The British keep learning the lesson of easy war, hard conquest...remembering for a few decades and then doing it again somewhere else. Or on the case of Afghanistan, repeatedly. Usually for fairly daft reasons.
Bit unfair. Certainly the 1st Afghan War did not go well (though Kabul did get flattened and that did quiet down the locals for a while) but the 2nd was a clear win and the Afghans started the 3rd so that's hardly Britain's fault. The 4th certainly was a mistake, but these things will happen if the electorate is foolish enough to pick a Labour government.
Well waiting till after would be the polite thing to do for narrative convenience but then again, the Germans infamously don't play cricket.
Though of course obscurely Hitler did once play Cricket and wasn't very good at it (a fact that I believe explains a great deal) and there was a Cricket tour of Germany in 1937 which may, or may not, make an appearance in future updates.
Excellent carrier updates Pip, as interesting as always. Is there such a thing as a British AAR with too many posts on the senior service? I think not.
I cannot imagine such a thing.
Ill just leave this here...
There are plenty of threads in OT where you can dump such things and risk a decent into modern politics, I can only ask that you use those many alternative dumping grounds for such things.
Of course the really important question is when will Pip give us a three part update on motorcycle manufacturing at the Birmingham Small Arms plant and what ripples will spread from there to effect the rest of the empire and the globe.
This is the important topic. The BSA M20 is just going through War Office trials and would end up with over 100,000 being produced during the war. Of course the other iconic British design of the period, the Triumph Speed Twin, is also just being launched and there is no war looming (or so the government think). Many things could change in the world of motorcyles.
Personally more interested to see if the British actually try to develope the computer tech they came up with during the war instead of giving it to the Americans and doing very little themselves. You could even try planting an early tech industry in Manchester several decades early, try and cushion the economic woes of later decades etc. Not sure if that's feasible though.
They did and did so in Manchester -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_computers
That it was cocked up is entirely due to the relentless shortage of money that so characterised the Post-War Consensus. You need fairly heavy subsidy to compete with the US tech industry (which is very heavily subsidised by the US defence complex) and it was never a priority as the post-war governments tended to worship metal bashing or just be inept.
I'd say its quite feasible, its more akin to however a case of "if British Empire doesn't go bankrupt or need to beg for American aid" before that. As to keep British electrics engineering fully British, it needs to be not be leaked to America, as America would no doubt use "Instant_research" cheat to speed ahead of British with sheer amount of stuff America has.
Post-war British tech tended to trip up during the transition from teams of dozens to teams of thousands. When your individual boffins stop being important, and leadership should go to properly trained managers not the brightest boffin, that's where the British approach stopped working.
I don't think it's insurmountable as British organisation could do scale (Vickers, Lyons, various Imperial organisations). I half wonder if it's a legacy of the War - so many amazing ideas were developed by small teams/individuals, often by individuals bypassing the official government channels, that people forgot why the channels existed and gave the small teams far too much power even when it became apparent it wasn't working.
If that's done, and the road lobby is handled way more carefully, instead of just sacrificing the rail network for them and caving into every demand up to and including today, that's many millions of jobs set up and a decent transport network running. Rail should still probably be nationalised though.
Britain can have a decent rail network or it can have a nationalised British Rail. It cannot have both. Not without a spectacularly different political culture and system.
As for Road vs Rail. Passenger Rail will make a loss (it does in every single other network in the world, at best you can get break even on operational but still not covering capital costs), bulk freight like coal/minerals can turn a tiny profit and mixed freight is a killer until containerisation and even then it's dicey.
I'd also point you at the UK's eye wateringly high level of fuel duty, the lack of any duty on diesel for trains and the fact the UK motorway network is half the size of Italy's, 1/3rd of Frances and a 1/5th that of Spain. Taking that all together the claim of 'caving into every demand' is, not to put too fine a point on it, bollocks.
I have less of a clue of what to do about mining, because so far as I am aware there isn't really anything else all these hundreds of thousands of unskilled labourers could be doing, and coal is going to keep decreasing in supply and demand compared to imports and oil. Or could imperial preference or commonwealth trade mitigate that somewhat?
Well, Coal is always in demand even in our current world. You're just not allowed to say that as it makes people's feelings hurt. And as long as coal is not nationalized, the mines will most likely stay atleast semi-competitive. As one big issue that lead to death of British coal was "The coal nationalization act of 1946".
Death of coal started long before nationalisation, though certainly British Coal made everything worse. Classic British nationalisation issues; everything decision became political (which mine gets investment, which are shut, etc) but there was no political accountability (no minister lost their jobs when British Coal wracked up larger losses, instead blaming management who couldn't do anything as the Minister kept interfering), plus all the fun of the unions.
There will, of course, be an update on this whole subject in due course. As was sneaked in back in Chapter XCVIII (which in fairness was 2010) the Chamberlain government had plans for the Coal industry, which the Miners hate, and which Eden has inherited. It was a live issue pre-war and will become more of one as the government has time to think about things other than Foreign Affairs and re-armament.
And we really can't call the oil one way or other in this timeline, as we have earlier access to Libyan Oil, and we really can't know how things go in Middle East, which really affects the future of oil, if for example no America is there to support Saudis, it can really make future of oil much much much more Iran-Iraq based.
I think the shear size of the reserves, and how cheap they are to extract, means the Saudis will always be a major player in the oil market. But who they work with, that is very much a different question.
Again I have to profess ignorance in these matters before I comment.
This is apparent.
Things the UK mining industry has going for it:
1. There is a lot of shit to dig up. Oil, gas, coal, precious and industrial metals and minerals, all of which are in rather large supply (and in regards to coal especially, some of the best quality in the world).
Nah. To take that last example the quality of Welsh anthracite is good, but the deposits are awful. Thin, windy veins. Hard to mechanise and functionally impossible to extract efficiently. Surrounding rock is not great quality so pumping costs tend to be high and support an issue.
Technology, taxes, etc all matter to an extent, but mining is a matter of economics and geology. If you have a good deposit you can make it work, but once you have dug those out then you will have problems. This is the issue that UK coal mining faced, the pits that survived had nice broad, flat deposits that you could get a longwall machine working on. The ones that were marked for closure had dug out the easy deposits and were chasing nasty seams that would never pay. And of course over time every pit digs out the good coal and ends up with the nasty ones, even if the nasty seams are extensive they aren't economic.
Many a mining stock market scam was run on the basis of confusing 'large supply' with 'something that is worth mining', so this is a long established confusion.
If successive governments and industry leaders tried, they probably could figure out at least half measures to keep the industry going through the rough times.
They did, it was called British Coal. South Scotland region lost money every year British Coal existed (and that was on incredibly favourable accounting terms), dozens of other pits were regular losers that 'hid' their losses by being grouped with profitable mines. The issue was, there were no 'rough times' just permanent problems due to geology, so things were never going to get better no matter how long mines were kept on subsidied life support.
At best, at very best, you could get a managed decline which Germany is attempting with DeutscheSteinKohl. But that has led to Germany trying to open a coal fired power station in 2020 while being a champion of green energy, so it is far from clear that is actually a better plan.
Depends if the foreign office gets out of its malaise in regards to doing their empire building. The big problems with the middle east all date back to the insane post world war 1 borders and the refusal of the British to step in at any point afterwards before it was too late and the Saudis took over Arabia. If for example the british remove that ruling family from power, the sitation gets better in the long run. If they actually decide to smash the borders down and start again with Lawrence's help or some tribal advice, they might end up not only securing peace in the middle east (massive cost reduction for the west) but also end up with most of the oil rights too..
The House of Saud is in the bad books of the Indian Office for attempting to talk to foreign powers without asking Britain. This has led to Harry St John Philby (father of the traitor) being kicked out of Saudi as the Foreign Office attempts to reassert it's control. Not over the region, but over it's bitter Whitehall rivals in the Indian Office.
And in fairness no-one in the 1920s knew Arabia was sitting on so much oil or indeed that oil would be so important. If it wasn't then no-one would really care about Saudi or it's terrible borders, it would just be a larger version of Yemen and equally ignored by the international community.
