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What's the earliest people think you could reasonably get high-speed rail in the UK? The easiest option I can think of is an Anglo-French treaty in the late 1960s or early 1970s to build a Channel tunnel that includes clauses requiring lines linking it to London (HS1) and Paris, and similar ones...

Discussion of Bremen in the German politics thread at the weekend reminded me of this. Thanks to a combination of history and – as I understand things – the Americans wanting their own port during the occupation of Germany, Bremen and Hamburg managed to survive as Länder. Not knowing enough...

So this little piece of fuckery reminded me of an idea I had a while back regarding the Russian Kaliningrad oblast. For one reason or another the Western Allies push back a bit more with regards to the annexation of Königsberg by the USSR, as a compromise instead of going straight to the Soviets...

In our timeline Britain gained the eastern half of French Louisiana in the Treaty of Paris at the conclusion of the Seven Years's War. This was a bit naughty on France part as they had already secretly ceded the whole of it to Spain with the Treaty of Fontainebleau for coming into the war, but...

I was reading an article at the weekend about Saudi Arabia simultaneously liberalising and cracking down in recent times, and one section that caught my eye was about the storming of the Grand Mosque. Which got me wondering. Suppose for a moment that the authorities got wind of al-Otaybi and...

Inspired by this article that strategos' risk posted about on the Other Place. In the aftermath of the First Sino-Japanese War seeing which was things were headed a group of local officials approached the British consul in Taipei to try and find a way to have Formosa come under British...

Assume for a moment that due to [REASONS] the first peace feelers are rebuffed and that the British don't sit down with the French until roughly six months later than our timeline. This means that the siege of Cassel has been successfully carried through and news of the fall and occupation of...

This is probably one for @Coiler but I was reminded a few days back about the Cooper vs. Ali fight of 1963. Claims that due to a tear in one of Ali's gloves the rest interval was more than momentarily longer than normal have been debunked, that Dundee used illegal smelling salts can't be proved...

Reading the Wikipedia article about the Tottenham Outrage – feel free to make your own Spurs jokes – there's a passing mention that the two perpetrators moved to the UK from France after the brother of one who they had been staying with was killed by the premature detonation of the bomb he was...

I was reminded this morning of the University of Stamford, a short-lived English university founded in 1333 by a breakaway group of lecturers and students from the University of Oxford. Oxford University and Cambridge University lobbied against it and they managed to convince the King to have...

John Major has a reputation as being fairly boring as Prime Ministers go, so I got to wondering what sort of point of departure could you come up with after his becoming PM to most decisively change that? One idea I had was his deciding to launch a military intervention in Rwanda during the...

Originally posted in the PMQs thread but decided to start a separate one. The 2007 Scottish Parliament election took place on the 3rd of May so let's say he resign at the end of March or at least towards the end of April and Brown take the reins essentially unopposed.

The general idea was what might shake out from the Kingdom of Sarawak remaining independent thanks to Anthony Brooke becoming Rajah when his uncle Charles abdicates and retires to the UK rather than it becoming a Crown colony. Sabah and Labuan likely get bolted on to it rather than join the...

No not one where mutated COVID-19 has gone on a rampage and killed off humanity, but one where the largest number of trouble spots are avoided. This springs from a whimsical idea of what, with the benefit of hindsight, could be done post-WWII. North Korea – losing the Korean War removes this...

Couple of threads over at the Other Place about a Conservative victory in 1964 and an alternate British Motor Corporation (BMC) got me wondering but were there ever any calls for or proposals to nationalise the UK motor industry prior to it getting into trouble? Labour nationalised the steel...

I came across an interesting thread by David T over at the Other Place which didn't get much of a response when it was posted. Hopefully no-one will mind my quoting it here. The main question has to be do people think that if it had been Cripps rather than Gaitskell who as Chancellor...

Something that came to mind earlier this afternoon but assuming for a moment that the Conservatives managed to gain a small majority similar to their 1951 one in 1950 how does that affect Labour's internal politics? I would assume that Attlee still stays on until 1955, and that it being...

Archibald Sinclair was elected MP for Caithness and Sutherland in 1922 and was leader of Liberals from 1935 until he lost his seat in the 1945 general election by 61 votes in a tight three-way contest. He stood again in 1950 but lost a second time by 269 votes. The Liberal Party itself didn’t do...

I’m trying to plot how get the Ryukyu Kingdom to become a British protected state similar to the Kingdom of Tonga and the most likely point of divergence so far appears to be the Bombardment of Kagoshima and its aftermath. The general idea is that due to [REASONS] – more forces, better planning...

This came out of a thread over at the Other Place about keeping the Habsburgs on a throne somewhere in Europe after Great War and I got to wondering about a Habsburg Liechtenstein. Liechtenstein was in large part created out of expediency, Johann I wanting to gain Imperial immediacy bought a...