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Notes -
We don't need to, but if you're going to take the opposing counterfactual you need to frame it in light of what was likely to have actually happened rather than simply assuming that things would have continued along in a sort of empire at its height best case scenario. This is the fallacy Niall Ferguson points out with regard to critics of the British Empire; if the British hadn't colonized, say, Malaya we can't just assume that the alternative was Malay civilization continuing to develop nicely on its own terms. The more realistic scenario is that they would have simply been colonized by the French, or the Portuguese, or the Dutch.
With regard to decolonization, I don't think there are any rosy scenarios where the bulk of the colonies continue to happily be British subjects indefinitely. A lot of the places that were decolonized saw increasing amounts of political violence during the 1950s and 1960s as their inhabitants grew resentful of foreign rule, and there's no indication that any of these could have been forcibly suppressed without stoking additional resentment and violence, especially if it were made clear that there was no intention of ever leaving. Had the decolonization project been delayed by even ten years we would have likely seen the Soviets funnel money into any anti-imperial forces, much as they did to their preferred sides in the civil wars that followed independence in many areas. This would have all happened at a time when Britain was still reeling from the economic malaise that marked the decades following WWII, and it would have had to justify to its own public ever-increasing expenditures of money it didn't have and the lives of its young men to hang on to whatever benefit they got from controlling a place like Nyassaland that most people can't point to on a map.
Now, I'm sure there's some alternate reality where WWII and the Cold War don't happen and everyone likes being a British subject and they get to hold onto their colonies indefinitely, but there's also an alternate reality where Africa is never colonized and its tribes organically form modern states that trade and interact with the rest of the world. But by that point you're moving too far into fantasy land to make a legitimate counterfactual.
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