After writing the previous edition of By-election Bonanza I wanted to delve further into political alternate history and their links with by-elections. Where previously I talked about some of my favourite examples of counterfactuals that are intertwined with by-elections this article will instead talk directly to an author of some of these works. Tom Anderson is the author of Not An English Word, The Unreformed Kingdom, and many other great works and was very kind in giving me the opportunity to gain an insight into the relationship between politics, his books and why he uses by-elections.
The transcript featured below is slightly edited as to create a better reading experience, but the content remains 100% accurate. Thanks again to Tom Anderson and please feel free to check out some of his writing here.
Adam: What got you into writing alternate history and maybe more specifically political alternate history?
Tom: There’s several ways I could answer that depending on where you cut off the sentence. What got me into writing, been doing that for as long as I can remember. I was not particularly interested in history in general as a setting because historically it has been taught rather poorly at school. I got into alternate history probably from reading Harry Turtledove’s books in the early 2000s which had the most mainstream success. When it comes to UK politics as a field for alternate history, in 2010 I happened to stay with my uncle in Canada who has a basement full of works of history and I read David Owens autobiography “Time to Declare” and he kind of brings it to life in a very engaging way and that got me interested in a way that I had never been before.
Adam: Something that I’ve noticed about some of my favourite books that you’ve written is the absurd side you’ve taken to them. What value do you find in approaching politics from a very out there concept?
Tom: Both of those books are a case of starting with a seemingly absurd conceit but then taking it in a more serious direction. Not An English Word, for example, I won’t spoil the exact concept because there’s an element of a reveal to it but the broad concept is that a Victorian era Liberal politician comes back to life to lead the modern Lib Dems in their current struggles to stay relevant and the point of that was although that conceit is obviously absurd the idea of it was that I had been reading about this politician who I won’t reveal and what really struck me was that within the context of the time and looking back, if you read what people wrote at the time like Queen Victoria in her letters to other people, everyone thought this guys a madman and he’s leading us on the road to ruin and there’s no way this could possibly work out and it did. What I wanted to do was try and recapture that in the current era by having comparable equivalents events today, for example in response to Putin invading Crimea you can just arrange to have him nuked and somehow get away with it and that was the sort of thing happening comparably at the time and the course of history happened to work out for the best, so I wanted to capture how bizarre that was and transfer it to a modern setting. I’ll briefly mention The Unreformed Kingdom and the idea there was looking at the way certain things we assume are inevitably going to be reformed away at some point by the idea of a Whiggish side of history but in practise they often aren’t, and it was basically taking that real life thing and turning it up to eleven. It’s the case of the Republic of San Marino is somehow still around within Italy and still has the constitution it has 500 years ago, and nobody bats an eyelid at them appearing in Eurovision, that’s a foreign example but there obviously a lot of good ones in the UK like the City of London’s governance, the fact that the House of Lords still exists. I think it was my editor Tom Black who mentioned to me a play, Waste, that came out about 120 years ago and the basis of the play was creating a fictional political setting for a future politician to look at and he picked something that was viewed as obviously something that’ll inevitably happen within the next few as viewed from like the year 1900, which was the disestablishment of the Church of England which has never happened. The Unreformed Kingdom takes that idea and just exaggerates it from the sublime to the ridiculous but pointing out that because we rationalise the way these things are still that way here and now, but we could just as easily do the same with much more in theory and it’s holding up a mirror to life in that sense. My primary answer to your question, the point of alternate history is effectively to hold up a mirror to life to make us re-examine our assumptions about the history of the world we live in because it’s easy for us to say that things are just the way things are but it’s not necessarily that inevitable.
Adam: Something really useful that you do with some of your books is you include a rationale, explanations throughout so for example in Not An English Word you’ll give an explanation to why the focus character says X thing, which a lot of the time is insanely niche in how you found something specific and transform it into a contemporary environment. Is that why you include that kind of thing?
Tom: Kind of, in the case of that specific example you were using, it was trying to capture the original character as much as possible. I will say, because I think this is something we take for granted, we are greatly privileged as authors and writers in the present day to have access to not just the internet but the fact that things are easily searchable. I wrote Not An English Word in about a month and the amount of research that would be needed for that even 50 years ago would have been years. It’s ridiculous how easy that is if you know what you’re doing nowadays. One thing I’ve noticed is that people are very critical of authors from the 1970s, 1960s for coming up with implausible names, especially for foreign characters, because they don’t know that the conventions like female Russians with names that end in ‘ov’ rather than ‘ova’ and that was incredibly hard to do back then and it’s much easier now. I think adding some level of justification in general just helps add a sense of solidity to alternate history, obviously you can debate whether the conclusion that you have drawn is the correct one or not but the fact that you can provide some justification is better than saying it must be done because the plot wants it to go that way.
Adam: By-elections play a role in some of the books that I’ve read of yours, why do you think there is such an intense fascination with by-elections?
Tom: It’s a very interesting question to ask because it’s one of those things that if you only study British politics you might just assume is the way the world works and it’s not necessarily the case, certainly in other countries. There are two things that I would say, one is perhaps the more obvious one, is that a by-election gets a massive amount of media attention. What does this mean for the country that a few thousand voters on a small turnout in this random place has picked this? Often the answer quite might be, well it didn’t mean anything but now you’ve talked about it up as a narrative. There are examples of that from real life like the SDP-Liberal Alliance in the 1980s, UKIP in the 2010s and again sometimes it doesn’t necessarily come to anything. For example, the SNP had a very famous by-election victory in the late 60s which led to a brief rising in the 70s but didn’t ultimately come to anything at the time, they were out of the limelight for a long time after that. That’s part of it certainly, by-elections are seen as this big deal that kind of hint to what the public are thinking that could lead to a big dramatic shift but the other point that is less obvious is that we have unitary parliamentary sovereignty. We have this view that Parliament is the be all and end all of politics, I’ll give you an example of this. You may recall recently Andy Burnham was sort of taking on the Government over various COVID rules and somebody reacted to this by saying “Andy Burnham, do you think he’s doing this to get back into politics?” because being Mayor of Manchester with all his power isn’t real politics, only Parliament counts. That’s the view and it goes back hundreds of years, goes back to the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution (another thing we don’t teach well enough in schools) and it is really important. That’s another reason why by-elections are such a big deal. Another example that I would use, and it’s nothing to do with by-elections, is Ed Balls because it was so rapid. On the morning of May 7th, 2015, we thought there was a reasonable possibility that Ed Balls would be the Chancellor of the Exchequer by the end of the week and then he lost his seat and practically by the end of the week it felt like he was on Strictly Come Dancing. That was the end of his political career. It’s partly because Parliament is so important but it’s more so because, especially in recent years in this country, we’ve come to be very unforgiving of politicians and this didn’t use to be the case. Tony Benn could lose his seat and then get back in with a by-election but again it was this sense of this person is out of the conversation, out of being relevant until they can get back in. In that case, a by-election is extremely important. It’s not that way in other countries where it’s much less all or nothing, partly because of proportional representation or because of federal power structures but there is this sense that someone can be sitting on the side-lines for years, like Charles de Gaulle in France, not being in elected office and then suddenly come back to relevancy and that’s kind of alien from our point of view. You can’t really imagine ‘there’s an emergency situation, we’re going to get Blair back as Prime Minister’, that idea just doesn’t exist in our headspace, if someone is out of Parliament, they are out of politics, they are out of consideration. If someone has gone to the House of Lords, then they’ve effectively been neutered, and they’re not allowed to do anything in frontline politics anymore. That’s part of the reason why I would say by-elections are so important, this sense that Parliamentary power is all or nothing and therefore a by-election is kind of the electorate saying, “Yes you are a relevant person” or “No, it was all in your head, you will now vanish from the pages of the history books”. I think that’s a big part of it and that’s why it is so dramatic when a new party breaks in, like with the SDP, UKIP, the SNP or whoever you want to name.
Adam: So why use them specifically in your books?
Tom: Partly because it’s so dramatic. In The Unreformed Kingdom I use one which was inspired by a real by-election that happened in Sheffield Attercliffe in 1909 where this was an area which, although it had a lot of working-class people at this time before universal suffrage, the Labour Party had never been represented. It was always a fight between the Conservatives and the Liberals, and you ended up with this situation where both of those two parties fractured for two different reasons there were disagreements over candidates and so on, so you ended up with a 5-way by-election which was very unusual at that time. Nowadays you’re talking about, with the First Past the Post voting system if it’s okay for someone to be elected on like 29% of the vote. Is that really legitimate? At the time, nobody really asked that question because it was nearly always a two-way race like it is in America nowadays and the fact that it was so fractured meant the Labour candidate made it through on a small plurality. That made it really dramatic, the fact that nobody else could agree meant that a socialist party which had never been seen in the area and is now considered synonymous with south Yorkshire which shows you how much that kind of starts an avalanche. There was a similar one in Australia that led Australia to adopt the Alternative Vote system because the right-wing parties were so scared of this happening that they wanted to introduce preferential voting, a by-election on the face of it may seem like just one seat but it has this profound effect on the whole-body politics. When you think about Alternate History we talk about a point of divergence, a small change that causes massive consequences, a by-election is kind of like being able to see that but in real life because we can kind of get a picture of how politics would have gone without this dramatic change. Sometimes a by-election can be important because it’s not a dramatic change like Darlington in 1983 where the whole point was everyone was expecting the Alliance to continue to do well and that Michael Foot would have to resign just before the election and then Labour actually won it and nobody knew what to do and Michael Foot stayed on as leader and led the party to Labour’s defeat, although you could say it would have been worse if it had been fighting over the leadership at the time. The point is that a by-election throws a cat amongst the pigeons of politics, because in this country it’s all about Parliament and we can try and draw tea leaves from local elections and so on but it’s primarily all about Parliament, it introduces something that changes the path of history and that’s why everyone tends to focus on them. From the point of view of my literature, I kind of view this because it has that same dramatic significance in real life. In The Unreformed Kingdom, as I say I was mainly taking inspiration from a real election which led to a sea change back then, it was about saying well now that you’ve got use to this vision of Britain where lots of things we take for granted have never been reformed, does that mean it’ll always be that way? Well not necessarily because here’s another dramatic event that could lead to consequences. I did use it in Not An English Word but that was mainly talking about a real by-election that had happened at that point anyways, the Eastleigh by-election in 2013, but it was just putting a different spin on that one basically.
Adam: How do you make the foundation of your alternate history, so say for example with The Unreformed Kingdom, did you intend going into it to centre it around a by-election. How do these things come together?
Tom: That is a good question, the shorter works that I’ve done like The Unreformed Kingdom and Not An English Word and the Curse of Maggie which are my main British politics focused ones, those were not planned greatly in advance I would say. I went into them with a vague idea of where it was going but it was written almost as a writing exercise, I think The Unreformed Kingdom was written in about a week, the Curse of Maggie was in a week and Not An English Word was a bit longer. I should say these were creative writing challenges, they’re what we call the TLIAD (Time Line In A Day) developed by Tom Black, which was a very short piece of fiction written all in one day and then that became a timeline in a week and so on but the idea was to specifically limit yourself to a period of writing, not do too much research beforehand, just see where it takes you. That was kind of the philosophy I took with these although I did do a bit more research for The Unreformed Kingdom and Not An English Word because I wasn’t already conversed with that. The Curse of Maggie by contrast was relatively easy to dash off because I had lived through most of that era, so it wasn’t that difficult for me to write about what was in the news at a particular time. So how do I lay the foundation of it, so as I say if you’re talking about the short political pieces those aren’t quite seat of your pants writing but certainly there is less planning that goes into them than it looks, I would say. A fella I know called Max Lindh always tells me that I write things very well on a first draft and I see that as a left-handed compliment because it’s more that I’m not very good at redrafting you could say so I kind of had to become more coherent on a first draft because I’m very bad at editing or redrafting my own work but that’s the way the shorter pieces work. This isn’t to say I don’t plan things for longer pieces like Look to the West which is my longest project which I first started writing when I was an undergraduate student, that’s scary, in 2007. That one has had much more planning put into it. To an extent it doesn’t need as much historical context because it started in 1727 and once you’ve gotten a significant way past 1727 you’re not featuring real people from history anymore because of the Butterfly Effect so in theory that sounds easy because you can make up whatever you want but you still got to keep in mind things like technological progress, the geography of the world does not change because of the people in it so you still can’t have fleets crossing the Atlantic in two days or whatever, you’ve got to pay attention to these things. I would say that’s the series that’s had the most research put into it on my part and the most background thinking behind it. Again, when I started thinking about it I had a very rough idea where it was going to go but its changed a great deal since that original conception. That’s what I’d advise about long-form writing is don’t get too attached to your original ideas.
Wow, what an inciteful treasure trove of insights into British politics that is leaps above the level of thinking I see in much of the press when talking about by-elections. I would like to thank Tom Anderson for taking his time to give this interview and being a real inspiration to me in his writing. As mentioned before please go and check out some of his books, I promise you won’t regret any of it.
Thank you so much for reading By-election Bonanza, I've been Adam Lawless and I'll see you in 2 weeks for idk, something at least related to by-elections.
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