Adopt an NPC: British Commonwealth
They can have a little revolution, as a treat
The history of Great Britain, in the modern day, begins with the end of the First World War. Britain’s goal, since Napoleon, had been to prevent the consolidation of the continent under a single power. In the early 19th century this was France, in the late 19th century, the enemy was Germany. But victory had come without reward: millions of young men were dead, Europe was dominated by a swathe of totalitarian regimes, and the wider empire began to fall apart. Britain’s conservative leadership was not capable of managing the tumultuous interwar period. It was almost an impossible task, between a militarizing United States, the spread of fascism, and the Soviet colossus, to chart a sane course, but that does not make their failure any less tragic. Labor unrest moved the government increasingly towards anticommunism, ultimately culminating in an unholy alliance between Edward VIII, married to an American socialite, and Osward Mosley, of the fascist Independent Labor Party, that firmly took control of British government in 1938 and brought the country into the Axis camp just in time for the Second World War.
Where the First World War was a pyrrhic victory, the Second World War simply a defeat mitigated only by a massive American intervention that effectively ended Britain as an independent power for half a century. Mosley was the scapegoat while Edward’s American ties kept him in power. Edward would preside over “Atlanticization”, a diplomatic model that would be emulated to some extent in Scandinavia and Iberia: Britain was hollowed out and used as a proxy by the United States in its global contest against the Soviet Union. The country lost an independent foreign policy and its political system was consolidated under the dominant “Royal Party” which grouped together conservative and crypto-fascist interests, allowing a limited range of expression in return for security and immense economic investment from the American Marshall Plan.
With that said, Atlanticization brought stability and prosperity and the 50s were a period of domestic success, albeit funded by immense American subsidies. To a population that had known nothing but turmoil and hardship since 1914 it was widely accepted and embraced. They turned a blind eye to the disappearance of political dissidents and labor activists, to the king’s scandalous personal life, and to the larger empire.
The United States controlled British colonial policy and strategically pursued continued colonization in critical areas: the Caribbean, where American influence was the strongest, key ports across the world such as Cyprus, in White Colonies such as South Africa and Australia which adopted their own apartheid systems, and in India, the jewel of the empire and what American planners identified as a keystone for control of Asia. The last two were tragedies that are still felt today: the Indian Civil War, and the dissolution of a united subcontinent, is elaborated on elsewhere, and the dictatorships in Azania and Australia persist in novel forms. It was largely American blood and treasure that propped up the imperial remnant at this point but that does not make Britain any less culpable.
The Countercultural Movement of the 1960s, partly artistic but soon turning political, was led by a generation that didn’t know the horrors of the early 20th century, only the prosperity but stifled political freedoms of “Atlanticist Britain”. A new wave of repression followed, squandering the good will Edward VIII had built up, and he died in 1972, little loved and little mourned by a population and history that see him as an American puppet. His successor, Elizabeth II, was nearly passed over for a male Windsor but by that point nearly anyone else acceptable in the line of succession had made it clear they would refuse the job as it would entail being a puppet for a clique of aristocrats and military leaders coordinating with the Americans. Only Elizabeth’s sense of duty had her take up the role where she carefully built up credibility within the system and with the population while she waited for her moment.
That moment came in 1980 when labor activist John Lennon was assassinated in broad daylight. Decades later inquiries would conclude that it was truthfully a lone gunman unaffiliated with the government, though the majority of the country then and now believes he was deliberately targeted. Dissidents had been murdered before but Lennon’s assassination came at the right time to light a powder keg of resentment and discontent that was beyond the ability of the secret police to control.
This was Elizabeth’s moment and she embraced it with the aid of other democratic activists like Antony Jay and Michael Palin. Where the political leadership of the 1930s was unable to preserve democracy in the balancing act between fascism and communism she was able to restore it and preside over free and fair elections in 1982, ushering in Britain’s first democratic government in fifty years. Called the “Little Revolution”, this ended up being the first crack in the American Empire as it demonstrated that Washington was no longer willing to foot the expense of Atlanticization to keep its client states tightly regulated. The conservative leadership of the past half century was thoroughly discredited and many fled abroad (investigations and attempts at extradition would follow with mixed success to reclaim all the stolen wealth).
That isn’t to say it was all roses: the collapse of both superpowers in the 90s saw rapid inflation as supply chains collapsed. Britain’s democratic politics were far from calm. They were a roiling mass of short-lived ministries and protests as the country navigated the Autumn of Nations, but they did navigate them successfully. Long overdue federalization saw the remaining colonies in the Caribbean and elsewhere granted autonomy, while the collapse of Canada saw the Maritimes join the newly reinvigorated Commonwealth for security (and a close affiliation with Quebec, which is a member in all but name with close political ties and a free trade agreement).
The new millennium brought with it the culmination of a century of struggle: Britain would never be truly secure as long as the European continent was under the control of a hostile power. The failures of the First and Second World War had doomed the British Empire and the Commonwealth's survival was dependent on a favorable resolution to the European quagmire. Britain pursued an aggressive security policy, blocking foreign aid to communist and ultranationalist groups both and securing a military alliance with a former colony in India, a rump republic of the larger Commonwealth Realm that had survived the Cold War, much like Britain, and emerged as a leading democracy, again much like Britain. British and Indian support for the underdog German Democratic Movement was instrumental in their victory, creating a new friendly democratic power at the heart of Europe.
As of 2010 Prime Minister Diane Abbott is riding high off her success, some of it earned, and moving forward with an ambitious agenda promoting human rights, civil liberties, and women’s freedom across the world*.
*She will actually spend the entirety of 2010 grappling with the scandal that she secretly sent her grandchildren to a private school.
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