So, this is fucking stupid but also, I had to expel the brainworm
Up! Up! Up!
How Britain
landed on the
Moon and What We
Did When We Got There
2040-2050: Arthur Webber (Labour)
In the 2030s it became obvious that the full consequences of global warming were worse than feared. The world's ice sheets were far less stable than predicted. The Greenland ice sheet, which was expected to take 7000 years to fully melt, and the Antarctic ice sheet, expected to last 10,000 years, were both likely going to be gone in a century. The amount of methane secured underneath them had been radically under estimated, and methane release from the dying seas had been ignored entirely. Attempts at geoengineering such as ocean seeding smothered the seas, making the situation worse.
In 2047, the first cyclone season hit Britain. In 2048 temperatures in Cornwall reached 50 C. In 2049, Most of London was underwater for the whole year. By 2050, a radical solution was needed. The US was working on rebuilding its cities in Canada and Antarctica, Russia was attempting to colonise its own formerly frozen north, China and Africa were dedicated to massive geoengineering projects and India was engaged in mass transhumanism. Britain needed to chose a direction.
2050-2065: X Æ A-Xii Musk (Up! Up! Up!)
Up! Up! Up! was a movement dedicated to one simple policy - that Britain could not survive on Earth but could survive in space. X Æ A-Xii purchased their father's old fleet of ten mothballed SpaceX Starship IIs from the Musk Foundation, which had been left unused since the Lunar Gateway Disaster. The fleet was refitted, repaired, and flights to the moon began in 2052.
The first thousand British people on the British lunar colony of Avalon were specialists and scientists but very soon under Earth's extreme weather, 90% of moon mission places were available to the highest bidder, with 2.5% reserved for international colonists. By 2057, a hundred thousand people lived on Avalon and Britain was expanding into new bases - Python, Blackadder, and Sandford. In 2065 Britain built the biggest rocket in the world, capable of carrying 600 passengers in cramped conditions, or 150 in luxury, and the pace of space travel expanded. By 2065, the space population had reached a million.
X Æ A-Xii had very few domestic policies - the incorporation of Gibraltar as a constituency and turning it into a launch station, hiring refugees from London, Lincolnshire, etc into the space fleet. Devon Laing, X Æ A-Xii's enterprising Chancellor, realised that the government could purchase the houses of people who were selling up to go to the moon and repurpose them to be be sold off to the poorer people left behind. This raised the house prices of remaining properties and helped the government turn a profit both by keeping the cost of space travel high and the cost of property stable.
The other major decision was to allow space colonists to vote in UK Earth based constituencies. This was practical - MPs couldn't be expected to commute to the Moon, but it also meant that Earth constituencies retained spacefaring populations considered likely to vote for more colonisation.
Tragedy struck in 2059 with the loss of a Generation 2 rocket and 150 wealthy travellers. Thankfully British law prevented the worst of the law suits but from then on space travel prices began to drop to fill the quotas.
2065-2070: Xanthippe Kapur (Labour) coalition with Devon Laing (Up! Up! Up!)
Kapur had grown up wealthy but had joined Labour after the destruction of London, when she went from being a promising researcher at the Adam Smith Institute to a climate refugee living in a camp in Luton. She had a great sympathy for those left behind by the pace missions, but not enough political power to push for earth based solutions. In coalition with Up! Up! Up! she pushed for space travel to be made affordable. New one year intensive degrees allowed people to train in essential colonist skills and buy tickets to the Moon. The wealthy appreciated the influx of new service staff, who provided essential maintenance that was long overdue. So much so that some of the original bases were expanded to include housing for them. In other cases, new cities sprung up.
The Generation 3 Starship was smaller and designed to make multiple, small scale launches with minimal cargo. Gibraltar's population reached half a million, as it grew into Britain's primary launch site. A Mars colony was postponed - the moon was closest and Kapur's goal was exodus, not expansion.
On Earth, the situation continued to worsen. The Storegga slide of 2066 released a megatsunami that devastated Scotland and puch of Britain's east coast. This was a human tragedy, but politically useful. Scotland's Green government had been planning to declare independence - the area being cool enough and high enough up to make survival in underground cities seem reasonable. By 2069 the Scottish parliament was quietly suspended due to bankrupcy and the Scottish Green reincorparted into the national party. Cornwall was deemed uninhabitable without specialist gear and by 2070 three hurricanes were hitting the British coast every year.
2070-2080: Asmodeus Huq-Guinness (Conservative) Coalition with Devon Laing (Up! Up! Up!) and Tobin Pratchett (Labour)
Asmodeus was the first Satanist Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, his family having converted during the New Age Revival of the 2030s. He was elected on a law and order platform that was curiously domestic in its priorities - control crime, stamp out illegal immigration, and bring the refugee camps to heel. These were not goals shared by his coalition partners, but their aims were preferable to the Green Party's goal of ending space flight and dealing with the situation on Earth.
The Interplanetary Constabulary was set up in 2070, and immediately worked on stamping out bootleg missions to the British Lunar Territory from outside of the UK. Meanwhile, the government positively encouraged it from enterprising individuals. This was the era of DIY colonists, when a community might save up, build a rocket, blast off, and probably die in space at some point, but those that survived formed a ring of orbital and lunar micro-colonies that were enterprising and unique in their cultures.
On Earth, millions of refugees were arriving in Britain every day, mostly from Africa and Europe, seeking the relative safety of the British Isles. Many were killed by the plagues or megastorms or the poisonous water but Asmodeus set the Royal Navy to gun down the rest in their boats. The EU mostly approved of this policy, they were retreating to underground and underwater citadels and trying to protect themselves from these same roving bands.
In 2076, Gibraltar was lost to the roving bands of the new Brotherhood of the Two Seas - a pirate republic that had set itself up as rulers of the Saharan and Mediterranean seas. This was a foreign policy disaster for Britain on a par with Suez.
2076-2080: Snowbell Bianco (Conservative) Coalition with Alice Templeton (Up! Up! Up!) and Tobin Pratchett (Labour)
Bianco had been a relatively insignificant figure, the Minister for Geoengineering and Terraforming, but that made her an acceptable choice to take over from a discredited and unpopular government. She pushed for a return to the Mars project, as a minor priority. As she famously said "if we want to leave the Earth, we need to reach for the stars". However, her real priority was mass transit. In 2079 the new Generation 4 starships were built, stealing heavily from the successful bootleg designs. It was the cheapest, most crowded rocket Britain ever built, but it was necessary, at a stage when Britain was starting to ferry its impoverished refugee population into space.
On Earth, Bianco avoided the Brotherhood-EU war by giving both sides rights to refuel at British spaceports and floating launch facilities. She pursued an Atlanticist trade deal, aligning more closely with the US and the new Oceanic Republic of Atlantis than with Europe.
2080-2085: Sebastian Lord (Green)
Finally in 2080, public rage at the Earth being left to die grew too much, and the Green Party was swept into power, mostly from constituencies that were well inland. However, this was a government in a difficult position. In 2080, the UK's space population outnumbered the Earth population for the first time, and the population, even those that had voted Green, didn't want to be left on Earth to die. The Greens invested heavily in Wales and Scotland, where underground arcologies were possible and safe. They even begrudingly got behind the Upload project, that had sent some 7% of the world's population into digital habitats. But the reality was, Earth was dying. The government had been elected on a majority to stop the space race, but never had the political capitol to do more than stop the Mars mission and mothball the most dangerous and old starships. It was now inevitable that Britain's future lay in space.
Domestically, the refugee shootings were stopped, but then, there were very few refugees left. Fifty year old restrictions on doomsday cults were lifted which led to a spate of mass suicides which at this point nobody minded too much. Although the mass suicide of the population of Glastonbury cost the Greens a seat in the following by-election.
2085-2095: Alice Templeton (Up! Up! Up!)
The final prime minister to technically run the country from Earth, Smith recognised that Westminster and Downing Street were no longer "undergoing renovations" and established a new political citadel - "The Flying Circus" in Python.
Space flights, which had never really abated under the Greens, were now accellerated. Project Dunkirk was launched in 2092, calling for every launch capable vessel on the Moon to be made available for a massive effort of refugee pick up and transit. On the other end... chaos. Leaky bases with no technology and little technical expertise. Some of which survived, but many failed. But people still went. By 2095, the population of terrestrial British population had been reduced to just 5% of the UK's whole.
2095-2114: Ruby Choudhury (LabourTory Coalition for Change 2100)
The unlikely coalition of the two ostensible parties of government was enough to oust both the exhausted UUU and the politically bereft Greens, and gave Choudhury a majority sufficient to re-form the UK. In 2097, clearance of the bootleg orbital habitats began. These had become the slums of the UK, and their populations were aimed mostly at the new Martian habitats, where Britain aimed to establish a presence on the new frontier. Many of the settlements were useful, however, and were constructed into what became known as the NHS - the National Hellfire Service - an array of lasers aimed at protecting the geographically fracturing British Isles from attack or colonisation.
The small terrestrial British population - just two million people - lived in caves and bunkers and a few big underground cities and presided over a nature reserve of swamps and bleak hillsides inhabited mostly by mosquitos, fungus and algal blooms.
The 2101 Great Reform Act established the new form of the British constitution, Voluntary FPTP. Every citizen got to choose which constituency they lived in from a list of those available on their planet and a recall vote could be called if ever an MP lost their majority in terms of number of pledged votes. This evened out to PR without general elections, which were seen as an unnecessary festival of democracy.
By 2114, the terrestrial UK was covered by the Welsh Constituencies, Scotland had Mars, former English constituencies covered the Moon and the eight Gibraltan constituencies were re-established to cover the Asteroids and beyond. The UK was one of the premier space powers, second only to the USA, India, and China in terms of capability, and only rivalled by the United Federation of Planets in terms of population.
