Irish Home Rule movement

Now, what was the, what was the situation I referred to, I referred to in the United Kingdom? Well, [coughs] throughout pretty much the entirety of the July crisis of 1914, the eyes of the key decision-makers in London were on the nine counties of Ulster in the north of Ireland.

On May 21st, 1914, the, uh, Irish Home Rule Bill had been passed by the House of Commons and, uh, was being aggressively rejected by the House of Lords.

Um, H.H. Asquith, uh, the Liberal, uh, Party Prime Minister, he, uh, his coalition was dependent upon Irish nationalist votes.

He was threatening to, uh, utilize provisions of the Parliament Act, which in some circumstances allowed a sitting government to circumvent the House of Lords and pass a bill by direct royal assent.

And tensions are also boiling over Ireland.

The debate over Irish home rule is fracturing the country.

The rhetoric was violent.

Churchill actually got hit in the head by a heavy book thrown by a conservative MP.

For like a whole generation or more.

All right, what else have we got here? On this day in 1914, Irish Home Rule Bill receives royal assent.

I've said it a number of times.

We've talked about this a number of times, haven't we? I've said it before.

what context? Yeah, like

how Gladstone would sit with Burke and decide what he wanted to do on Irish Home Rule.

Like, you know, this idea that actually kind of like reading, reading to help form history.

opinions rather than just kind of assuming that you know conservatism is this so I have to read this conservative and I already kind of think I know what they're about yeah so that historical question of when really I think is really important

Following James II's deposition in 1688, his loyalists, including many Catholics in Ireland, fought on his behalf, but the resilient Ulster Scots stood firm against his authority.

The defeat of those Jacobites at Boyne not only reinforced Protestant dominance but also highlighted how a personal union could mask deep regional conflicts that would later surface during the Union and the Irish Home Rule debates.

In sum, these intertwined military campaigns, settlement policies, and religious shifts forged an empire where national identities were negotiated on the battlefield and in legislation.

College football is back.

Even in 2010, when a new Labour leader takes over, Ed Miliband, his first speech is all about Disraeli and about the philosophy of one nation, and that being an idea that even the Labour Party might want to buy into and project to the public.

I'm not going to ask you to go back to the question of Irish Home Rule.

We've done that.

If people are interested, the episodes are still available, as are all our episodes.

but this would jeopardize the financial position of the British gentry, which controlled extensive land holdings in Ireland.

So, when Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone came out in support of Irish Home Rule, those aristocrats who supported the Liberals jumped ship, turning instead to the Conservative Party.

To make up for it, the liberals moved to the left on a number of issues to court working class voters, like increased factory regulation, increased secularism, and increased access to education.

Well, this gradually led more bourgeois voters to join the conservatives, and to the liberals' further adoption of even more populist policies to court even more working class voters in turn.

One of the characters who best embodies the shifting tides of British politics in this period was a young politician by the name of Winston Churchill.

The grandson of a duke on his father's side and of an American banker on his mother's side, Churchill had served in the army before working as a journalist in South Africa during the Boer War.

A staunch imperialist, he opposed Irish Home Rule and was elected to Parliament as a Conservative in 1900.

But opposed to the Tories' protectionist trade policies, he moved to the Liberal Party in 1904.