What If Gordon Banks Had Played: Foreword
About
"What If Gordon Banks Had Played" is a work of alternate history, as well as a political thriller, conspiracy theory and hatchet job. It tells the story of a United Kingdom in which the 1970 general election was actually won by the Labour Party because England's World Cup campaign of that year went slightly differently.
But events take a turn for the worse and very gradually the country sinks into dictatorship, and many of the real-world events of the period 1970-2001 still happen, but happen very differently and all at the same time. Strangely, the story also anticipates some of the events of 2017-2021 ...
The text
The text was originally posted on the web in the early 2000s. It has been cleaned up thus:
- conversion to Gemtext
- spelling
- some character encoding issues (particularly double quotes)
- re-linking the original images, some of which are lost on the archive.org version
The original text contains any number of fictional documents, some complete with little images of the title pages.
Legal
The original author's name can be found with a little digging.
He doesn't like to be associated with the text because he reckoned it's probably libellous. However, all the people he may have libelled have since died.
In terms of copyright, it remains copyright of the original author, and no known licensing is in place.