 (acting)
19. Barbara Castle; Labour; February 1963 - June 1976
20. Margaret Thatcher; Liberal; June 1976 -

 

[Rattigan]

Various lists below. Please assume that all the Commonwealth countries use a standard FPTP or MMP system (some with AV but that's not terribly important): apologies for being boring. All of them have Westminster Parliamentary systems with Governors General representing the monarchy in their respective countries and the prime ministers and cabinets exercising governmental power.

List of Prime Ministers of Australia

1. John Curtin; Labor; October 1941 - December 1949
2. Robert Menzies; Liberal-National; December 1949 - May 1954
3. H.V. Evatt; Labor; May 1954 - November 1958
4. Harold Holt; Liberal-National; November 1958 - December 1961
5. George Cole; Labor; December 1961 - November 1964
6. Harold Holt; Liberal-National; November 1964 - December 1967
7. John Gorton; Liberal-National; December 1967 - October 1968
8. Frank McManus; Labor; October 1968 - May 1975
9. Malcolm Fraser; Liberal-National; May 1975 - [1]

[1] Maximum length of Parliament altered from 3 years to 5.


List of Prime Ministers of the Bahamas

1. Roland Symonette; United; July 1968 - July 1973
2. Henry Milton Taylor; Progressive Liberal; July 1973 -

List of Prime Ministers of Canada

1. William Lyon Mackenzie King; Liberal; October 1935 - November 1948
2. Louis St. Laurent; Liberal; November 1948 - June 1949
3. John Diefenbaker; Progressive Conservative; June 1949 - April 1964
4. Lester Pearson; Liberal; April 1964 - June 1970
5. Pierre Trudeau; Liberal; June 1970 -

List of Prime Ministers of Ceylon

1. D.S. Senanayake; United National; April 1948 - March 1952
2. Abeyratne Ratnayaka; United National; March 1952 - April 1956
3. S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike; Freedom; April 1956 - September 1960
4. Sirimavo Bandaranaike; Freedom; September 1960 - March 1964
5. D.P. Atapattu; United National; March 1964 - February 1969
6. Wijeyananda Dahnayake; Democratic; February 1969 - February 1974
7. Sirimavo Bandaranaike; Freedom; February 1974 -

List of Prime Ministers of East Africa

1. Lord Delamere; Democratic; July 1963 - November 1965
2. Jomo Kenyatta; New Africa; November 1965 - May 1969
3. Josiah Kariuki; Socialist; May 1969 - October 1970
4. Jomo Kenyatta; New Africa; October 1970 - June 1974
5. Milton Obote; Socialist; June 1974 -

List of Prime Ministers of the East Indies

1. Lee Kuan Yew; People's Action; January 1964 - April 1966
2. Lim Yew Hock; People's Alliance; September 1966 - December 1968
3. Toh Chin Chye; People's Action; December 1968 - April 1971
4. Ong Eng Guan; People's Alliance; April - September 1971
5. David Marshall; Worker's; September 1971 - December 1975
6. Lim Chong Eu; People's Alliance; December 1975 -

List of Prime Ministers of New Zealand

1. Peter Fraser; Labour; April 1940 - December 1950
2. Walter Nash; Labour; December 1950 - November 1963
3. Arnold Nordmeyer; Labour; November 1963 - November 1966
4. Jack Marshall; National; November 1966 - August 1974
5. Robert Muldoon; National; August 1974 -

List of Prime Ministers of Newfoundland

1. Albert Walsh; United; June 1944 - April 1949
2. Joey Smallwood; Liberal; April 1949 - January 1973
3. John Crosbie; United; January 1973 -

List of Prime Ministers of Pakistan

1. Liaquat Ali Khan; All-India Muslim League/Pakistan People's League [name change in August 1951]; April 1948 - September 1956
2. Ayub Khan; Liberal; September 1956 - October 1970
3. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto; Pakistan People's League; October 1970 - July 1976
4. Yaqub Ali Khan; Liberal; July 1976 -

List of Prime Ministers of Puerto Rico

1. Luis Munoz Marin; Democratic; January 1952 - January 1965
2. Samuel Quinones; Democratic; January 1965 - July 1970
3. H. Lavity Stoutt; Conservative; July 1970 - November 1973
4. Rafael Hernandez Colon; Democratic; November 1973 - November 1976
5. Ruben Berrios; New Progressive; November 1976 -

List of Prime Ministers of Rhodesia

1. Garfield Todd; United Federal; September 1953 - June 1976
2. Abel Muzorewa; Liberal; June 1976 -

List of Prime Ministers of the West Indies

1. Grantley Adams; Labour; February 1953 - September 1963
2. Forbes Burnham; Conservative; September 1963 - June 1972
3. Michael Manley; Labour; June 1972 -

 

[Rattigan]

The Soviet Union

The Soviets adopted their latest constitution in 1945, developing by the 1970s what their leaders termed a 'democratic society' but which most outside and neutral observers called, at best, a guided democracy and, at worst, the same autocracy as OTL but a degree of market socialism mixed in.

Elections to the legislative assembly are held once every five years. All candidates need to be cleared by the CPSU Secretariat and there is, of course, absolutely no question of political parties outside of the CPSU being organised. But semi-formal CPSU factions have formed (although they have to be careful about how they organise themselves) and occasionally some legislative districts see fierce contestation between candidates from different factions. Following each election since 1945, a CPSU congress is called to vote on the new General Secretary, although such votes are, of course, tightly controlled by party elders. The General Secretary is, by convention, a member of the legislature and controls much of the machinery of domestic administration. In practice, the General Secretary is required to have a close relationship with the Finance Ministry, which since 1931 has absorbed the state planning office Gosplan. While Bukharin was Finance Minister, he was generally thought to have the upper hand over the various General Secretaries.

A less formal position is that of Premier. Commonly thought of as the Soviet government's representative to the outside world, the Premier is the Soviet head of state and chairman of the Politburo. Their main role focuses on foreign and defence affairs (although there are Ministers of State and Defence who sit in the Politburo, they are generally subordinate to the Premier), including geo-strategy. Tukhachevsky dominated the position since the 1940s and resisted any attempts to formalise ways in which he could be removed or transitioned away from (for obvious reasons). Since the chaos induced by Tukhachevsky's death, an informal idea has emerged which requires the Premier to 'have the confidence of the Politburo.' This suggests that, in practice, a new Premier can be chosen by consensus of the Politburo (of which the General Secretary is a member), although what this would look like in practice has yet to be tested.

General Secretaries of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

1. Nikolay Krestinsky; February 1937 - July 1950
2. Georgy Malenkov; July 1950 - July 1955
3. Nikita Khrushchev; July 1955 - July 1960
4. Alexei Kosygin; July 1960 - July 1975
5. Valentina Tereshkova; July 1975 -

People's Commissar for Finance

1. Nikolai Bukharin; June 1922 - November 1973
2. Leonid Kantorovich; November 1973 -

Premiers of the Soviet Union

1. Mikhail Tukhachevsky; October 1942 - June 1968
2. Georgy Zhukov; June - December 1968
3. Leonid Brezhnev; December 1968 -

 

[Rattigan]

United States of America

The new constitution designed by Abraham Lincoln and which came into effect in 1880 solved many of the nation's post-Civil War problems by reducing the federalism and separation of powers that the Founding Fathers had built into their original constitution. This 'Second Constitution' greatly expanded the powers of the President and the executive's ability to direct the legislature, all the while reducing the power of the Supreme Court and the states. (Lincoln toyed with the idea of renaming the country the 'United State of America' or the 'American Republic' but ultimately abandoned it.)

Under the Second Constitution, the President has all of the powers he had under the previous constitution with a couple of important additions, namely: the powers to sack and appoint a Vice President and Speaker of the House; a line-item veto and a suspensive veto (i.e. they can send a bill back to Congress for another reading and another vote) over legislation; and the powers to declare wars and negotiate and ratify treaties. The President retains his power to appoint and sack ministers, but by convention only does so in consultation with his Vice President and Speaker. The President is elected to four-year terms via a popular vote, with there being no limit to the number of terms a president may run for. In the presidential election, the two candidates with the most votes in the first round of voting go forward to a second round run-off.

Congress is made up of two chambers: the House and the Senate. The House is elected every four years, at the same time as the Presidential election. In practice, this means that the House and the White House are usually controlled by the same party. By 1976, the House is made up of 556 members, being 555 elected via FPTP from across the states and the Speaker. The Speaker is the presiding officer and administrative head of the House, giving them effective control over the House's legislative agenda. The Speaker is also automatically a member of the cabinet. The number and shape of House districts per state is decided by the independent Districts Agency. As of 1976, a state is granted a representative for every 608,000 people living inside it, with each state having a minimum of one. District boundaries are drawn such that they each have equal populations (or as close to equal as possible).

The Senate is made up of 95 members, being two senators from each of the 47 states and the Vice President, appointed by the President. The Vice President has had their powers greatly expanded, such that they have the same powers as the Speaker has over the House. They are also automatically members of the cabinet. The Senate as a whole, however, has had its powers reduced. Most notably, it only votes on bills passed by the House. In addition, if the Senate won't pass a bill, two-thirds of the House and the President can, together, override the Senate and pass a bill anyway. Senators serve six year terms with elections staggered such that roughly a third of senators are up for election every two years. This means that they the Senate is periodically out of control of the President's party, resulting in a scenario known as 'cohabitation'. The main powers of the Senate reside in its powers of committee and amendment, along with its power to confirm cabinet members (apart from the Speaker and the Vice President), Supreme Court and federal judges and other federal executive officials.

The Supreme Court has had its powers watered down. In particular, its powers to strike down legislation are now generally limited to state legislation and executive orders (the former on the basis that federal law is supreme and cannot be contradicted by state law and the latter on the basis that executive orders may be improperly made). The constitution contains a number of 'basic laws' (most of which focus on the place and timing of elections, citizenship requirements and protections for free speech) which cannot be overruled by subsequent legislation and the Supreme Court can review laws which attempt to do that. However, the vast majority of legislation which has passed both chambers of Congress and been signed into law by the President cannot be reviewed by the courts.


Presidents of the United States of America

1. Franklin Roosevelt; Progressive; January 1933 - February 1946
2. Floyd B. Olsen; Progressive; February 1946 - January 1953
3. A. Phillip Randolph; Progressive; January 1953 - January 1957
4. Everett Dirksen; Republican; January 1957 - January 1961
5. Estes Kefauver; Progressive; January 1961 - August 1963
6. John F. Kennedy; Progressive; August 1963 - January 1973
7. Nelson Rockefeller; Republican; January 1973 -

Vice Presidents of the United States of America

1. Joseph T. Robinson; Progressive; January 1933 - July 1937
2. Floyd B. Olsen; Progressive; July 1937 - February 1946
3. Scott W. Lucas; Progressive; February 1946 - January 1953
4. Adlai Stevenson; Progressive; January 1953 - January 1957
5. Richard M. Nixon; Republican; January 1957 - January 1961
6. John F. Kennedy; Progressive; January 1961 - August 1963
7. Lyndon B. Johnson; Progressive; August 1963 - January 1965
8. Hubert H. Humphrey; Progressive; January 1965 - January 1973
9. John B. Anderson; Republican; January 1973 -

Speakers of the United States of America

1. Walter F. White; Progressive; January 1933 - March 1955
2. Roy Wilkins; Progressive; March 1955 - January 1957
3. Charles Halleck; Republican; January 1957 - January 1961
4. Roy Wilkins; Progressive; January 1961 - January 1969
5. Carl Albert; Progressive; January 1969 - January 1973
6. Pete McCloskey; Republican; January 1973 -

 

[Rattigan]

Western Europe

Governments of Italy, the Benelux, Spain and France below. I've decided not to include Portugal in the end because the Estado Novo and the transition to democracy occurred as in OTL so please assume that the relevant leaders are the same. I've done a previous update on Spain (https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...xon-social-model.458146/page-18#post-18659522) so please refer to that for Prime Ministers and Presidents up to the fascist takeover in 1934. An update on the German successor states will come later today.

Italy

The monarchy is restored as a symbolic figurehead in June 1946 by referendum and a new legislature is elected two weeks later. The new legislature is bicameral, with the lower house elected via a modified form of PR requiring parties to receive 5% of the vote before they get seats in the assembly and the upper house elected by the regions (Italy was occupied primarily by American forces and the constitution shows their influence). The new Christian Democracy Party, a successor to a variety of centre-right parties in pre-republican Italy, became the main force on the centre-right, while the Communist Party became their main rivals after their break with revolutionary politics (in 1949) and limited rapprochement with the Catholic Church (in 1951). The centrist/centre-left Liberal Democrat Party has emerged as the largest third party.

Monarchs

1. Umberto II; June 1946 -

Presidents of the Council of Ministers

1. Alcide De Gasperi; Christian Democracy; June 1946 - August 1954
2. Fernando Tambroni; Christian Democracy; August 1954 - November 1963
3. Aldo Moro; Christian Democracy; November 1963 - October 1969
4. Enrico Berlinguer; Communist; October 1969 -

Benelux Union

A union of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, established under Commonwealth urging in 1954, later expanded to include the successor states of the Dutch East Indies (Java, Borneo, Sumatra and East Indonesia) following their independence in January 1965. In truth, federal writ runs lightly over the federal countries, largely limited to defence, foreign affairs and broad oversight over taxation and internal trade regulation. The Benelux is thus caught somewhere between a full state and an intergovernmental organisation, the big reason it is considered more of the former is that it has a single delegation to the UN. Since their joining in 1965, the number of East Indian members in the federal assembly has been increasing according to a pre-agreed timetable. The notional head of state of the Benelux is selected from amongst the monarchs of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg and, after 1965, Yogyakarta, Surakarta, Maluku and Pontianak. In practice, they rotate every five years.

Supreme Head

1. Juliana; the Netherlands; December 1954 - January 1960
2. Baudouin; Belgium; January 1960 - January 1965
3. Jean; Luxembourg; January 1965 - January 1970
4. Hamengkubuwono IX; Yogyakarta; January 1970 - January 1975
5. Pakubuwono XII; Surakarta; January 1975 -

Prime Minister

1. Louis Beel; People’s Party; December 1954 - July 1964
2. Paul Vanden Boeynants; People’s Party; July 1964 - April 1968
3. Joop den Uyl; Progressive Socialists; April 1968 - August 1974
4. Mohammad Isnaeni; Progressive Socialists; August 1974 - December 1976
5. Gaston Egmond Thorn; Liberals and Democrats; December 1976 -

Spain (Republic of)

Following the collapse of the Falange government in 1943, General Francisco Franco was made interim head of state and head of government until February 1946, when his autocratic instincts saw him defenestrated by the occupying Commonwealth forces. Democratic government was restored in May 1947, although with most of the remainder of the President's political powers, beyond choice of Prime Minister, stripped away. Rather than being appointed by agreement between the parties in the legislature, the President would now be popularly elected to a maximum of two seven-year terms.

President

1. Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera (as both head of state and head of government with the formal title of 'Caudillo'); Falange Espanola; June 1934 - July 1943
2. Francisco Franco; non-partisan military; July 1943 - February 1946
3. Position Vacant - Bernard Montgomery served as Allied military governor; February 1946 - May 1947
4. Federico Garcia Lorca; independent; May 1947 - May 1961
5. Miguel Maura; Liberal Republican Party; May 1961 - June 1971*
6. Valentin Silva Melero; independent; June 1971 - May 1975
7. Jose Maldonado Gonzalez; Socialist Workers’ Party; May 1975 -

* Died in office

Prime Minister

1. Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera; Falange Espanola; January 1933 - July 1943
2. Francisco Franco; non-partisan military; July 1943 - February 1946
3. Indalecio Prieto; Socialist Workers’ Party; February 1946 - May 1947
4. Miguel Maura; Liberal Republican Party; May 1947 - March 1959
5. Luis Carrero Blanco; Liberal Republican Party; March - December 1959
6. Jose Solis Ruiz; Conservative Republican Party; December 1959 - October 1961
7. Rodolfo Llopis; Socialist Workers’ Party; October 1961 - October 1965
8. Mariano Navarro Rubio; Liberal Republican Party; October 1965 - March 1966
9. Rodolfo Llopis; Socialist Workers’ Party; March 1966 - July 1972
10. Mariano Navarro Rubio; Liberal Republican Party; July 1972 -

France

This is mostly covered in my update on France (https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...xon-social-model.458146/page-29#post-19130977) but there have been a couple of important changes since the early 1960s. The renewed war in Indochina caused the old Guallist Union of Democrats to split, with left wing members joining the Radicals and right wing members joining the Republicans. This expanded Radical Party, in turn, split five years later, with the left wing defectors forming the Socialists and the centrist remainder keeping the name Radicals (ironically enough). Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam (minus Cochinchina) left the French Union in April 1969.

Presidents

1. Charles de Gaulle; Union of Democrats; December 1945 - November 1946
2. Georges Bonnet; Union of Democrats; November 1946 - December 1950
3. Philippe Leclerc; Union of Democrats; December 1950 - December 1960
4. Georges Pompidou; Union of Democrats; December 1960 - December 1965
5. Pierre Mendes France; Radical; December 1965 - December 1970
6. Jean Sassi; Republican; December 1970 - December 1975
7. Francois Mitterrand; Socialist; December 1975 -

Premiers

1. Charles de Gaulle; Union of Democrats; August 1944 - December 1945
2. Robert Schuman; Union of Democrats; December 1945 - November 1948
3. Pierre Mendes France; Radical; November 1948 - November 1952
4. Robert Schuman; Union of Democrats; November 1952 - November 1956
5. Raoul Salan; Union of Independent Republicans; November 1956 - April 1962
6. Maurice Faure; Radical; April 1962 - November 1964
7. Edmond Jouhaud; Republican; November 1964 - September 1968
8. Raymond Barre; Republican; September 1968 -