As for the ever-fascinating ‘what if’ of the Second World War, can we please be spared such tedious comments as ‘if we lost the war, why are we speaking English and not German?’ . Appearance and reality are not the same thing, and one doesn’t have to be physically conquered and subjugated to be defeated. You could argue that our principal rivals in World War Two were the Americans, and we are now speaking American. But our laws are made in Brussels and Luxembourg, by an organisation wholly dominated by Germany.