• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

Alternate History General Discussion

It's certainly an 'interesting' analysis of the UK's position post-war which doesn't mention the fact that we were bankrupt on the war's conclusion and faced continual financial and currency weakness for decades. We ended up heavily reliant on the US virtually by necessity stemming from this.

The United Kingdom was indeed in dire financial straits after World War II but the overall economic situation wasn't nearly that dire and the country ended up paying for a lot of the capabilities it ended up losing anyways. GDP per capita was close to France until the late 1960s (source). The truly poor relative economic performance actually happened in the 1970s after the United Kingdom had achieved debt levels comparable to its peers.

Here is a graph of debt to GDP levels for various developed countries (from here):

122611krugman1-blog480.jpg


In the nuclear field there was enough money to pay for the Sellafield Complex and Calder Hall and to develop and test both atomic and hydrogen bombs, but in 1958 the United Kingdom made the decision to rely on the United States for designing nuclear weapons and naval propulsion reactors. That's despite the fact that research and development costs represent a small percentage of the total cost of nuclear weapons and the fact that the United Kingdom has the second largest plutonium stockpile on Earth (source). Most of that plutonium is under civilian control but many of the Magnox reactors were built with the capability to run military fuel cycles, including three larger civilian stations (source). Even after outsourcing the development of nuclear technology to the United States the United Kingdom still had enough money to develop and build the Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor, a program that went significantly over time and budget. France took the opposite approach and developed its own nuclear weapons and naval propulsion reactors while choosing to base its Mesmer Plan reactors on Westinghouse designs that it developed into a French design lineage.

There was enough money to develop and technology in many other fields.

In aerospace there was enough money to develop three strategic jet bombers (source), an intermediate range ballistic missile (source), the advanced TSR-2 strike aircraft, the Vickers VC10 and Hawker Siddley Trident jet airliners, and pay for a portion of the Concorde project. Many of the commercial airliners that the British government and/or its associated corporations helped finance weren't commercially viable designs that needed some assistance to help come to completion but were essentially custom designed to the specifications of the state owned airlines, leading to difficulty in making international sales. The most successful British airliner of the period, the BAC One-Eleven, wasn't designed to the specifications of either of the state owned airlines and was launched with an order from British United, a privately owned company. It managed to secure orders from airlines based in the United States, no small feat in an era of protectionist aviation policies, including high tariffs on foreign airliners.

The United Kingdom developed the Advanced Passenger Train, the first with a tilt mechanism, and even had some enter service. It then cancelled further development and sold the technology to Fiat, which developed it into the successful Pendolino train.

Many early firsts in computing and communications were developed in the United Kingdom or by British scientists. The United Kingdom is still second only to the United States in the quality of its universities and is a major financial center, so it should have been possible to create a British equivalent to Silicon Valley. Even Finland was able to achieve major success with Nokia.

In Alternate History, there tends to be a habit of people liking a system or country so much that they write a story where it perpetuates itself until modern day and possibly forever.

I'm not talking about the British Empire, I'm talking about the the United Kingdom.

Bad luck doesn't even have anything to do with the decline of the United Kingdom, it's a series of bad decisions that happened for decades. That isn't something unique to the United Kingdom either. The Spanish Empire made bad decisions over the centuries before its decline, the Soviet Union made bad decisions over the decades that culminated in its collapse, and there aren't too many people arguing that the United States has been making great decisions over the past few decades.

France was able to steer itself into a preeminent position in Europe through good decision making after World War II. Russia has made an unparalleled comeback since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The situation for the United Kingdom was much closer to France and thus a similar outcome was well within the realm of possibilities.
 
When it comes to Britain and the economy, everyone ignores that most of those bad decisions were due to a feeling of being left behind by ‘those nice guys who weren’t that important’. Especially the fact that it was also a bunch of awkward sods from Left and Right deciding that if you had the right economic formula then you would gain eternal growth...which isn’t how that works.
The United Kingdom was indeed in dire financial straits after World War II but the overall economic situation wasn't nearly that dire and the country ended up paying for a lot of the capabilities it ended up losing anyways.
The problem was less debt, and more inflation/overheating of the economy and Exports over Imports stagnating. Most of the other countries like France, Germany etc. were just better at the export game (and knew when to devalue when it could secure economy value *cough*).
 
When it comes to Britain and the economy, everyone ignores that most of those bad decisions were due to a feeling of being left behind by ‘those nice guys who weren’t that important’. Especially the fact that it was also a bunch of awkward sods from Left and Right deciding that if you had the right economic formula then you would gain eternal growth...which isn’t how that works.

The British economy of the 1970s and 1980s was one of the strangest systems of any major country. It was a total mismatch of some of the most socialist and some of the most laissez-faire economics and the policy changes were often quite rapid. At one point the British government owned most of the major steel, automobile, rail, and shipbuilding industries in the country, and that's probably not even a full list. Then the British government went and privatized almost everything. I'm not sure how much of that was due to Conservative economic theory and how much (if any) of that was to comply with any European Community requirements in force at the time, but it probably resulted in a small scale version of what shock therapy did to Eastern Europe.

Privatization in the United Kingdom was so through that there are areas where government in the United States actually has more involvement in certain sectors than government in the United Kingdom. In the United Kingdom energy, passenger rail, and airports have almost no government ownership, but those sectors have major and in some cases almost total government ownership in the United States. In fact, in the run-up to Brexit both the left and right wings of British politics were talking about how the United Kingdom would be better positioned to achieve certain strategic goals because an exit from the European Union would allow for greater government involvement in the economy.

The problem was less debt, and more inflation/overheating of the economy and Exports over Imports stagnating. Most of the other countries like France, Germany etc. were just better at the export game (and knew when to devalue when it could secure economy value *cough*).

It seems like the United Kingdom experienced the challenges of international economic competition a few decades before the United States did. At one point the United Kingdom was the industrial powerhouse of the world but it suffered disproportionate economic decline when competition developed after World War II. Then the United States enjoyed a few decades of being the industrial powerhouse of the world up until the 1970s when competition from Europe and Japan developed. In both cases being faced with actual competition did not end well, but the United Kingdom wasn't in a position to try to control things like the United States was able to with protectionist policies such as import limits.

It's a bit ironic that the United States was able to use British financial theory to help fuel its growth, but then again the Japanese were able to use American industrial theory to beat its industrial giants in their own backyard.
 
Then the British government went and privatized almost everything. I'm not sure how much of that was due to Conservative economic theory and how much (if any) of that was to comply with any European Community requirements in force at the time, but it probably resulted in a small scale version of what shock therapy did to Eastern Europe.
Actually you got it a bit wrong there, large portions of British industry had over the 60s and 70s been asset stripped by mainly Labour Governments but as a way to essentially quickly nationalise and centralise control. The privatisation was done not because of the EC requirements but because of the leaders of the Conservative’s being in the thrall of the Friedman/Selsdon Group, with the Government essentially just switching off the finance tap in the end.

That being said, the type of ‘shock therapy’ you discussed didn’t last long due to 1981 really and the Tories would start putting some money back in the economy in time.
 
I think also looking at graphs and data and going ‘Why didn’t the British Economy grow properly etc.’ is essentially falling into the same trap lots of British Economists did in the 50s/60s/70s and 80s.

Like this stuff is covered incredibly well in Adam Curtis (good) early documentaries like the Mayfair Set and the League of Gentleman in which might as well be ‘a group of upper class economists are baffled that the economy isn’t adhering to there demands whilst the upper middle class finds ways to profit’.

Graphs, facts and data only will give you half the story and much of the problems with economics are often human error etc.
 
I think the graph produced precisely underlines my point, so I'm not sure what point is being made in producing it?

Yes, the UK had periods of good economic growth but sterling and the financial position were never good at all for literally decades, and incoming governments almost always faced a finance/currency crisis which the previous government had put off until after the election. The poor import/export situation, the debt burden, the burden of east of Suez commitments and the demand of social spending were all strongly structural issues; they certainly weren't as stark as being "choices". A fifties Labour government might have started post-India decolonisation a few years earlier than OTL but I think that's about it.

France could easily have gone down a different course on European policy so I don't see any great wisdom in what happened, which was mostly by chance. You had the rejection of the EDC by the National Assembly, and if de Gaulle had come to power earlier then France would have gone down a very similar course to Britain on Europe. Russia isn't as unstable (either politically or economically) as it was in the nineties but it's still mostly a basket case. Its ecomomy is still massively reliant on oil and mineral extraction, it hasn't made any major foreign policy gains, and its facing a demographic slide. I'm not sure what any of this has to do with Britain post-war though. Yes, it would have been nice if we'd had north sea oil reserves earlier and in significantly bigger quantities?

Post-war nationalisations and then later privatisations might be a confusing process from a certain American perspective (I suppose? But even Truman tried to nationalise the steel industry) but it was fairly routine across a lot of the west.
 
Last edited:
That's arguing we didn't do well with a plan - which is more true on a long-term arc and hindsight, if you looked another time you might say "this has mostly worked, the UK government has its feet under the table and got a nice fat rebate" - more than we didn't have a plan though.

It failed because people don't have the benefit of hindsight, which is also why pretty much the entire political establishment were hostile to intergration in the forties and fifties.

If there was a coherent plan or idea for Britain’s future, where exactly did the Commonwealth fit in to it? Why did we keep switching between pushing for further integration into Europe and pushing against it? Why has the issue of Europe contributed to the downfall of every leader of the country’s natural party of government for the last half-century?

If there was plan (as a opposed to a series of short-term, opportunistic and impulsive choices), it did not fail due to a lack of hindsight. France and Germany did not have hindsight. It failed due to pure and unrestrained incompetence.

I don't think I implied euroscepticsm. In the UK saying our entire membership was a strategic failure is however only ever an anti-EU position or a federalist one and I think I left room for both. But I really wouldn't want to guess which direction you were coming from this at.

I wasn’t saying that our membership of the EU was a strategic failure. I was saying that British foreign policy post-WW2 has largely been a series of constant and incessant failures.
 
Graphs, facts and data only will give you half the story and much of the problems with economics are often human error etc.
France could easily have gone down a different course on European policy so I don't see any great wisdom in what happened, which was mostly by chance.

It’s all well and good saying that other countries could have had the same problems that we did but the point is that they didn’t. I don’t believe for a second that we couldn’t have developed an economy stronger than France’s and Germany’s post-WW2 if competent people made competent decisions, because it’s those decisions that affect the problems with imports/exports, debt and so on. The same applies to our dependence on the United States; if we build a stronger economy and negotiate better deals (the Anglo-American loan springs to mind) we wouldn’t have to be so reliant on them. I think @Delta Force has done a superb job showing that our current status was no way inevitable, the opportunities were there for the taking even with our problems (which weren’t as bad as France’s or Germany’s), but we just didn’t take them.
 
My question is whether the failures noted are proof that there was no plan, or whether the plan didn't succeed. If the latter, there are further questions: was the plan realistic? If not, why was it adhered to? If it was realistic, how did the failures occur? Were they systemic or individual errors?

In my opinion, the political and journalistic establishment seem to be rather myopic in regards to how we are seen by the rest of the world, as well as being overly reluctant to apply lessons learned from elsewhere. Then again, my knowledge of these issues in other countries is limited, so it may not be a uniquely British failing.
 
One thing I’ve noticed is that, in alternate history or just historical fiction, the writers tend to ignore the dark side of a historical figure of just make him not do those bad things for whatever reason. It feels like they want to stan for a character without seeming like an apologist for said figure if he didn’t do anything nearly as evil as he historically did.
 
One thing I’ve noticed is that, in alternate history or just historical fiction, the writers tend to ignore the dark side of a historical figure of just make him not do those bad things for whatever reason. It feels like they want to stan for a character without seeming like an apologist for said figure if he didn’t do anything nearly as evil as he historically did.
Makes sense, I guess. If you're a big fan of someone, enough to want to write a big narrative about them, why would you want to dwell on their mistakes and failures? And if you're writing a conventional fictional narrative, you generally want to write sympathetic characters. History is full of unpunished injustice, but fiction hews away from that.

If I wrote a mystery novel and included a chapter where the detective beats his wife and takes bribes to look the other way from a human-trafficking prostitution ring and this had nothing to do with the mystery and he got away with it, I know which chapter the editor would suggest gets cut.
 
And if you're writing a conventional fictional narrative, you generally want to write sympathetic characters.

I've always thought a lot of the whitewashing of the Confederacy in Guns of the South was Turtledove trying to make protagonists that would be sympathetic to a modern audience. Doesn't excuse the art, but makes me less hard on the artist.
 
Actually you got it a bit wrong there, large portions of British industry had over the 60s and 70s been asset stripped by mainly Labour Governments but as a way to essentially quickly nationalise and centralise control. The privatisation was done not because of the EC requirements but because of the leaders of the Conservative’s being in the thrall of the Friedman/Selsdon Group, with the Government essentially just switching off the finance tap in the end.

That being said, the type of ‘shock therapy’ you discussed didn’t last long due to 1981 really and the Tories would start putting some money back in the economy in time.

The Labor Party might not have been able to come up with a coherent economic strategy either given the debate over Clause IV of the Constitution of the Labour Party that continues even to this day.

The poor import/export situation, the debt burden, the burden of east of Suez commitments and the demand of social spending were all strongly structural issues; they certainly weren't as stark as being "choices". A fifties Labour government might have started post-India decolonisation a few years earlier than OTL but I think that's about it.

The situation East of Suez was certainly a choice. With all of the challenges facing the United Kingdom stationing forces in Malaysia and Singapore certainly wasn't the highest priority. They were both sovereign states and the military presence there could have been better utilized in more strategically important areas such as the Middle East. The original plans for East of Suez didn't even call for a withdrawal until the mid-1970s (source).

The timing of social spending was certainly a choice too. If the import/export situation was so dire that the Labour Party was able to run on and win with a platform of indefinite rationing in 1950 its clear that the government was failing to meet the most basic of human needs. Spending scarce government funds nationalizing industry and healthcare might not be the best use of those resources. This is not an argument on the merits of universal healthcare, but one of timing and methods. There were clearly still major issues with ensuring people were receiving sufficient food and fuel (and almost certainly housing) at the same time that the British government was launching expensive new government initiatives. France had already ended rationing the year before Labour won by promising more of it, and the United Kingdom would be the last major country to end it in 1954. That came after the Conservatives had been in power for three years following their victory in the 1951 elections and after they had made campaign promises to end rationing.

Post-war nationalisations and then later privatisations might be a confusing process from a certain American perspective (I suppose? But even Truman tried to nationalise the steel industry) but it was fairly routine across a lot of the west.

The difference is that a lot of major British companies ended up failing shortly after privatization, often bringing down entire sectors with them. Many state owned enterprises in France were successfully privatized and are still in business today. Even the state owned enterprises of the United States would have a viable pathway if privatized. The federal power companies are still viable while legally selling power at cost and would essentially print money if they were selling it at market rates. Amtrak and the United States Postal Service could achieve profitability if they were allowed to end some of their business practices that exist only for political reasons.

On this note, for a goofy-soft AH question: Would a North Sea'd up UK (or independent Scotland, since this is a soft divergence anyway) ever end up joining OPEC openly? :p

It depends what you mean by "joining OPEC". Russia often openly coordinates with OPEC but it has never been a member. There might also be issues with the United Kingdom's status a petroleum exporting country due to its high levels of domestic consumption. Indonesia was once a member of OPEC but ended up leaving after declining domestic production and increasing domestic consumption led to it becoming a petroleum importing country.
 
The Labor Party might not have been able to come up with a coherent economic strategy either given the debate over Clause IV of the Constitution of the Labour Party that continues even to this day.
I think you put too much emphasis into that, Labour has bickered over Clause IV since the beginning and it’s entire existence was to keep the Left in check. More emphasis should be placed on stuff like ‘In Place of Strife’ and Labour’s situation with the Trade Union.

Edit- A more intriguing consideration would be if In Place of Strife was implemented which whilst in the short term could be rather disastrous could have some benefits in time.
 
Back
Top