The Secret of the League
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What Might Have Been is a 1907 British dystopian novel by Ernest Bramah (published in USA as The Secret of the League, 1909), which describes a successful overthrow of a democratically elected British Labour Party government by members of the upper classes, and depicts such an overthrow as being a positive and desirable outcome.
George Orwell credited the book with having given a considerably accurate prediction of the rise of Fascism, and also with reflecting "the mentality of the middle classes" and the brutal measures which members of these classes might condone should they feel threatened with a revolution — "even such a decent and kindly writer as Ernest Bramah", in Orwell's words.[1]
The book was written after the 1906 United Kingdom general election, in which the Labour Party, formed just seven years before, gained 29 parliamentary seats — a great increase from the two seats it had before — and for the first time became a serious factor of British politics. The idea of Labour gaining a majority, though still apparently unlikely, was no longer impossible — a prospect which some Britons, evidently including Bramah, considered alarming, especially since the period after the elections featured intensive labour disputes and militant strikes.