It's now more than five years since we came back to Canada from our fourteen-year sojourn in the UK. Looking back across the Atlantic has been a mostly depressing experience. First there was the Cameron/Osborne austerity policy, entirely ineffective and hugely damaging; then the whole Brexit referendum fiasco, created by Cameron entirely for the purpose of seeing off the rebellious right wing of his own party, with disastrous results; and now the Brexit "negotiations" themselves, with a clearly overwhelmed Theresa May presiding over a Cabinet of schemers and buffoons, with a sex scandal or two thrown in for good measure.
My wife commented a while back that it's a good thing we don't live there any more: we'd be angry all the time, and we're too old to live like that. She's right. I think what would make me angry -- and still does, even at a safe distance -- is that the Tories are only ever motivated by what's good for their party, not what's good for the country. Did Boris Johnson ever really believe the lies he told on the campaign trail back in 2015? Surely not, but he saw them as a way to power, and that was enough.
A friend recently gave me a quirky book called "The strange death of Liberal England" by George Dangerfield. It was published in 1935 (though its style seems older than that) and it deals with the years leading up to the Great War. The names of some of the players are familiar -- Balfour, Asquith, Lloyd George -- but the detailed history of the period is less well known, and offers some interesting foreshadowing of more recent events.
From 1906 to 1910 the Liberals had a majority in the House of Commons, but their ability to pass legislation was repeatedly thwarted by the Tories, who used their huge majority in the unelected House of Lords to turn everything back. A fresh election left the two parties almost tied, with the Liberals agreeing to support limited Home Rule for Ireland in return for the Parliamentary support of Irish MPs. The death of King Edward VII and the accession of George V presented the Liberals with an opportunity to bring in legislation eliminate the Lords' effective veto, backed by a threat to create as many as 500 new peers (all Liberals) if the Lords attempted to veto the move. After a closely-fought and rancorous debate, the legislation passed, and the Lords have never since that time been able to overturn legislation passed in the "lower house".
Deprived of the Lords as a weapon, how did the Tories respond? Determined to oppose the Liberals at every turn, they chose to make nice with the Ulster Unionists, Protestants intransigently opposed to Home Rule -- "Home Rule is Rome rule". One of the delights of Dangerfield's book is his startling frankness: he doesn't like Tories very much, and he views the Unionists with nothing short of contempt: "they cared for no-one but themselves".
The Tories didn't much like the Unionists or what they stood for, but needs must, and so an unholy alliance was formed. It's that alliance that prepared the ground for all the troubles that followed -- the rising in 1916, the post-Great War conflict that ultimately led to the creation of the Irish Free State, with the six most Protestant counties of Ulster gerrymandered off to create Northern Ireland, and the decades-long "Troubles" that flared up in 1969 and were only ended by, of all people, Tony Blair, with the Good Friday Agreement.
That Agreement allowed something resembling real peace to reign over all Ireland for the first time in almost a century, with the border between the Republic and the North fading into insignificance. Sadly ironic, then, that one of the many potentially baleful consequences of Brexit could be the return of a "hard" border between the two jurisdictions, with unpredictable consequences. And tragically, the hapless May is only able to govern at all through a devil's bargain with -- who else? -- the Unionists.
Having conspired in the division of the island for partisan political reasons a year ago, and having never looked past military force to keep it in place ever since, the Tories may be about to leave their mark on Ireland all over again. And all because of a partisan decision by David Cameron that went wildly wrong. Truly, some things never change.
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