 Let's begin. I'd like to begin by thanking Hanson Gulchin for having had the goodness to invite me back to yet another of these conferences, and although it would be unfair to last year's conference to say that this one is particularly good, I do think that these conferences get better and better. And they are the high point in my own intellectual calendar, so thank you very much, Hanson Gulchin. Now, I've been asked to talk about Chamberlain Churchill and the Second World War and counterfactual history. And in doing that, I'll begin by saying that I regard it as probably uncontroversial in this room if I say that the world would have been a better place had the Second World War not taken place. In the first place, we can say that had there been the Second World War, between 30 and 50 million people would not have been murdered in various kinds of state action. There would have been no first use of nuclear weapons against Japan. There would have been no devastation of Germany in the material and the cultural sense, though Germany would probably not have got entirely cleanly out of the hit to dictatorship. But there would not have been this total closure on German civilisation that happened in the mid-1940s. Central and Eastern Europe would not have been taken over by the Soviet Empire. You can say that the world at large would have been a better place. Speaking as an English nationalist, I can also say that England would probably have been a better place had there been no Second World War. The financial cost to Britain of the Second World War, the direct financial cost, I believe was £34,000 million, which doesn't mean much nowadays, but it's something like five times the gross domestic product of 1938. If you translate this into modern American terms, you're looking at a war that costs something like $50 trillion, and that's just the direct financial cost. Once you start looking at the opportunity costs, the indirect costs, then it is almost incalculable how much it costs. That being said, the huge financial cost did not seem to do the country any long-term damage, and by that 1960, in the economic terms, the country was better off than ever before. You can also say that the loss of men was not excessive. It was not anything to compare with the mincing machine that we had during the First World War. 60,000 civilians lost in the bombing. I think that's something like one Hamburg or a couple of hours of Dresden, so you can hardly complain about the German bombing campaign. And the loss of material in the bombing, again, was inconsiderable, really, at the times it made up in a few years. I think the real cost to Britain was the fact that, in 1940, Churchill struck a deal with the British Left. Churchill was allowed to strut around for five years playing at great power politics, going towards meetings on equal terms with Roosevelt and Stalin. The Left was allowed to take over the entire domestic administration. A Conservative MP wrote to his daughter after the 1945 general election. She said, wasn't it terrible that you've got a Labour government? And he said, nothing much to worry about. We've had that since 1940 anyway. There was a revolution in Britain in 1940 when the Left took over and everything bad that's happened in Britain since then is a direct or indirect result of the revolution in 1940 where the Left was allowed to take over the domestic administration of the country. By the Left, I mean the state socialists. I do think the Second World War was a bad thing in the sense that I believe that Britain should not have given that military guarantee to Poland in March 1939. Now, when I say this, quite often people say, oh, that's a terrible thing to say. If we hadn't stopped Hitler in 1939, he would have taken over Poland, he would then have invaded Russia and clothed in the enormous prestige and material resources from conquering the Eurasian landbaths. He would then have turned back and swallowed them up in one bite. Well, we don't know what would have happened. There's no way of saying. But if you look at Hitler's intentions and Hitler's abilities, it doesn't look as apocalyptic as many people who are in favour of the Second World War seem to say. There is no evidence that Hitler wanted to conquer or even to making them into a satellite. The only treaty he ever made that he ever kept was the naval treaty with Britain and he did keep that. He kept that. It's the only treaty that actually followed the letter. Hitler continually tried for peace with Britain right into 1941. He regarded the war with Britain as a diversion from the main project of his life, which was Laban's Ram in the East. Now, his intentions were Laban's Ram in the East and I must say that I doubt his ability to achieve that. Of course, when Hitler did eventually invade Russia in 1941, he had to fight war in the West. He had all sorts of diversions in the Balkans and in North Africa and this to some extent slowed him down. On the other hand, when he did invade in 1941, he was clothed in the prestige of having won the war in the West and he had battled hardened armies. It's difficult to say what would have happened if Hitler had invaded Russia in 1942-1943. Would he have won? He might have lost. Even if he had won, the point is that we know from having seen the American British occupation of Iraq and of Afghanistan that it is quite easy sometimes to conquer a country but to occupy it is rather harder. And to have conquered Russia, to have conquered the whole of European Russia and then to make this suitable for German settlement or simply to hold it against continued partisan attacks might well have consumed Hitler's strength for the rest of his life. We can also doubt how long without the Second World War as it happened, Hitler's health would have continued. We know that by 1945 he's in pretty bad shape. Now you can say that was the stress of fighting and losing a giant war but other leaders fought the Second World War and came through in pretty good shape. Stalin, Churchill and so on, it didn't seem to do their health much harm and so it may be that Hitler would not in any event have made it much beyond 55-60 and so it's difficult to say exactly what would have happened if Britain had not given that military guarantee to Poland. On the other hand, I don't see much reason to suppose that Hitler would have been able to set out on some project of world conquest. I just don't believe A that Hitler wanted to do this, he saw it as a diversion from Germany's true mission in the East and B that he would have been able to do any such thing. But one of the reasons why this interests me, although not the reason why it interests me, I've always been interested in what might have happened. Some people say, oh that's not true history, a true historian investigates what did happen. Perhaps I'm not a real historian but I am interested in what might have happened in other circumstances and I think that is quite a good way often of understanding what did happen. What would have happened, for example, if Drouet's cart had got stuck in the mud in 1791 when Louis XVI and his wife tried to leave France? What would have happened if he'd got away? What would have happened if Napoleon had died at the Siege of Toulon? What would have happened if Napoleon had won the Battle of Waterloo? All these are perhaps unanswerable questions but they're also very interesting questions. Another reason why it interests me at the moment is that my very good friend Richard Blake, whose novels you may have seen over there, has a six month gap in his schedule and he's currently writing a novel called The Churchill Memorandum. Mr Blake did decide in the first instance to set a thriller in the year 2014, 100 years after the non-occurrence of the First World War. It starts in 1896 when Churchill gets a spear in the gutter on the moon and that's the end of Winston Churchill, therefore probably no First World War and certainly no Second World War. But the problem with writing such an alternative historical thriller is that it is just so difficult to wind the tape back and then run it again without those two world wars. So what he decided in the end to do was to set his alternative history novel, a novel in the style of Elin Smith's Probability Broach or of King's The Amos's The Alteration. There is a whole genre of this literature. He decided to set The Churchill Memorandum in 1960 or 1959 actually 20 years after a freak accident in Prague. We know that Hitler visited Prague in the middle of March 1939. He was there for 22 hours inspecting the architecture and the sites of Prague. He was then driven to the railway station in Prague and got on a train to Berlin. What would have happened if when Hitler was driving back to the railway station in Prague his escort had got into trouble? It was a frosty morning. The roads in Prague were rather icy. What would have happened if one of the armoured cars in his escort had got stuck in the tram lines and Hitler's Mercedes had swerved to avoid hitting this and a Diana type scenario? So Hitler is dead in March 1939. There would then have been no Second World War because there would have been an immediate power vacuum in Berlin. What would the world look like? What would the world have looked like in 1960 if there had been no Second World War? And if we could have all the arguments with the neoconservs by saying, okay, well, Hitler's dead. So you don't need to worry about whether Hitler would have invaded America in 1948 or something. You know, Hitler's out of it. What happens next? A number of things that we can probably say about this world of 1960, it would have been a great deal richer because you would not have had between 30 and 50 million people murdered by various forms of state violence. There would not have been that enormous outpouring of wealth and the world would have been a richer place. Because we're only looking 20 years afterwards, we can rule out things like British crown colonies on the moon and indefinite life extension and all the rest of it. The world would have looked in many respects, much as it did in 1960, but there would have been some very interesting differences. Germany, I could deal with very quickly. I suspect that with Hitler out of the way, the power struggle in Berlin would have been won by Göring. He was popular with the German people. He was popular with the German establishment. He would have outmanoeuvred people like Himmler and Goebbels very easily. He might have killed them, might have retired them. It doesn't matter. He would then have run a very corrupt, very authoritarian socialist-style state. That's all we need to say about Germany. By 1960, fewer of Göring would be rather old. He probably wouldn't have gone to war with anybody. The Germans would have spared the past 20 years goose-stepping up and down, black banners, endless Wagner and otherwise, not very much, a protectorate over Poland perhaps, and a cold war with Soviet Russia. Soviet Russia would not have been devastated as it was by the Second World War. At the same time, Stalin and the Communist ideology would not have had that enormous prestige that they gained from actually beating Hitler because they didn't notice the fighting anyway, so they won war, I suppose. Communism might not have been so effective as an armed conspiracy in the 1940s and 50s, as in fact it was. What about Britain? What indeed about Britain? Well, I said that our main misfortune in the Second World War was the state socialist coup of May 1940. Because there would have been a Second World War, there would have been no defeat in the Norwegian campaign, no fall of the Chamber in Government, there would not have been that state socialist coup. We have no opinion poll data from the late 1930s, but everybody seems to have been agreed that the general election of 1940 would have been won by the Chamberlain national government, and this would have carried on into the mid 1940s. That is not to say that Britain would have avoided a drift into state socialism. The intellectual consensus among the smart people in the late 1930s was socialist. Look at the great names of the period, George Orwell, J.B. Priestley, Harold Acton. You have a whole range of people, often quite brilliant writers and journalists, and they believed in state socialist solutions to the problems of my country, and I find it very hard to believe that these people would not sooner or later have had their moment. These intellectual changes are often a generational matter. I suspect, drifting away from the main theme, that if the Conservatives had won the 1997 general election in Britain, we would still have had many of the things that we regard as new labour horrors. It was not just a matter of a one general election. This was a matter of a generation coming into its own. Equally, what is happening in America at the moment with President Obama would probably have happened whoever won the presidential election of two years ago. This is a matter of a younger generation that is easing aside its elders and is coming into its own, and they will do the things that they have been talking about for the last 25 years or so. Going back to my main theme, if there had been no Second World War, I find it inconceivable that people like George Orwell, J.B. Priestley, Harold Acton and all the rest would not have had a great influence on the British national mind and therefore on the course of British government throughout the 1940s and the 1950s. Without the Second World War, you would not have had the same cleaning out of the productive classes. There would have been a great deal more resistance to the drift into state socialism. These people would not have been carried shoulder high into the intellectual and political citigals of British life. They would not have had it all their own way. There would have been resistance. There might have been some kind of reaction in the 1950s as indeed there was. felly mae'r waz yn ymweld yn ymweld, yn ei fwyaf ychydig, oherwydd mae'n ddweud yn ymweld yn ymweld yn ymweld yn ymweld. Wrth iddo, mae'r ddweud yn oed yn oed yn yr ymddylliannod o'r cyfnod ymlaen. A wnaeth ymweld ymweld yn ymweld yn ymweld yn yr ymweld yn ymweld. Byddai'n gwybod ymwyaf yn ymweld yn 1960? I think the answer is yes, and that would be one of the downsides of having been no second world war. The empire was never a source of British greatness, it was an effect. It was rather like the plumage on one of those birds that's good for attracting mates and frightening away predators, but it is in itself pretty useless. I suspect that by 1960, in this alternative world, Britain would still be stuck in India, trying to keep peace between lunatic mobs of Muslims and Hindus. We're stuck in India because we were there, because there was no great reason for us to leave, and because everybody said, well, we've always been there, so we should always stay there. And with India, I imagine that most of the rest of the empire would still be there. The technology. Now, I don't think that there would have been so much development of aircraft and rocketry. This was enormously fostered by the Second World War. I don't think that in the same great development of computing this again was fostered by the Second World War. Indeed, the purely civilian economy didn't really get interested in computers until the 1970s, until then computers were things for the state or for companies which were recipients of state contracts, the military industrial complex you could call it. And so without the Second World War, less development of computing, less development of aviation technology, possibly no development worth mentioning of rocketry. There would have been visionaries talking of space travel, but probably nothing definite done about it simply because the technology hadn't been developed. What technologies would have developed in place of that? Now, I can't answer that, it's rather like best yet what is seen and what is not seen. We saw between 1940 and 1960 the development of certain technologies. We don't know, we can't know what technologies were there by crowded out. Would there have been more medical progress than in fact there was? Would there have been much more development of electronics but in the civilian economy? I don't know, but the fact that between 30 and 50 million people were not being killed, you'd have not had that scale of material devastation indicates that there would have been many technological advances which in fact had not happened by 1960. Perhaps the sort of technological breakthroughs we had in the 1970s and 80s would have taken place in the 1950s and 60s. I don't know, I can't know, but my friend Mr Blake will try to work something out when he comes to the background of the Churchill memorandum. Now, one thing I would, one thing I have not mentioned so far is what would have happened with America without the Second World War and my short answer is I don't know. I think it's fair to say that the whole Roosevelt project, the New Deal, was rescued by the Second World War. It does not seem that America was rescued from the Great Depression by any of Roosevelt's interventions in the 1930s and it's only the enormous inflationary spending and the war economy of the early and mid 1940s that got America out of the Great Depression. So, if there had been the Second World War, what would have happened in America? Would the Roosevelt project, was this a generational shift and would it have continued rumbling along but in slightly different ways? Would there have been a traditionalist reaction in 1940 or 1944? I don't know. Would perhaps America have run into very serious domestic problems? Would there, might there have been, even a break up of the United States? I don't know and that is a weak point in the whole Churchill memorandum background and I hope that many of the Americans who are in this room will have some ideas on what would have happened. Now, the last thing I would say is that the Churchill memorandum will not be great literature when it's written just as the other novels that Richard Blake has written cannot be regarded as great literature, but they are significant in one aspect. We in the libertarian and conservative movements have been very good during the past half century in explaining what is wrong with the world and what needs to be done in the economic and political sense to make it a better place. If you want to know about our views on company law reform or land reform or monetary reform or have you, it's all there. It's all being done, it's all being done at the moment with great brilliance. But the world is not as influenced by this kind of abstract political, economic and social thought as we would like to think. The socialist takeover of the western mind in the early and middle 20th century had rather little to do with all those socialist pamphlets. I think that it was driven much more by the cultural war that the socialists unleashed. I think the novels of George Orwell of J.B. Priestley, I think certainly many Hollywood films did a great deal more to bring the western mind over to socialism than any amount of scribbling by socialist intellectuals. One of the weaknesses that our movement has suffered over the past few generations is that we are not very strong in the arts. We have not done much in the cultural sense. We have had very little cultural outreach. Whenever we do think of culture, it's to complain about how lifting and how disgusting Hollywood is or how dreadful are these American comedy programs or, in my case, in English women, how ghastly and how bleakly propagandistic soap operas like EastEnders are and their corrupting effect on the English mind. We are very good at criticising, but we haven't so far been very good at providing an alternative of our own. Even in America, if I want to think of great libertarian cultural propaganda, the best I can think of is something like Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which was released, I think, in 1984 and 1985, a great libertarian film, which is also a very good film, but there hasn't been that much produced even in America, even in the broadcast arts, and there's been very little done in England. Although Richard Blake may not be another Proust or another Baltsack or another Dickens or whatever that just fit in the blanks, he is an interesting cultural phenomenon. He is an outspoken libertarian who also writes mainstream fiction, which is read by fairly large numbers of people. To say that Richard Blake will by himself revolutionise the English mind in the same way as priestly, all-world, goals-worthy, shaw, wells, and all the others did in the early 20th century is perhaps saying more than can be said about Richard Blake, but on the other hand, if Richard Blake, a libertarian novelist, can break through into mainstream fiction, many other people can. I do think that The Churchill Memorandum will be a significant novel, even if it's not a very good one, in the sense that it's worth considering what the world would have looked like in 1960 had there not been this gigantic catastrophe in the early 1940s. The world would have been a better place if the state had not been as entirely released from its bottle as in fact it was. So I do believe that you should encourage Mr Blake as much as possible by buying his novels. If any of you have contacts with Hollywood film people, Mr Blake is always willing to talk to these people. More importantly, if you do have a novel of your own that you've been idly considering for the past few years, I think it is in your interest and I think it is your duty to go ahead and to write it because you'll be fighting the war for truth, writing justice just as effectively by writing novels as by writing more cultural and economic critiques. So with that I thank you for your indulgence and I will shut up now. Thank you.