The Tale of New Britain (UK gets PR in 1918)

Basically a resurrection of an old TL of mine, edited and hopefully improved.


Part 1: Advance, Britannia (1918 – 1921)

Chapter I: The Goat

The play begins on December 14th, 1918.

This was the day of the Khaki Election, arguably the first great realigning election. Its name was fitting; every town from Wolverhampton to Waterford was populated with the crowds of uniformed ex-servicemen, some with missing limbs, some blinded. It was an omnipresent reminder of the Great War, which had ended just a month earlier. Ten percent of the workforce lay dead; 723,000 men, with triple that number wounded. No city in Britain would be spared the sight of crippled beggars on their streets. Yet victory, wholly unexpected when it came, was met with euphoria, celebrated according to legend with open copulation in the streets.

In this shadow came the first general election since 1910. This election would be a first for many reasons, not least because of a particular piece of legislation passed earlier in the year. The Representation of the People Act 1918, often known simply as the Fourth Reform Act, which brought the franchise to all men over 21, women over 30, and replaced Britain’s electoral system, an antiquated and unfair model called First Past the Post which inflated the seat count of the big parties and deflated that of the smaller ones, with a new proportional model.

The man at the front of it all was Britain’s wartime leader, David Lloyd George, whom Conservatives referred to as “the Goat.” Lloyd George, still with near dictatorial wartime powers, was a hero, the man who won the war. He had become Prime Minister in 1916, the first Welshman to do so and widely thought the best chance of bringing victory, replacing his rather ineffective Liberal predecessor, Herbert Asquith. Despite his own personal triumph, Lloyd George’s Liberal Party were in dire straits. The expansion of the franchise to many working class men in 1867 and 1884 had gradually begun to squeeze the party, and the Liberals were split in two between those supporting Asquith and those behind the Goat. Those supporting Asquith even sat on the Opposition benches. This split was finalised in the 1918 Maurice debate, effectively a vote of no confidence in Lloyd George in which Asquith himself, still technically leader of a single unified party, and many Liberals opposed the Prime Minister. The vote failed, and so did any cohesion within the Liberals. They were, in all but name, two parties.

The Khaki Election itself demonstrated the vast changes in Britain. 707 seats were available in the Commons, with 354 needed for a majority. The Conservatives, under the New Brunswick-born Andrew Bonar Law, came first with 283 seats. To the shock of many, and dismay of those Liberals and Conservatives who had reluctantly approved proportional representation with The Goat breathing down their necks, Labour roared to second place. They leaped from 42 seats to 163, a remarkable achievement that solidified the political importance of the working class. The Labour leader, William Adamson, a Baptist Scottish miner from Fife, later wrote of his “giddy, childlike euphoria” at the realisation that it would be he standing at the despatch box at the head of His Majesty’s Opposition. Those Liberals who had stood behind David Lloyd George came in third place, with 113 seats, while 99 seats went to Asquith’s allies. In Ireland, the radical Sinn Féin captured nearly half of the 105 seats available, 50, while the Irish Unionists won 26, and the Irish Parliamentary Party won 20. The number of unionist and separatist MPs from Ireland were virtually equally split, but it hardly mattered when it came to Ireland’s future.

The nature of proportional representation meant that seats were given even to those parties who won a fraction of a percentage of the vote. Nine parties won a single seat, most famously the Women’s Party which propelled the internationally famous Christabel Pankhurst into the Commons, where she would remain for almost forty years representing her Staffordshire constituency. Other parties to secure single seats included the National Socialists (a centre-left social democratic party, despite its name), sending the Essex MP Jack Jones, later described as “the wittiest man in the Commons.” The left wing Highland Land League, which would eventually morph into the National Scotland Party, the National Association of Discharged Sailors and Soldiers, and Socialist Labour also secured single seats. But of course, of far greater significance was the major parties formed.

The Khaki Election is also often known as the Coupon Election, after Lloyd George and the Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law sent out “coupons” to all those MPs who had supported the wartime coalition. The coupon endorsed them as official representatives of the coalition. Receiving it was widely seen as a sign of patriotism, and condemned those who did not receive it to be regarded as anti-war or pacifists at a time of great patriotism. Not a single Asquith Liberal received one, while plenty of Conservatives did. The Conservatives did not oppose those Liberals with the coupon, as Lloyd George intended to keep the wartime coalition in place despite irritation among many Conservatives that the Prime Minister had gone against them on the question of electoral reform. Some argued forcefully that the triumph of Labour to second place proved that they were right. Winston Churchill roared that “with one piece of legislation, we have put Bolsheviks within range of Downing Street.” But power was still open to the Conservatives. So it was that, despite the fact that Lloyd George and his allies came third, the election was still an endorsement of the Coalition and thus it would govern.

The new coalition took shape the very next day. Despite the fact that the Conservatives under Bonar Law were the largest party, David Lloyd George was to remain as Prime Minister in an arrangement that surely he could tell wasn't going to last. All 13 elected MPs from the National Democratic Party and 2 members of Labour also joined the coalition, for an eventual tally of 411 seats, a majority of 57.
 
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Chapter II: Dominoes

Across the Irish Sea, a second government was taking shape. All 50 Sinn Féin MPs refused to take their seats in Westminster and in January 1919 attended the Dáil Éireann, or Assembly for Ireland, the revolutionary government based in Mansion House, residence of the Lord Mayor of Dublin. There, the independence of the Irish Republic was declared. The British government refused to recognise the new government, and the War of Irish Independence began. Two weeks later the leader of Sinn Féin, Éamon de Valera, escaped from prison to be declared president of the new Republic which began setting up its own courts, raising its own taxes, and spending money just like any sovereign parliament. Britain was hardly in the mood to fight another war, but the Irish republicans were happy to help them along. Michael Collins founded the Irish Republican Army, which initiated a classic guerrilla war, targeting British soldiers, police, and anyone suspected of collaboration with “the occupier.” The British response was to outlaw the Dáil Éireann and Sinn Féin while deploying the infamous Black and Tans onto the Irish streets to visit brutality on the population.

Ireland was to be the first domino in the gradual decline, and collapse, of the British Empire.

1919 was the year which the Socialist Review insisted Britain came closest to a worker’s revolution. There are certainly reasons to believe this; more than 60,000 people flooded into central Glasgow in late January to protest high rents. A famous photo, now a symbol of the socialist movement in Britain, emerged of a red flag rising amid a sea of grey-clothed protestors, shining in their presence like a sun. The British Army were forced to intervene with tanks supported by exclusively English soldiers, while the Cabinet discussed utilising the new Royal Air Force against the rioters. Earlier that month, 10,000 people including 2,500 soldiers had marched through Folkestone to protest being sent to fight Russia, where civil war waged and thousands of British troops were already shivering at Archangel and Murmansk. This was one of many; more than fifty mutinies by British troops took place across the country, the most famous being aboard HMS Kilbride at Milford Haven, when the sailors refused to go to sea and hoisted the Red Flag. Race riots erupted in Liverpool, mostly committed by unemployed ex-servicemen, while that same city saw its police force strike, demanding recognition of the National Union of Police and Prison Officers. There was genuine fear within the government, including from Lloyd George himself, that Britain was on the edge of bolshevism.

Yet what many of the socialist persuasion neglect to mention is that the goal of only a very small minority was to overthrow capitalism. Britain was far from Glasgow becoming Saint Petersburg. The overwhelming majority of protestors were simply angry at their own personal conditions, whether it be low pay, poor conditions, high rents, or unemployment. The reality was that Britain was not a place for politics of the extreme, even after its most devastating war (for now). The Communist Party of Great Britain, offspring of the Third International in 1920, never saw electoral success which allowed it any kind of relevance. The revolutionaries spent more time arguing with each other than the government. On the continent, the reality was different for both the victors and losers. Germany was embroiled in revolution for the first half of 1919, while Italy had been on the winning side yet saw widespread unrest culminating in fascist rule. Such madness would not come to Britain, exactly.

But the economic conditions helped just as much as any cultural feature. As 1919 became 1920, labour was rapidly reabsorbed especially thanks in part to the Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act, though to the loss of women who had acquired wartime jobs, and by 1920 unemployment had fallen to a level below that before the war, with the notable exception of southern Ireland. With this, strikes began to fall. It was a very brief recovery and new storm clouds would begin to swirl once more, but for the time being the government had a moment to catch its breath before 1921 came along and everything went completely south. The government tried to do what governments are meant to do, but seemed to be pulling in two directions. Lloyd George was a true radical, but trapped in a coalition of conservatives. As a result, the near-dictatorial wartime powers the government enjoyed over the economy quickly fell away. The coal mines and railways returned to private hands, despite strikes in the former, while wage and price controls fell away. The government was handing back all of the controls it might have needed for the economic renaissance it craved. Lloyd George’s pre-election promise of “homes fit for heroes” was hardly met; by 1923 the shortage of new homes would be worse than in 1918.

Meanwhile, Lloyd George was troubled by the notable fact that his party was still split in two. Both sides claimed legitimacy, each with a powerful leader, and it wasn’t in the nature of either to step back. Behind the scenes Lloyd George and Asquith were very quietly mumbling to each other about getting back together, especially after the general election had been rather disastrous for them, but little of substance emerged was yet to emerge. There was also the important fact that Labour had shunted the war-weary Liberals into third place. Labour had emerged from the war with a new constitution pledging it to “common ownership of the means of production,” and its middle class membership had soared to the puzzlement of those who thought it merely a vehicle for flat-capped dock workers, grubby-faced miners, and bellowing revolutionaries. Coming second in the election had invigorated the party massively; at their June 1919 conference in Southport, William Adamson was practically carried to the stage, welcomed as a hero. This soon fell away. Adamson had seen how Labour’s mighty electoral achievement had awakened talk of the socialist bogeyman, and had no intention of aligning himself with would-be revolutionaries, especially when the new political order practically guaranteed he could only govern in a coalition. He would pay for his lack of vision.

At the 1919 conference, Adamson responded to the deafening cheers with a speech in which he suggested coalition with the Conservatives in the future might not be so bad, before condemning the rioters in Glasgow. “The needs of the people will never be met by stamping on people’s heads,” he declared. Put simply, this was a betrayal. People in the crowd began shouting at him and objects were thrown onto the stage. The leader had to be hurried away after an apple core struck him in the forehead, exploding spectacularly (the apple, not his forehead). The speech opened the floodgates; the grievances suddenly became many. It seemed that an attempt to douse the flames of socialism had only caused them to rise ever higher. Had the party seen a rather more moderate result in the previous year’s election, perhaps it would have calmed down but now it was the official opposition and excitement meant many took leave of their senses. One Shadow Cabinet minister resigned after Adamson refused to back an outright declaration of support for the revolutionaries in Russia. Adamson, recognising which way the wind was blowing, hastily resigned as leader in October. “I never knew one speech could bugger you so badly,” he later complained. J. R. Clynes would replace Adamson, doing his bit to calm the party down, but the incident had demonstrated how fragile Labour’s innards were and would not be the first instance of a leader becoming the victim of his party’s own radicalism. The party was a mosaic of different leftie persuasions, and the 1919 crisis would be the first instance of the party’s natural habit of gladly tearing itself to small pieces the moment it fell into Opposition.
 
Chapter III: How Is The Empire?

While chaos mounted at home, so too did it in the empire. Three summer months in 1919 saw a thousand British soldiers die in the now forgotten Third Anglo-Afghan War, while unrest spread in Iraq and India. Following the Great War, the empire was tottering. The first signs of her demise were apparent. But in 1921, this would be thrust to the centre in the empire’s most painful sore; Ireland.

The war was still raging across the Emerald Isle, which was escalating by November of 1920. Fourteen British agents were killed in Dublin on “Bloody Sunday”, November 21st, and later that day British security forces entered the pitch of a football match and opened fire into the crowd, killing sixteen. In December, British forces burned down the centre of Cork. County Cork, Dublin, and Belfast saw three quarters of the casualties while roving squads of IRA men patrolled the countryside, preying on the British security forces who responded with brutal reprisal attacks. Lloyd George made some effort to conciliate with the Government of Ireland Act 1920, establishing separate devolved parliaments for north and south, which suited the Protestants of Ulster, but not the Catholics of the south. It wasn’t enough for them; only full independence would be acceptable. That goal was about to be crushed by their own hand.

On June 7th, 1921, King George V arrived in Belfast to attend the opening of the Northern Irish Parliament at the City Hall. He had been warned not to go for fear of assassination, but insisted. He had a message for all Irishmen. He eloquently appealed for them to “forgive and forget,” calling for conciliation and goodwill. It was an olive branch to the revolutionaries. It might have had some effect, were it not for what happened next. The King left City Hall, an enormous crowd of thousands either side of him as he did so. A young man called Jackie Finnegan emerged from the crowd. An unemployed and fanatical young republican, he had been with the rebellion against British rule since the beginning and wanted for the murder of a constable. He held a powerful Webley revolver in his left hand. In an instant he fired three shots; the first struck the King in the chest, the second grazed his shoulder as the Sovereign staggered and crumpled towards the floor. The third round struck a nearby policeman in the neck, spraying the fallen King with blood. Finnegan’s revolver jammed as he tried to fire again, and before he could move he was grabbed by two officers and dragged out of the crowd, one of them gripping him by his hair. The crowd screamed at the first gunshots and began to panic, many sprinting away, while others nearby tried to throw punches at Finnegan as he was pinned to the ground. The young republican was knocked unconscious when one man broke free of the police trying to contain the crowd and landed a punt to his head. Meanwhile the King was dragged to a nearby car which rushed to Belfast City Hospital, leaving a long slick of blood on the street. It remains a point of republican pride that the road in front of Belfast City Hall is stained with royal blood.

In London, the Cabinet was in session when a civil servant entered and passed a telegram to Lloyd George. The Prime Minister read it silently, turning white as snow as he did so. He refolded the telegram and looked up at the rest of the Cabinet, who were still in oblivious discussion. One by one they noticed him and fell silent. “Gentlemen,” he murmured. “The King is dead.”

In Dublin, the Dáil Éireann learned of the news at around the same time, de Valera and a small company receiving the news by phone at his safehouse. Some of the more militant republicans whooped in triumph, as Éamon de Valera tried to shush them. More than one of those present saw the inevitable escalation of the war as a good thing; it would make it even easier to rally the Irish people into one unified force, so they thought. de Valera hoped to avoid such a calamity, and urgently telephoned a local newspaper expressing “deepest sorrow and condolences” for the death of the King, insisting that the action was completely unconnected to Sinn Féin. It was only an hour after he had done so that a British reply came; not in words, but actions, as armoured vehicles surrounded his safehouse. de Valera had been watched by British intelligence, his every move tracked, but for the sake of preventing martyrdom (a lesson learned during the 1916 Easter Rising) a move had not yet been made. de Valera ordered his men to surrender, and not a shot was fired as they were taken into custody by solders with fixed bayonets bursting into every house on the street. “They’ll get us for this,” de Valera said to one of his comrades as they were taken in.

Three days after his death, George V arrived in London aboard HMS Hood, the Royal Navy’s grandest ship. Four million people, ten percent of the national population, surged into London to pay their respects. Three million would pass the King’s coffin at Westminster Hall, joined by countless heads of state. Four days later, a mile long cortege left for Westminster Abbey. Big Ben tolled fifty-six times – once for each year of the King’s life – and artillery salutes of fifty-six guns were fired from Hyde Park and the Tower of London. Arriving at Paddington, the coffin was taken by train to Windsor for burial in St George’s Chapel, where the King’s father, Edward VII, had been buried, and among his earlier predecessors both Henry VIII and Charles I. The government sent a wreath of white lilac and white carnations in the shape of the George Cross with an inscription signed by David Lloyd George. At the centre in white letters were the words “For Valour.”

For many historians, the death of George V marks the definitive end of Pax Britannica. It came to symbolise the beginning of the end of the Empire, starting in Ireland, as the very physical embodiment of empire was murdered by his own subjects. The 27 year old Edward VIII was thrust onto the throne, and sitting in Buckingham Palace he had no idea what to do. The new king was a vain, petulant, politically naïve womaniser. He may have been adulated amid the outpouring of patriotic spirit, but that didn’t make him the right man for the job. Edward VIII is now a cursed name; the reasons why he is now known as the Traitor King had not yet come into play but from the earliest days of his reign the government was worried. At his coronation he spoke of his optimism that “we shall smash the rebellious Irish”, rather inappropriate for a country in desperate need of healing, and in an unprecedented interview with the Daily Telegraph spoke openly and informally about his private life in a way that shocked the elite to the point where Lloyd George found himself practically lecturing the sovereign on decorum during their weekly audiences.

The public may have been thirsty for vengeance, but much of the Cabinet was not. Yet it was clear to all that nothing less than a full scale response would be acceptable. Lloyd George took no joy in authorising the mobilisation of 100,000 men and instructing the Ministry of Defence to put occupation plans into effect. Blockhouses, blocked roads, censorship, arrest of dissenters, all were to become facts of life in Ireland as it effectively became a police state. While Germany had its political chaos, Italy fell to fascism, Russia slid beneath Stalin’s fist, and France traded prime ministers every other day, the war in Ireland was to be Britain’s own crisis.

The protests against deployment seen in 1919 were nowhere to be found this time; the King had been murdered and the country was threatened with breakup. This literally was For King and Country. Anti-Irish riots had swept major cities and towns throughout Britain. HMS Hood’s first task after returning the King’s body home was to anchor herself in Dublin Bay in a show of force, joined by a squadron of destroyers. When shots were fired from the city towards Hood, she showed her presence was no feeble act by strafing Booterstown with anti-aircraft rounds.

From the beginning, the British faced two tasks; defeating the enemy and winning the population. To accomplish the latter, Lloyd George had made the characteristically rare step of listening to Herbert Asquith. Before the King’s murder, Asquith had already called British actions “the blackest annals of the lowest despotisms in Europe” and was now lobbying the government to avoid practicing warfare in such a way which would stain Britain morally and drive the Irish population to the republicans. But Lloyd George was adamant in the Commons that, in his words, “the example of Ireland must forever be the example we turn to when asked for evidence that appeasement of aggressors shall not work.” It was a lesson which would need to be employed in the future.
 
Chapter IV: An Unhappy Marriage

As the war in Ireland continued, so too did other events.

The economic boom of the immediate post-war period quickly fell away like loose plaster. Until 1920, the government may as well have been running a war economy with a budget of £2.5 billion. The 1914 budget had been thought shocking enough for peacetime spending of £200 million. These numbers are somewhat distorted by inflation, but when the inflationary bubble was pricked in 1920, the government was forced to declare its priorities. Interest rates rose to nearly 8% while the budget of 1920 more than halved government spending. Before the war, income tax had been 8%; now it was 33%. A quarter of the government’s budget was dedicated to its interest.

By the winter of 1920, Britain had fallen into recession. Her factories had been archaic before the war, now they struggled to sell anything to a shrivelled post-war export market. Unemployment was quick to quintuple to 10%, while inflation turned to a deflation of nearly -15%, adding an additional burden onto Britain’s already crushing national debt which had reached 135% of national income. With the huge cuts imposed by the Treasury, there was no extra spending to cushion the effect of the recession. Social reform was often impossible, and the recession came to be described at the time as the worst since the Industrial Revolution. Housebuilding was a prime victim with Christopher Addison, the man behind the state programme, resigning as target after target was missed. The Treasury may have soon been running a surplus, but the deep deflation ensured that debt was little affected, not decreasing until 1923, and very modestly. In human terms, the result was chaos. In 1919, when Britain was supposedly on the brink of revolution, 36 million days had been lost to revolution. In 1921, it was almost 90 million. British manufacturing was further hurt by the Kelley-Cockran Act 1921, passed in the U.S. Congress, which imposed tariffs on certain British imports in response to the occupation of Ireland and which became the source for the today rather antiquated insult “kellycock,” referring to the vindictive.

The recession was not the main reason for the collapse of the coalition in 1921, but it certainly helped. Within the Cabinet, Lloyd George fought tooth and nail for an alternative to deflation. His Tory Chancellor, Austen Chamberlain, stuck to Treasury orthodoxy as he dug his heels in. In one April meeting of the Cabinet, the Prime Minister held court for four solid hours as he argued in favour of a much increased role for the state in the economy. He was preaching to atheists. Lloyd George certainly still had faith in himself, and the coalition likely wouldn’t have lasted so long without the power of his personality, but he was leading a Cabinet of mostly Conservatives who would greet his proposals with, at best, the nod and smile of an accountant about to explain in simple terms why your dream cannot be.

Frustrated, on August 4th the Prime Minister arranged a private meeting with the Labour leader, J.R. Clynes, at his private home, Pinfold Manor in the Surrey village of Walton-on-the-Hill. The meeting was enclosed in such secrecy that the Prime Minister even abandoned his bodyguards from the Special Protection Service, established after the king’s murder, and the windows of Pinfold Manor were blacked out. Lloyd George had grown weary with the entrenched views of his supposed allies in the Cabinet, and hoped that perhaps socialists would be more open to his economic proposals. Sitting down with Clynes, he made the upfront offer of a new coalition. The mathematics weren’t on their side, as Clynes was quick to point out, but the Prime Minister replied that he was certain he could persuade enough of Herbert Asquith’s fellows in the Commons to join them. This could form a majority. After all, Asquith had become a champion of left-wing progressives since the war’s end. Surely a union with Labour would fit him like a glove. J.R. Clynes thought for a moment. “I’m more concerned about whether he will sit with you than with me, sir,” he finally said. The Prime Minister was optimistic that he would be willing to put grievances to one side and conciliate. Then J.R. Clynes brought up the war in Ireland. Labour’s policy was to support Irish independence, but at that very moment 100,000 troops were occupying the country and Labour couldn’t possibly be party to this. Clynes understood that following the murder of the King, Labour would be seen as unpatriotic for taking the anti-war approach. After all, just three days earlier an Irish republican had set off a bomb at Glasgow Central station, killing five people. Regardless, he couldn’t go against his party and change course. Adamson had only suggested a change of direction and been crucified; Clynes would have to do much worse. Besides, he was himself the son of an Irishman. Labour was delicate enough as it was following the ousting of Adamson nearly two years prior. Clynes wasn’t sure it could survive another internal row. Lloyd George replied with a promise to re-examine policy towards Ireland. “A new government means a new policy,” he told Clynes. He then leant in and offered what he hoped would be the trump card; “it would also make sense for the leader of the new coalition’s largest party to ascend to the premiership.” In other words, J.R. Clynes could become history’s first Labour Prime Minister. This was a remarkable offer; Lloyd George was offering to give up the premiership on the condition that he be made Chancellor of the Exchequer. Clynes was not a power hungry man, but he knew a Labour-headed administration could be far more socialist than a Liberal-headed one. He agreed to discuss the proposals with his Shadow Cabinet, but would need concrete proof that the two Liberal sides could reconcile before offering a definitive answer.

Returning to London, Lloyd George found a crowd of journalists at Downing Street barking questions about his secret talks with J.R. Clynes. The Prime Minister was furious; clearly someone had been leaking. In fact it transpired that a reporter from The Times had been watching his Surrey manor and observed the Labour leader’s coming and going, despite all the stringest measures that'd been taken. “Sometimes I truly despise habeas corpus,” he later remarked.

Yet what came as a surprise to everyone was that the Conservatives did not call off the coalition right there and then. They too had a grasp on basic arithmetic and knew a Labour-Lloyd George Liberal grouping would not add up to a majority, and few believed Asquith would get on board with it. So it was that the coalition seemed poised to continue, albeit rather more awkwardly. Re-enter Lloyd George. Invigorated by his meeting with Clynes, and excited that his grand ideas might still have a future, he openly appealed to Herbert Asquith on August 27th for “liberal values to be saved in this land,” by the two men shaking hands and reuniting. Doing so meant swallowing quite a lot of pride, as he promised that the reunited party would immediately hold a leadership election. Now Asquith saw the opportunity to become Prime Minister once more. For the Conservatives, they saw the appeal as a naked demonstration that Lloyd George was doing everything he could to banish the Tories into Opposition. Their leader, Andrew Bonar Law, was ill and with this crisis some within the Cabinet saw him as a liability amid the possibility of a sudden election. So it was that without fanfare the party dumped their leader and in his place came Stanley Baldwin, the President of the Board of Trade, who beat off an attempt by the former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour to return to the top.

On his first day as leader, Stanley Baldwin phoned Lloyd George and told him it was all over. The Conservatives were leaving the coalition. To this day, a party unilaterally withdrawing from coalition is known as invoking the Baldwin Protocol. Lloyd George was driven to Buckingham Palace, where the new King Edward VIII was presented with his first minister’s resignation and the dissolution of Parliament. A fresh general election was set for October 13th, 1921. There was no time to reunite the Liberals; it would have to wait. His hope of retaining the premiership seemed to be in the dirt.
 
Intriguing. It seems to foreshadow a grim future for this Britain, I look forward to seeing just what does happen in the 30s and 40s...

fasquardon
 
After the 1921 election update I'm going to be changing the format of this TL; each update will encompass a whole year and, if anyone requests, I'll do sub-updates that expand on particular topics. I've effectively completed a timeline of events up to about 2020 so basically know what's gonna happen. Though bear in mind updates will likely be sparse this summer; am working 4 days a week and going to London all next week. But I shall try nonetheless
 
Basically a resurrection of an old TL of mine, edited and hopefully improved.

Some mistake here surely. STV does not give seats to those with a tiny percentage vote. It requires quota transfers within a constituency, which obviates against tiny parties. A number of proportional systems would do so, either a national or regional list or Alternative Member Systems without a threshold to exclude tiny groups ie that used in Israel.
 
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