Peace in Our Time! - A TRO Inspired Franco-British Union Quest

I am just wondering if there will be an equivalent of the 70s overproduction crisis that helped bring about Reagan and neoliberalism
I mean the actual crisis that did this in the UK was the oil-shock from the Suez closure leading into high inflation which resulted in a Social Contract between Labour and the Unions which then fell apart in the Winter of Discontent due to Wildcat strikes primarily led by ethnic minorities who demanded higher democracy within their Unions. Overproduction had nothing to do with it.
the updates hint that the majority of the benefits are going only to a select few and I don't doubt that eventually the people and even governments of these places won't start demanding more concessions and benefits as more of the population demands a slice of the Franco-British Dream so to speak, will the FBU be willing or able to do that, given its economy end of the day still relies on uneven extraction from its not!colonies?
Planned expansion of the Commonwealth bureaus basically hits this problem, and its not like what we're doing is some radical new concept. Its just neocolonialism with a fancy lick of paint.
To say nothing of the fact that it will run into the same economic problems that OTL social democratic bastions fell to eventually
I have no idea what you're talking about with this.
So assuming this is indeed Elizabeth's death, the FBU now has a not quite 18 year old king. Interestingly, there should be a Regency that last about two weeks, which means that under the 1953 Regency law Prince Philip is now the Regent of the United Kingdom.
London Bridge Is Down is/was the codeword for starting Operation London Bridge, the funeral and transition plan for Lizzys death, so shes 100% cooked. I don't think a Republic is happening just because like, she got killed by far right nutjobs. Public opinion towards the monarchy is probably going to spike in solidarity considering the new King is a kid, and his mother just got shot by Neo-Nazis or Darlinists or w/e. Its possible some of the Commonwealth Nations will take this chance to declare a Republic, lot of the islands did that OTL and they were always more invested in Lizzy than the Crown itself.
 
Well thanks for this mind image

Sorry for the mental image, though in my defence considering that Britain is... Britain and that it has a Sand France stapled to it where quasi-fash or outright fash attitudes are varying degrees of normalised I get the feeling that as far as ways for the FBU to remain a great power until the end of the quest reinventing the Mladarossi from first principles might actually be one of the least cursed.
 
Edit: obligatory "Lyle, Lyle turn on the TV, they hit the Queen! They hit the fucking Queen, Lyle!!"

I think Fission's willingness to go "ok you voted for this but there is no way this would actually happen" and change the results to be more in line with reality has helped a lot. It both toned down some of our more ambitious plans and taught voters and plan makers to be realistic if they actually wanted what the voted for to happen.
Yeah, more quests should go for a limited approach like this rather than letting the dice run the game. The "wholesome democratic socialist" option was incredibly precarious and couldn't be sustained indefinitely, while meme options like the Napoleonic restorationists in Algeria were still incorporated into the plot while being treated as the flash in the pan they would normally be. I think overall this quest has really become a standout among other alt-Cold War scenarios for how it's portrayed these political tensions and proxy conflicts in a way that's realistic but keeps us on our toes.
 
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I'd argue that Bevan is the closest thing the modern FBU has to a founding father
I imagine that Bevan is fondly remembered within the parts of the Commonwealth that are not white majority.
famously party-politics never change and no new parties rise up from political shakeups, ever
To be fair political shakeups only occur when the present major parties fuck up massively and so far everything is a-ok.
are the main opposition
The NPUP and its predecessors suffered a hilarious blowout in the last two elections. The only region that they dominate is Algeria and Algeria is the process of alienating the rest of the Commonwealth. Calling them the opposition is like calling Moseley's gang a credible political party.

The political Overton Window is somewhere between Democratic Socialism (Labor) and Social Democracy (Radical-Liberal). The he NPUP is likely to stay in the Political Wilderness for the next generation and that's if "London Bridge Falling" does not get them investigated and blacklisted.
 
I imagine that Bevan is fondly remembered within the parts of the Commonwealth that are not white majority.

Probably true, but this speaks less to practical reality and more to memory being a fickle thing indeed and doubley so when it's a culture's memory as opposed to an individual's memory: it's been explicitly stated that Bevan going all in on decolonisation and investing in the commonwealth is the reason the commonwealth is still a thing in Africa.
 
The NPUP and its predecessors suffered a hilarious blowout in the last two elections. The only region that they dominate is Algeria and Algeria is the process of alienating the rest of the Commonwealth. Calling them the opposition is like calling Moseley's gang a credible political party.
yes because as we all know it's impossible for a far right party nominally confined to one region to surge at the polls at moments of serious domestic instability, that's never happened and we don't need to worry about it
 
Yeah, the biggest problem for the FBU's long term stability is that many within the ranks of its military and paramilitaries are far-right sympathizers. There were multiple attempts to assassinate Bevan before. They quieted down under Grimond, but that didn't really do anything to meaningfully address the problem, especially now that the Queen has apparently been assassinated.
 
Yeah, the biggest problem for the FBU's long term stability is that many within the ranks of its military and paramilitaries are far-right sympathizers. There were multiple attempts to assassinate Bevan before. They quieted down under Grimond, but that didn't really do anything to meaningfully address the problem, especially now that the Queen has apparently been assassinated.

You have in fact been purging and sidelined them. Investigations into political violence was one of Grimond's big domestic planks.
 
far right party nominally confined to one region to surge at the polls at moments of serious domestic instability
Especially when that party has significant levels of institutional support and those institutions are worried about communist influence!
It is impossible when said domestic instability was caused by Far-Righters in the first place. Do you really think that the Right is going to be a political force when they have assassinated the Queen.
 
We don't even know which far right group might've killed Lizzie. They could have ties to French Algeria, or the Tories, or even some lone Rhodesian with an axe to grind. Who did it and who they were connected to entirely changes how we can handle it.

Hell I wouldn't be surprised if some opposing political party blames the ruling government for getting the Queen killed. Claims that our reshuffling of the military and security created a blind spot. Might not be necessarily true but I'm skeptical that this is the end of rightwing politics in the FBU
 
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street brawls with communists and attacking jewish neighborhoods
Eh that was able to be swept under the rug as "patriotic actions against the enemies of Germany", in this case it'll be impossible to justify why killing the Queen would be a "patriotic action" against the "enemies of the nation". Besides it's literally stated to be white nationalists
stoked by white nationalists
and was provoked by the Right
really among the conservative right, reactionary, and fascist circles that the worst response emerged

I am optimistic that this will be the end of Right-wing politics within the FBU for decades to come.
 
I am optimistic that this will be the end of Right-wing politics within the FBU for decades to come.

if the far right doing evil things that normal people find appaling was enough to exorcise it from the body politic we wouldn't have neonazis after the literal holocaust.

this notion that right-wing politics will just go away because they do something reckless or embarrassing - or even that they're nominally purged from positions of power! - is a fantasy and it's simply not borne out historically.

EDIT: like let me make something clear - perhaps, if it's true that british neonazis have indeed assassinated liz, those specific neonazis will be discredited in the near future in the eyes of the FBU electorate. it may well, however, provide fertile ground for other far-right groups to rally and go "see?! the decadent and cryptocommunist bevanites let our beloved queen die on their watch, clearly we must [insert deranged nationalist screed here]!!!" we know this is the case because this has been a playbook in right-wing politics for a very, very long time - as long as there's been liberal democracy, really.
 
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With america committed to multiple fronts. There some places with fbu interests that aren't getting their share of money and guns to give them a black eye. We should start intervening there more.

Of the top of my head we have Ethiopia with its semi recent victory over italian somalia, starting some rebellions will do us some good and its been mentioned that mega congo has found a second wind and is consolidating with soviet support while beating their rebels. The previous backers of their rebels were the apartheid countries that we mostly overthrew and the americans who have mostly shifted to angola.

I think Ethiopia is the easier target since its trying to be neutral between the blocs and we will have an easier time smuggling things with so many allied countries around them.

Also I think we should plan for algeria trying to go their own way since we've been going through the list of settler colonies. Possibly in the future if america gets a president that's willing to deal with them over fbu objections.
 
Also I think we should plan for algeria trying to go their own way since we've been going through the list of settler colonies. Possibly in the future if america gets a president that's willing to deal with them over fbu objections.
We should not let this happen. Losing Algeria is an existential crisis for the FBU, the Franco in Franco-British Union will disappear and I am not going back to lame names like United Kingdom.
 
It is impossible when said domestic instability was caused by Far-Righters in the first place. Do you really think that the Right is going to be a political force when they have assassinated the Queen.

I am optimistic that this will be the end of Right-wing politics within the FBU for decades to come.

It's worth pausing to ask what the far right is and what it entails. Fundamentally, all right wing politics are various measures to either maintain the status quo or reverse perceived changes to it, with far right politics being either particularly extreme measures or for various aspects of society championed by the right to be taken to their most extreme conclusions (right wing politics wants the car to move, far right politics wants it to go fast and drive it into a wall in the hopes of smashing through to the other side). Right wing politics is adaptable, covering free market libertarians, the "state socialism" of Bismark and the "leninism without the Marxism" of the KMT and similar East Asiam rightists, because the beliefs they have are how they explain their anxieties regarding the status quo slipping away from them to themselves and their actions are whatever measures are deemed necessary to maintain said status quo or at least what they value from it.

My point here is that in the long run it doesn't really matter what a bunch of racist freaks get up to, as not only can far right politics jettison open racism when it suits them (since ultimately they want to Do Something against the capital E Enemies of normality and overt racism is just how they explain their desire to do this to themselves) but worst still pretty much any political perspective with sufficient investment in the status quo will under the right circumstances reinvent far right politics from first principles. Even if we put the entire racist right to the sword, the anxieties and conditions that birthed the rascist right still exist, and there's still every possibility that we end up with nominally liberal or social democratic leaders across the Commonwealth who claim their inspiration is Savinkov entirely because it would be vulgar to admit that it's really Mussolini.

The is especially the case given... That the political project of the FBU is inherently a right wing one. This seems to contradict my previous statement that we remained left wing after Bevan, but this isn't the case. When I argued that SV voted left, it was an assessment that Bevan had modernised the FBU's political project and that with a more moderate government accepting his modernisations Bevanite social democracy had been cemented as an uncontroversial part of the FBU in the same way that the Blair government cemented Thatcherite neo-liberalism, but in the end Bevan was acting within the limits of the FBU's political project. And that project is implied by the "Villain Protagonist" tag and outright stated in the blurb for this quest: we're trying to ensure the survival of the British Empire as a political power, to smuggle the evils of the old world into the new worlds the USSR and CPS are trying to build. That is by definition right wing, whether the project is run by tories, liberals, Social Democrats, Syndicalists or even if my prediction of a Franco-British Mladarossi becomes real, it doesn't matter since in the eyes of the FBU's political project all of these are just methods by which its survival and the survival of the evils it values will be maintained. Simply put, it doesn't matter if the far right is discredited this decade, it doesn't matter if it drives itself into a wall and it doesn't matter if we purge it in its entirety: the FBU as a fundamentally right wing project will generate a new far right as passively and unconsciously as respiration generates Carbon Dioxide.
 
Many people here are assuming that the Queen will be killed by X Group and that the public will know this. Perhaps another culprit will be framed? Or perhaps she dies of natural causes and the crisis is that Phillip or Charles goes wacko?
 
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