A Greater Britain
A Greater Britain is an Alternate History timeline by Ed "EdT" Thomas, originally posted on AlternateHistory.com. It can be found here.
The aim of the timeline was to Rescue From The Scrappy Heap one of the most hated political figures in British history, Oswald Mosley. In popular history he's usually dismissed as a Nazi collaborator, while Ed demonstrates that he had a distinguished political career long before the rise of fascism in Europe: specifically Mosley is compared to Tony Blair (emphasised by each chapter being prefaced by a Blair quote) in that he was a Labour politician who foresaw centrism as the way forward, but one who nailed his colours to an unwise mast (fascism and the Iraq war respectively).
A Greater Britain diverges from our timeline when a few votes at a close by-election go the other way and Mosley scrapes into Parliament a little earlier. Consequences and butterflies from this mean Mosley never quixotically abandons Labour to start his dead-end New Party and instead reforms Labour from within, becoming Prime Minister in 1932. His domestic policy such as House of Lords reform and devolving power in India is explored, but most significant is his foreign policy, as he pursues an alliance with Mussolini's Italy. This means the Rome-Berlin Axis never forms, and when thanks to butterflies Austria contests the Anschluss, Italy and Britain call Hitler's bluff and war begins before Germany is ready...
- Balkanize Me: Yugoslavia, of course. And India after 1953.
- British Political System
- European Union: Very different to our version, though it has the same name - it's a cordon sanitaire aimed at Germany and Hungary, at least initially.
- For Want Of A Hundred Votes
- Happily Ever Before: The timeline proper ends with a short victorious Second World War, no Holocaust, peace in Europe and an India which has seen a peaceful transition to a confederation within the British Commonwealth. The epilogue set in 1974, on the other hand, has a crazy North Korea-style Fourth Reich run by Reinhard Heydrich armed with nuclear space stations, India having broken apart through civil war and strife, and more.
- Historical In-Joke: Many, but in particular the epilogue features Margaret Thatcher and Alan Clark as members of the Labour Party thanks to Mosley's move to the centre.
- Magnificent Bastard: Mussolini, of all people, gets to be one.
- Franco, who managed to become the president of the Spanish Republic despite being one of the leader of an earlier coup against said republic.
- Mary Sue: Oswald Mosley (the revised version of him) can come across as this.
- Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Nuclear-armed Nazis In Space!
- Peace Conference: The Stockholm Conference, which ends the Austrian War.
- Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: The main purpose of this timeline is to do this to Mosley.
- To a lesser degree, Edward VIII and Subhas Chandra Bose.
- Red Scare: After the defeat of Germany in the Austrian War, the Soviet Union was regarded as the "main threat to world peace". Later replaced by the more radical-left People's Republic of China.
- World War Two: Averted, though the major wars in Europe and East Asia still occur.