I don’t wanna start drama with this but the legitimisation of chronic Lyme as a diagnosis harms disabled people. There’s no evidence it exists (and plenty it doesn’t) but it’s still used to justify dangerous and inappropriate long term antibiotic treatment for people who have no bacterial infection but do have conditions such as fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. I don’t think Cecil mentions having post Lyme fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue but if he does please use that instead of chronic Lyme.

i have no idea either honestly (on cecil having it, if it's mentioned more than once i did not get that far into the podcast)

i used chronic lyme disease bc at least three people used that term, and with a quick google i didn't find anything to suggest that term shouldn't be used, but thanks for the heads up!

20 Elections - 20 Notes

During the general election, I wrote twenty different alternate history shorts. Here’s the thinking and points of diversion behind them: (SPOILERS) #1: You Won’t Get Me, I’m Part Of The Union This one, you can tell it was written when Le Pen was clearly going to make it Round 2 of the 2017 French elections. (Banks is in UKIP financier Aaron Banks) The title is from a hit song in the 70s about trade unions. Famously, a desperate French President Reynaud in 1940 proposed a vaguely defined “Anglo-French Union” in the hope of keeping his government going and France fighting. Any such union would, of course, stick together only in conflict. Of the other three union members, Ireland was secretly offered Northern Ireland back if it joined the war effort in 1943 and Gabon did hold a referendum on independence or remaining part of France. Britain was lucky in that it’s the only European empire to have escaped decolonisation without a long, bloody war (for us rather than the locals) to retain colonies that we then lost anyway. France fought two such wars in Algeria and Vietnam - if we were bonded to them, we wouldn’t be so lucky as real life. #2: A Popular Mandate The title is a mean dig at pro-Brexit’s talk of mandates but the story is based on Erdogan’s increasingly autocracy in Turkey. (And he too held a referendum) The POD is another famous one: the coup plots against Harold Wilson by a few idiots in MI5 and press magnate Cecil King, with Lord Mountbatten intended as the interim leader. In real life it was a damp squib but if it had happened, then the door would be opened for more coups - the spell that we call “peaceful exchange of power” would be shattered and, like a few other countries, we might never get it back. Dimbleby as in David Dimbleby, the BBC’s undying election night host. #3: These Colours Don’t Run IRON MAIDEN!!! One of their many songs about war and armies, of course. The Iraq War was a hugely defining event, the two of the one-two punch that started with September 11. It hangs over every foreign military engagement for a dozen countries and makes people leery of any big involvement. And the Iraq War happened solely because George Bush and his chums won, and were given an opening by 9/11 - so you just need the votes in Florida to change and then, we just have a string of successful, “cheap” interventions from Falklands on (or so we’d remember them). Is that notoriously gobby Jess Philips as Labour leader, battling against notoriously urg-not-HIM Liam Fox? I can’t possible comment. #4: Carry On As in “keep calm and”, written not so long after a terrorist attack. A statement had to be made. #5: Meet The New Bosses This one comes from two things: the unprecedented success of Macron in France and the collapse of the big parties that allowed it, and the many, many fluctuating polls in our election. Labour and the Tories seem like stable, unstoppable forces but such certainties can change - as seen by the obliteration of the Lib Dems and SNP eating all other parties in 2015, as well as France. All it would take is a bit of time and both parties screwing up - the wrong leaders at the wrong time, rather than the zeitgeist-nabbing Blair and Cameron. (Danzcuk was exposed as a creepy sexter after seeming like a righteous campaigner so imagine if he’d got power...) Cole from story #1 is back but in a different role due to the different timeline. That comes from Kim Newman’s Life’s Lottery, where the same cast appear over and over in different roles & personalities depending on what choice the reader makes. (Vince as in Cable, Abbott as in Diane) Why Dundee? Cos the Beano, home of Roger the Dodger, is from there. The Yorkshire Party is actually real but has never won a thing. The BNP hasn’t either, but here they benefit from UKIP never supplanting them and stand as the Front National standins. #6: Status Quo Statistically, it’s weird that we not only have had only two women PM’s who were the only two female party leaders at UK level and so few women seriously run for the job. I wonder what could ever be the reason for that. I wonder. All female leaders mentioned are real prominent politicians, some more than others. Davidson is Ruth Davidson, Scottish Tory leader and at the time of writing, I didn’t expect her to be the Tory’s shining light in 2017, the one gaining them seats without loss. Maybe she will be a potential PM soon.... #7: The Old Familiar Stain The title comes from the song Hurt, by NIN and then Johnny Cash. A recurring claim in Britain is the Empire wasn’t so bad and we brought civilisation to the heathens, even if we know not to say White Man’s Burden now - this even as we hear time and again about atrocities we glossed over at the time. (Kenyans who were tortured during the Mau Mau uprising did go to the High Court a few years ago) Surely we’d not think that if we’d been good socialists, right? Politicians mentioned are all key Labour people through history - including party founder Keir Hardie - with “Uncle Arthur” a nickname for Arthur Henderson. Only Ramsay Macdonald got to be PM in real life, and in difficult circumstances. #8: The Big Society Title is, of course, a mean dig at a Cameron slogan. A bunch of alternate history and sci-fi stories have multinational megastates and power blocks. Council elections are often meagre because they’re considered to not really be powerful - why wouldn’t that happen in a hypothetical ‘megastate’? The POD here is no American Revolution, leading to increasingly powerful dominions within empire, leading to here. Philadelphia was America’s prime city before the revolution and temporarily a capital. #9: A Sense of Proportion I was in a defiantly optimistic mood for this one. Back in 2011, we decided not to move to a different electoral system - alternative vote rather than this timeline’s single transferable - but stick with first-past-the-post instead. Voting models show this would prevent a majority Tory government and lead to UKIP's 4m voter surge giving them more than one seat. That would not have been sustainable, hence the early election after all. Ed Miliband really has had a change of reputation in certain circles: once he was no longer party leader, he started to be quite funny and play social media like a fiddle. That, it seems, was the real Ed all along and he was covering it up. Once you take fear away... #10: Special Relationships You can all tell what this one’s about. Ruth Davidson returns, this time with Louise Mensch, former MP and major Trump & Putin hater. Having her be in Cabinet is a stretch but hey, narrative. Operation Sea Lion is the famous Nazi plan to invade Britain - and in violation of alternate history, most historians are pretty sure Sea Lion would have failed. If that had happened, you alter the shape of World War Two. The barbed comments about America “being late” for the war are still made now, after we were allies together, and if America had never shown up at all (and without Pearl Harbor it may not have) then all we ‘know’ about transatlanic relations is out the window. #11: The Great Blue Hope Popularly, the Falklands was what saved Thatcher’s first term. A divisive government, high unemployment, and an eyecatching new opposition party in the SDP could have nobbled her without the war - and the war could have easily gone against us. And once you’re a failed party, you can be a failed party for a generation. The many annoying answers to door-knocking are all things that I’ve seen or heard canvassers & politicians mention. It’s a right slog.

#12: Clever, Clever, Clever I Don’t Like Michael Gove: The Novelisation. Gove really did backstab Boris Johnson in the real world’s 2016 party race. Now we know that’s what Mr “I Don’t Want To Be PM” would do. We also have allegations he was at dinners with Trump allies that Cambridge Analytica set up. He was a Brexiteer - and once the Prime Minister is taking a stance, that side can no longer claim to be the anti-establishment vote. Labour and the Lib Dems going into coalition in 2010 is a recurring ‘what if’ in political thought. It’s public record how many people in Labour didn’t want to, however, and if the Lib Dems were doomed for helping Tories imagine if they’re propping up a ‘failed’ government. It’df definitel;y be Tories winning next. Liz Kendall came nowhere near winning the Labour leadership in our time but she did get brief attention for playing the Young One card - after 17 years of power and looking tired in public, Labour would want young. #13: Frankenstein Must Vote The further we get from the 80s, the dafter the “video nasties” thing seems. A bunch of horror movies, many not that bad except in production value terms, being effectively banned in the UK, that far into the 20th century? The past is another country. Hammer Horror did not, in real life, survive the mid-70s but it could have, maybe, with a bit more effort. Zepellins vs Pterodactyls really was a planned film. There’s Cole again! (And Ansari from #5, in passing) Yeovil is a penname for Kim Newman. #14: Mission Control A Newquay spaceport is a controversial idea the Tories pitched this year. Could it even work? We may find out, we may not. British space agencies have never quite worked the way we dream about them. Black Knight was almost a real rocket system but, in the end, did not happen. Money was only going to pay for so much and realistically, any UK NASA would be limited. However, it could change us despite that - as Warren Ellis once argued for Ministry in Space, our space fiction is the cry of a declining Britain, hungry to believe there was something else to do. Another big nation involved in space flight would also transform the space race, even if it sucked at it. Charles Kennedy never became PM but could - maybe should - have. #15: And I Would Make Five Hundred K The SNP once helped keep Labour in power in the 70s and in exchange, they got a referendum on devolution - one that did not succeed. If it had, it is possible independence may have happened earlier, and (for the plot to work) we’re saying Scotland was less hit by Thatcher’s policies and instead turned them into Scotland’s own. With oil and financial dealings, an independent Scotland could prosper - and would be prey to large foreign sharks. We often think of an independent Scotland as mega-left because we assume the modern SNP will run it and start it off. It’s not a hard law. Oor Wully (”Our Willy” in phoenetic) is a long-running Scottish comic strip. Trump’s mother came out of Scotland and if this was blowing up at the time his businesses were doing bad in the States, I can see him shifting. #16: The Glorious Status Quo The Glorious Revolution - named by English people as for us, it was bloodless - saw parliament call in foreign Protestant monarchs to replace a more catholic-friendly one. This was a huge influence in our politics (and killed thousands upon thousands in Scotland and Ireland) as well as global, ending the Anglo-Dutch rivalry. Catholic-Protestant divides of the time mean even if it didn’t happen, something would at some point. Now this one was a toughie because with this far back a diversion, the world needed to be as different as I could get it without being incomprehensible. The tech, the landmarks, the ethnicities (Native American immigration) all get tweaks. For Tradesman Party, read Labour.

#17: Rock The Vote One thing that keeps going around is that Tony Blair - this is honestly the truth - wanted to get into music and was part of a student rock band. It would only take a bit more success on that front and Blair could have done that for a career instead of becoming an MP. I can’t say if he’d ever be that great a musician but in New Labour’s heyday he had the charisma, the drive, and ability to connect with the common man that, if he did have talent, would make him a star.

He used to be further left in his youth but got turned off by the hard left, as he says here. Blair was one of the main people pushing for action on Kosovo so sadly without him, that’s not stopped. #18: Heard Around The World Britain did not go fascist, unlike many other European nations. If we had, it would have eventually ended - but as with #2, once you’ve opened that bottle, the genie isn’t going back in. (You could also be sure America would back a right-wing post-fascist government over a socialist one) We’ve seen time and again that when certain governments get into power in certain countries, they may not last long.

Part of the inspiration was the Gambia, where the recent election had ended in the incumbent ignoring the result and the winning party have to flee abroad to get aid from the African Union.

Paisley as in the notorious Reverend Iain Paisley, Creasy as in Labour’s Stella Creasy, and Labour heavyweight Aneurin Bevan was from Wales.

#19: Big Boy’s Rules Britain is a big nation that’s not as big as it once was and ones to be bigger again. That compulsion to be big won’t go away. As noted before, Suez was what did us in as an imperial power - and made it clear Europe was out, the US and USSR were in. But militarily, it almost worked. A bit of extra time and we’d have won. And if we’d won, we wouldn’t care about the murkiness and the morality. #20: It’ll Be Alright On The Night Writtem very shortly before the vote. Simple diversion: Brexit does not happen. Everything follows on from there. To keep things as unclear as they seemed in our time, I arranged for both Tories and Labour to have weak, unpopular leaders - both seen as shifty. In hindsight, I’ve set up Labour to be stuffed unless it gets a coalition deal and I, like many, overestimated the third party vote collapse.