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Least favorite alt-history story?

David Flin said:
Indeed. On this forum, when I wrote here, I would plead and plead for feedback. What worked, what didn't, anything.

Getting blood from a stone was easy by comparison. Finally, I gave up trying out first drafts here, because as far as I can tell, maybe 2 people read them, and I got sod all in the way of feedback.
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Tell me about it.

Try Space Battles or Baen's Bar. They can be more useful.

Chris
 
Time Enough said:
Even when me and @Oppo had a ‘Alliance Victory’ in a timeline it was because Thatcher was persuaded to do a snappy in 81’ and even then it was an Alliance-Gilmour Tories coalition against Foot’s Labour. Even then there’s problems with it.

It easier for Kinnock to become PM in 87’ than a 200 Majority for Alliance.
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Nah, everyone secretly hates the Tories/Labour, and as soon as it looks like there might be a breakthrough, will vote en-mass for the LDems/their predecessors.

Which is why we're talking about this in Nick Clegg's 11th year as PM.
 
David Flin said:
I simply cannot work out how, under any circumstances, one can credibly claim 35 seats as a result for the Conservatives.

I can believe in an Alliance victory, with enough tweaks, possibly even with a narrow majority. But a majority of nigh on 200 for the Alliance? And yet this is being defended as "realistic".
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It sounds like someone imported results directly from Electoral Calculus or something without accounting for anything non-uniform in the vote distribution. Because I could easily see a scenario in which someone had some high but not unreasonable popular vote swing from the Tories to the Alliance, but failed to account for the fact that that would probably be more pronounced in swing seats and seats where the Tories were uncompetitive than safe seats, or for any regional variance, or what have you.
 
David Flin said:
Having said that I don't care for too detailed criticism of amateur TLs on forums, I have to say that one has some interesting election results from a 1983 UK General Election following no Falklands and a Tory breakaway group forming in 1981.

As we now know, the Alliance won a landslide 423 seats, Labour held 169 and the Conservatives just 35. Margaret Thatcher lost her own seat of Finchley by over 5,000 to the Alliance and most of her Cabinet also lost their seats.

I'm no political expert, but I rather think that even under the worst conceivable conditions, the Tories might get a touch more than 35 seats. With a POD just two years before.
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@Oppo just said it but it bears repeating that at the Alliance’s polling peak the Tories were facing a complete wipeout
 
David Flin said:
I can easily believe a Tory collapse to 200 seats. I can believe one to 150 seats (lower than 1997). I can just about believe in around 120 seats.

35 seats is farcical.
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What about a gentleman’s 25 seats? Would that be less farcical? Asking for a friend.
 
Radical ecologist/deepgreen regimes appear in right wing anti-environmentalist screeds but I haven't seen much about a Deep Green/post-AGW Eco-Authoritarian state
 
David Flin said:
Anything less than around 120 seats simply isn't credible. There are that many constituencies where one would need ASB level swings to put them into jeopardy.
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The Canadian Conservatives fell to literally two seats after being around for 126 years. In the past decade, the Liberals, the natural party of government, went from a humiliating third place to a majority in one election. A more volatile party system (which the SDP had the potential to create) could easily produce shock results.
 
The 50% number was literally one poll. I thought everyone on this board would have known what an outlier is, but apparently not.

It's also a total fantasy number, given ever since the nationalist/Liberal breakthroughs of the seventies nobody has come close to getting 50% at a general election. The absolute ceiling in a general election is about 43-44% of the vote.

The Alliance only consistently broke (barely) above 40% of the vote for about one month. They need to crack about 38-40% of the vote for FPTP to work for them, and not against them. Even pre-Falklands they were well below that, and that's before the wasted vote factor kicks in.

It's also worth pointing out that even in 1997, when they were about as popular as syphilis, the Tories still won 31% of the vote. Labour of course won 27% in 1983, which was pretty much bedrock for them. Between 1979 and 1992 the Tory vote didn't fall below 40%. So I'd put a big health warning on any assumption that the Tory or Labour bedrocks are in the low twenties.
 
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gentleman biaggi said:
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You're mistaking a poll - a 1980s poll, at that - for reality. The Alliance was never on 50%, and Labour and the Conservatives were never really on 23%. Once you take away the polling fluke, you maybe have something more like 29-29-40. Then you have to consider the protest responses who aren't really going to vote Alliance and the impact of an election campaign.
 
Edmund said:
You're mistaking a poll - a 1980s poll, at that - for reality. The Alliance was never on 50%, and Labour and the Conservatives were never really on 23%. Once you take away the polling fluke, you maybe have something more like 29-29-40. Then you have to consider the protest responses who aren't really going to vote Alliance and the impact of an election campaign.
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dudes focused too much on the SDP/liberal alliance when are we gonna talk about SDP interlude???
 
Elektronaut said:
The 50% number was literally one poll. I thought everyone on this board would have known what an outlier is, but apparently not.
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More than that, it was an outlier in an environment that would have produced better numbers for the Alliance than an election would (per cross-country trends), wasn’t it? New parties and third parties do a lot better in polls than reality, and incumbents do worse farther from elections.
 
gentleman biaggi said:
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See, that to me is almost a case against the idea. If we know that that polling result happened that way and the actual election happened the way it did, that really seems to be an indication that the problem is with the poll, not that if the election had actually happened then we would’ve seen that results and the political destiny of Britain just turned on a dime like that between December 1981 and June 1983.
 
Wolfram said:
More than that, it was an outlier in an environment that would have produced better numbers for the Alliance than an election would (per cross-country trends), wasn’t it? New parties and third parties do a lot better in polls than reality, and incumbents do worse farther from elections.
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It's probably worth pointing out that the opposition in the UK lead in polling not just in 1979-1983, but also in 1983-1987, and 1987-1992. None of this carried at the subsequent general election.
 
Polls tend to give weirder results when done in between election seasons than when done in election seasons, as in that time people actually have to think about who they are going to vote for. I remember in 2015-2016 Geert Wilders's PVV was leading in practically every poll for the 2017 Dutch Elections, yet ended up sputtering when it actually came.
 
gentleman biaggi said:
dudes focused too much on the SDP/liberal alliance when are we gonna talk about SDP interlude???
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Are we talking David Owen’s Magical Electoral Fun Ride here? Because if so, he ain’t getting a stonking Majority but there’s a silly timelines possibility where he forms a coalition with the Tories or Labour after David Alton defects etc.
 
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