The last one ...
I will venture to say that upon the one great class of subjects, the largest and the most weighty of them all, where the leading and determining considerations that ought to lead to a conclusion are truth, justice and humanity—upon these, gentlemen, all the world over, I will back the masses against the classes.
William Ewart Gladstone, 1886
Anyway, it was occurring to me the other day the extent to which Ireland has been involved in so many of our major party political realignments since the 1832 Great Reform Act.
1840s: Corn Law repeal splits the Conservative Party, and leads to the formation of the Liberal Party out of the Peelites, Whig rump, and Radicals. Immediate catalyst? The Great Famine in Ireland.
1880s: Gladstone's support of Irish Home Rule splits the Liberal Party; Liberal Unionists walk out, forming coalition, and eventually merging, with the Conservatives. The High Victorian period of Liberal political dominance is brought to an end (notwithstanding a final brief flourish from 1906-1911).
1918-1920s: The introduction of full male and limited female suffrage following the 1918 Representation of the People Act no doubt played the major role in this realignment by facilitating the rise of the Labour Party; but Ireland still makes a contribution via the post-war collapse of the Irish Parliamentary Party, and the Liberal Party's loss of implicit support from Irish constitutional home rule supporters (and Lloyd-George's role in negotiating the Free State Treaty).
2010s: Possible party realignment (too soon to judge) brought about by Brexit; disagreements regarding the border between the United Kingdom and Ireland are one of the main contributors to the political debacle that might in turn facilitate party realignment.
It's a bit like an unhappy arranged marriage where the two parties are still arguing over custody of the children years after the divorce was finalised.
I'm not sure I'm really offering a debate question; but it seemed as good a topic as any to start off a thread that I find myself owning even though I didn't actually start it...
Quick Poll note:
As an experiment, I'm including the Independent Group. I've also combined UKIP and Farage's new Brexit Party (which has accumulated 7 or 8 MEPs without too many people noticing) as a single poll option. I've kept the SNP and Plaid Cymru as separate poll options, but - after some handwringing - have moved the Greens to 'other', while explicitly recognising the Greens in that category; I felt it was important to continue to recognise the contexts of Scottish and Welsh politics as separate (and note that the Scottish Greens are an entirely separate pro-independence party that's not affiliated with the English and Welsh Greens). It's not an ideal solution, but we're currently accumulating more parties than the poll limits can cope with. I do particularly apologise to any Alliance supporters in NI.
Feel free to discuss how misguided my choices were on this poll; but you're stuck with it until thread X. By then we may have a better idea of whether the current political instability has led to anything, or whether the traditional semi-dichotomy has reasserted itself.
