Alternative Multiverses

Theresa May's Inheritance

It seems like yesterday.  Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher, Churchill redivivus, leading Britain to victory in the Falklands War.  Yet, at the same time for many, it has faded in memory.  What was it all about, again?

It turns out that a major sea change had taken place in British society: in 1979 a Gallup poll had shown the British to be the most pessimistic of thirty-one countries surveyed; in 1983 [just four years later] they were the eighth most optimistic.  If you were going to pick one event, or sequence of events, which turned the tide in popular sentiment it would have been the Falklands War.

Robert Tombs, towards the end of his magisterial, The English and Their History [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015] reflects upon the aftermath of the Falklands War and its impact upon the British people.

The first impact was that it did not unite all.  Most significantly it drove the Left and Thatchers critics into the grounds of extremist sentiment, where many now dwell, ideologically separated from the the bulk of British people.  This group has continued, and are now living in a parallel universe--at least for the present.  Who knows what the end game for them will be.

Tombs describes this parallel universe as it was developing in the eighties in Britain.