A Question of Partisanship, 1909–22: British Party Politics, the Great War and Ireland

Abstract

In 1909 the Liberal and Unionist Parties found themselves in the most irreconcilable political disagreement of their modern political history. This was inspired by a mixture of political issues and political tactics; and the Irish Question was soon gathered up into this mixture, so much that it was quite inseparable from it. For there is a tendency to see Ireland as invading British political space yet again, as disrupting the even tenor of British political ways, as introducing into British politics the savage disagreements characteristic of politics in Ireland. Yet Ireland alone could not have provoked this, despite the fact that the political parties found themselves once again left with Home Rule versus Union as an integral part of their political descriptions. In November 1906 Austen Chamberlain declared that ‘just now, for an Englishman, at any rate, a speech on Home Rule is like flogging a dead horse’.¹ The movement of Ireland to the centre of the political stage involved its recognition by the major parties as a public issue essential to the outcome of their party battle.