Some people here are saying that the Soviets, if they captured Hitler, would essentially have treated him as an animal and given him a public execution. I very strongly doubt that. The Soviets don't want to open themselves to a charge of barbarism as if they were medieval Rus. They would take...
The British kept troops in Batum until 1920, and I've seen it suggested that it was only once they left that the Reds felt sufficiently emboldened to annex Georgia.
The key issues are cost and imperial overstretch - Britain doesn't want to be keeping a couple of divisions in the Caucasus when...
Well, agreed but the Conservatives secured a lower share of the ex-UKIP vote than would have been expected at the outset of the campaign - around half I think rather than 66 - 75%.
It would have been perfectly possible for the Tories to win a landslide even if Labour's share of the vote...
I think there is a distinction between a party being of the centre-right and being Conservative. Yes, the majority of the party's MPs would be of Conservative origin, but the infusion of a phalanx of formerly Liberal MPs is going to have an effect on the party's policies and outlook, and for the...
You can see the shadow of what might have been a famous Tory victory in the real life results anyway - industrial seats in the Midlands and the North swinging to the Tories even as London and the South goes the other way, the fall of ex-mining seats like Mansfield. A landslide victory of May...
I have always been interested in a timeline which explores the Lloyd George Liberals and the Tories 'fusing' after the First World War (being much too lazy to do one myself) as opposed to what actually happened which was the Tories feasting off the corpse of the Liberal Party. EdT sort of did...
Even in those circumstances I think Labour would still govern with Liberal support - Baldwin and Lloyd George despised each other, and Baldwin (not to mention Chamberlain) would prefer to go into opposition rather than govern with Liberal support. You would need someone like Churchill leading...
Is the idea that Churchill's government on the verge of being unseated due to the Great Smog not just a myth which appears to have been created by the Netflix series "The Crown"? I'm not aware of there being any great political uproar surrounding it - indeed as I recall (it's been several years...
Presumably Bonar Law's throat cancer is butterflied away in this timeline?
I am enjoying the comparisons between the Second Spanish Republic and the British Union. Mosley seems perfect as the Gil-Robles figure, Bissett sounds very much like Lerroux to me, with Chamberlain bearing a shade of...
The recent fracas over Bercow has got me to thinking about the circumstances in which he became Speaker in 2009 (I appreciate that this is a WI which will very much appeal only to the PoliBrits).
Speaker Martin misjudged both the mood of the public and the mood of MPs by getting het up about...
While it is true that the Communists were the biggest party after the 1946 elections, my understanding of the February 1948 political crisis and coup d'etat is that they took place when they did because both the Communists and democratic parties thought that the Communists were going to suffer...
This leaflet from Aberdeen City Council suggests that the picture in Aberdeen was, at least, a bit more mixed than that:
http://www.aberdeencity.gov.uk/web/files/LocalHistory/jacobite_trail_leaflet.pdf
Back in the day Aberdeen University was split into two colleges. From memory, it was...
This is good, although I have the feeling that Aberdeen was broadly sympathetic towards the Jacobites - at least, it was during the 1715 rebellion, and the entirety of the North East was a Jacobite stronghold in that rebellion.
I have always thought that a Stuart restoration was much more plausible in 1715 than 1745 - the Hanoverian succession was not at all popular across Britain (in quite a large number of places there were pro-Jacobite riots) and the Jacobites had a large army in Scotland which they threw away...