Well, Parliament was quite badly bombed during the Great War, (even worse than OTL, where the Commons was entirely destroyed) so even though the ultimate aspiration is to move back in, the Provisional Government (which, as an aside, isn't 'provisional' at all after the 1936 General Election, but these terms stick...) never quite gets round to it. Had the Revolution not happened, the Commons chamber would doubtless have been rebuilt in a U-shape similarly to its offspring in Canberra; the only reason this didn't happen post war was thanks to the personal intervention of Winston Churchill, who correctly argued that doing this would lose the 'cockpit of the nation' factor.
IOTL, the Commons evicted the Lords from their Chamber and Peers sat in the Royal Gallery between 1941 and 1950, but as the Palace has suffered worse damage ITTL this isn't really going to work. The next option would be *County Hall across the river, but that will probably be too small, as will returning to Parliaament's roots and squeezing into the Chapter House at the Abbey, so if Parliament is determined to sit in Westminster it'll have to be whatever is built on the sites of *Methodist Central Hall and the Middlesex Guildhall.
Assuming the former of the two is built (and I can't see why it wouldn't be, although like Westminster Cathedral it might not look the same ITTL), I can see it rather appeaking to Lloyd George's non-conformist roots.
As a side note, FWIW 300 MPs fill the present Commons perfectly adequately (albeit with plenty of room to stretch), and normally occupancy is considerably lower in the course of your average debate. You seldom get more than a couple of hundred Peers in the Lords at any one time and yet the place generally looks pretty full when it happens.
There isn't much of one, institutionally- the Syndicalists see the BSP as a rather ineffectual Bourgeios talking-shop, although in reality a fair bit of the organising structure persisted in an underground way to be co-opted by the Syndicalists later on.
However, Bottomley et al are going to want some sort of democratic fig-leaf, so I rather assumed that an entirely ineffectual lefty party of the George Lansbury handwringing variety would be tacitly encouraged. This would be rather compromised come 1936; hence the Action Party, of which more below.
The way I saw it, the Action Party are Social Democrats, basically, but with a rather corporatist bent; think New Labour in "A Greater Britain", so lots of Important Words with Capital Letters and sentences without verbs. They've absorbed what was left of the constitutional Left by default and got a lot of working class seats, but didn't neccesarily deserve to, and aren't as radical as their electorates, by and large; one of the reasons why the Party is the vehicle the Syndicalists use to take power is the fact that by 1938, it's completely hollowed-out and in danger of collapsing as an electoral force. You'll notice that they're outflanked on the Left too, although on reflection I think it makes more sense to say the "Syndicalists" represented in the Commons are actually more Menshevik-ish.
As for Action's coalition with the New Democrats, it works quite well- too well reallly, as once in Government the Party loses any anti-establishment credibility it might otherwise have had.
I would have thought that there would have been a variety of more regional parties represented in the National Assemblies- Nationalists of varying stripes, and the like- and within the Commons, I assumed that the independents would contain various smaller groups (for example, the Cornish Independent may well be a *Mebyon Kernow type).
As for the fate of the Coalition, I hadn't quite worked out how it fell apart, only that by 1938 the Government was a very shaky coalition of Action and assorted Lefty scrapings, independents, etc. This probably requires a General Election given the arithmetic, which is one of the reasons why I hadn't got round to redrafting this and thinking through all the implications. The problem I have is that Action is more likely to lose ground then be in position to be the largest party in Government.
Hm, maybe the New Democrats remain the largest party but fail to make an agreement with the Liberal-Conservatives or Nationals, leaving a weakened Action forced to combine with a surging far Left? That, of course, requires a crisis to set things off- I think I posited one or more of of the Devolved Governments getting knocked over (or not) by the far-left or far-right, which is probably enough. I like the concept of an Edinburgh Bürgerbräukeller- especially as it'd just be in time for the whole Ulster thing to kick off.
I imagine there's something of a boiled frog effect whereby a lot of people are uncomfortable with Red Friday but the Government is (just barely) constitutional enough to satisfy the Centre. Until the whole thing begins to deteriorate, at which point the constitutional parties are going to split. Remember it's not as simple as a Revolution, not really; it's the Blues who are trying to overthrow the (just about) lawful Government, no matter how questionable the circumstances were surrounding its formation.
Which doesn't mean that a lot of Blues are actually rather pink, or even green, of course- a fair few lefties and nationalists are willing to go to arms to prevent the imposition of the Workers' Republic.
There is that- one thing I thought would be a dividing issue is that the Orange types were fervently anti-Home Rule ("Home Rule is Rome Rule", and all that), while the Nationals are rather more circumspect, realising that they might do rather well in the Shire seats in the English Assembly.
I'll repeat my answer the last time I was asked this, if that's ok- but King Henry is basically right.
"Short answer? It varies. Some Unions, particularly the smaller ones, will be pretty democratic; others, particularly those who get captured by a dictatorial individual or clique, will be less so. Just as OTL, many Unions will suffer from having low participation amongst the normal workforce, allowing the insiders and ambitious types to make decisions on very low turnouts.
I think the paradox of the FWR is that on a local, workplace level, it probably is quite democratic. The second you get into regional and national government though, let alone Federal, you’re in the realm of bloc votes and beer and sandwiches."
Fantastic map! But I do wonder why Orkney and Shetland have elected a member of the Partaidh Gaidhlig. Given what's been said about the continuing power of landed interests, I could imagine that Orkneymen might be almost as keen as the Gaels on getting rid of landlords by the 1930s, so did they hop on the land-language-people bandwagon and assume the language meant in their case was Norn?If, as seems likely, there's a strong strain of Free Kirk radicalism in the movement, that would be another thing in common.
Excellent point, and I freely admit that I'm not sure- it's not my field really- but I would have thought the land reform issue would be the obvious issue. I think you've demonstrated rather wonderfully the dangers of doing a map like this actually- everyone has expert local knowledge!
You know, I hadn't thought of it quite in these terms but that really is rather good. I can see that catching on ITTL, although not in the FWR for reasons mentioned below.
What's the Syndicalist historiography of of the Civil War? You mentioned that the Levellers would make good heroes for a Workers' Epic, and given the Irish nationalist connection I can't see any love for Cromwell, so I suppose everything I just said was counter-revolutionary nonsense.
Well, I've made Syndicalist historiography cleave pretty closely to the ILP's take on things IOTL, so to quote from the horses' mouth as it were;
"The political ascendency of the British oligarchy was achieved in the seventeenth century as the result of a series of revolutions. At first the merchants, and the oligarchic House of Commons which was their political instrument, had to share power with the Calvinist (Puritan) Church- the revolutionary 'first international' of the era in question- and were also for a short time subordinated to the military dictatorship of their Fuhrer Oliver Cromwell (1653-8), the Founder of the British Reich"
Anti-fascism being less of an issue ITTL (though the Syndicalists will not like the Integralists much) I think Cromwell is seen as the British example of Marxist Bonapartism; the Levellers et al being the true revolutionaries. This would also help to sidestep the religious issues bound up in the Civil War re Ireland, which is handy.
Please, do feel free! I might add it to a later edition of the "World of FaBR". Mind PMing me anything you come up with?
Well, IOTL the Commons actually voted for AV in (IIRC) 1918 or thereabouts, only for the Lords to veto the proposal; I think the idea was AV for county seats and STV for Borough ones, and this was even partly implented in the University seats, which saw Members elected by STV until their abolition in 1950. Avoid the Liberal split or patch it up somehow and you could easily see it stick; there's a decent window there.
I'm a firm No actually, precisely because of the 'Britishness' of the change you mention; ie a half-arsed mess for political expediency that pleases nobody and doesn't actually improve anything.
In my view AV's a crap system- as Roy Jenkins pointed out, it's actually less proportional than FPTP. At best, it won't change much- at worst, it'll give us even larger majorities, which is deeply unhealthy.
I would actually be delighted to see a genuine choice between FPTP and STV; they provide two very different approaches to politics, and personally I would be genuinely undecided on which way I'd vote. Multi-Member constituencies and STV (known before the war as "British Proportional Representation") have impeccable British pedigree; MPs have already been elected through the system, after all! Clegg was entirely right when he called AV a 'miserable little compromise'.
What frustrates me is that so many AV enthusiasts seem to be STV fans who see it as a stepping stone to something better, without stopping to think that adopting AV will probably kill their pet project for a generation. It's a bit like a juror condemning a prisoner because even though they're pretty sure he's not guilty they know he committed some other crime- you have to vote on the basis of the question before you, not what you would like the question to be.
