And thus Mosely is undone, but at least he was able to chose - to some extent - the manner of his departure. A courtesy not always afforded to people who ride the wave of revolution. It also must have seemed to have come very quickly in the end ... as it often does, with the earlier cracks really on being perceived in hindsight.
In the end Mosley had an alright time of it, leaving office. Previously there's been a Thatcher comparison, and I think it extends somewhat to his downfall. The popular unrest surrounding it can't truly be called revolutionary, but it's a defining moment, and a signal that the government has gone beyond the point of no return. Had he stayed any longer, I think his exit would have been far less dignified – and more than anything, I think vanity would prevent Mosley considering that possibility too strongly.
And so to Bevan. I have a curiosity here, given some of the later items we have seen, about how Bevan will manage the veritable flood of pent-up demand for change there is. For that too is a wave that is difficult to ride.
There is a lot of demand for change. Unless he's been planning this for decades, he's going to struggle.
And so to Bevan indeed. It will be a strange one; as you both suggest, he is in an unenviable position, even if he is the victor. He hasn't so much ridden a revolutionary wave too power as leveraged certain liberalising undercurrents in order to strengthen his position in government, which basically leaves the system intact while offering the possibility for some liberal reforms. And this, without wishing to foreshadow too heavily, is what we will see: a reformist who never quite gets to the root of the problems afflicting the Commonwealth in the middle of the century.
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I mentioned last week that I'd give a bit of a debrief post-Mosley, and outline few alternative scenarios that may or may not have left things better placed. Seeing as this timeline is now eighteen months in the making, looking back there are things I would do differently were I to start today, and while I don't have any plans for a redux in the foreseeable future (I'm not completely mad) I am sort of interested in going through some potential divergences – particularly as they relate to Mosley's fate.
I will say that the bare bones of the timeline – Mosley being in power from 1934–61 – has been set in stone since the beginning, and well before I'd even drafted the sequence of events going into the 1940s and '50s. In this sense, I think the 61 downfall ends up feeling about right for the course – but a lot of this is me post-rationalising predetermined arbitrary dates. This arbitrary historicism could possibly have been avoided in the first instance by leaning more heavily on gameplay, and particularly by using the Cold War Expansion mod instead of the New Era Mod. CWE I prefer for its historical depth, whereas the NEM feels a bit more like a simple timeline extension. (My dream, of course, would be an Echoes world Vicky mod with a 1945 start – but that is incredibly unlikely.)
In the end, I hit upon lifting Windscale wholesale as a Chernobyl-style catalyst for change – both because I felt it was an interesting event to take a look at, and because it fit quite nicely within my planned timeframe. This continues on the overall theme for the timeline, which is that historical events are reimagined and re-evaluated outside of the context of a Westminster-style democracy. I like doing this because I think it exposes certain things about how we perceive governmental malpractice traditionally, versus when we are conditioned to think of the government as somehow more authoritarian. (The other example is the decision to keep in the winter of 1946–7, but expand it into an early Winter of Discontent.)
In my mind, the Winter of Discontent presents the first real opportunity for a divergence that isn't entirely arbitrary; had Bevan worked more closely with the unions, they probably would have been able to oppose the emergent Mosley–Boothby axis and strangle directorialism in its crib. This would completely erase what I call the 'Long Mosleyite Fifties' (1945–61) and usher in Bevanism a decade early, still in a precarious position but with much more focused unrest to deal with – and without much of the illiberalism to overturn. The Socialist Front likely survives, and power sharing would become the governmental modus operandi; Britain by the Sixties would be shaped by an alternate post-war consensus, with Bevan at the starting point instead of Gaitskell and Butler. Plurality and internationalism would reign supreme, Europe would be in for a golden era of bread and roses, and they all lived happily ever after.
Slightly less utopian would be to have Mosley step down in 1954 after twenty years in office, a year before the 1955 Assembly election. This keeps in the foundations of the illiberal Fifties, and would probably offer the best chance of Party of Action dominance into the Sixties, likely I think by having Boothby take over for at least the rest of the decade. Whether this would alter much materially, I'm not sure, although I think it would have an interesting side effect on how the 'Mosley era' would be viewed historiographically; a neat twenty years in power from 1934–54 is even more neatly split in two, with the operative year being 1944. The first decade, 1934–44, takes in Mosley as a dynamic wartime leader, having (or at least claiming to have) masterminded the defeat of fascism both at home (1933~36), in Europe (1936~40) and in Asia (1940~44). The second decade, 1944–54, is then a period of decline where the Chairman mostly fails to 'win the peace', running out of ideas to renovate the economy going into the midcentury and growing increasingly illiberal. In my mind, this maps nicely onto a view of Mosley as Churchill: rousing in a crisis; all at sea everywhere else. Boothby and his successors would then manage the
image of the Party of Action in power without necessarily doing much to change course.
It's quite possible in this scenario that the whole thing runs out of steam rather predictably with Harold Macmillan quitting circa 1963 – or maybe Boothby and Bevan have some sort of Blair/Brown secret treaty and Bevan takes over on schedule, with more or less similar results. The most notable change is probably Windscale being butterflies away, with the added bonus of male homosexuality being decriminalised way ahead of schedule in 1955.
The final scenario that offers any meaningful divergence, as I see it, probably relies on doing away with every trace of the Vicky play-through altogether, which would free up the possibility of Mosley coming to power some time other than 1934, and under different circumstances. But I think this isn't so much worth exploring, because everything would be up for debate and I may as well write a new (and entirely arbitrary) timeline. I think in this case I would have forced myself far less to confront the darker side of life in the Commonwealth, and the whole thing may well have just turned into a utopian exposition of how world syndicalist revolution in entirely possible. Thank goodness we avoided that one.