212. Labour struggling, Tories soaring, the economy wobbling

It was a bad time for Gladstone, defeated in an election held just a few months after the previous poll which he’d won. It was a bad time for Charles Stewart Parnell and his Irish Parliamentary Party...

11 Kesä 202314min

It was heartbreak time for Parnell. He’d spent eleven years in parliament, leading to the emergence of a powerful Irish Parliamentary Party that eventual won the balance of power. That put Home Rule, ...

4 Kesä 202314min

The storm that had been building for years over Ireland broke just as soon as Gladstone, with Irish support, finally brought down the Salisbury minority administration. His problem was that quite a fe...

28 Touko 202314min

Salisbury, who’d secured his position in the Conservative Party by his clever political work over Gladstone’s 1884 Reform Act, was now Prime Minister. But only at the head of a minority government. Th...

21 Touko 202314min

After nearly five years in power, the strains inside the second Gladstone government were beginning to show. Indeed, both main parties were having trouble, above all with their respective awkward squa...

14 Touko 202314min

As the second Gladstone government approached its end, it had little enough to point to as major successes. Some measures had been passed to try to pacify Ireland, but that sad country was still far f...

7 Touko 202314min

After the Phoenix Park murders, there was a bit of a hiatus in Parnell’s campaign for Irish Home Rule, while he consolidated his grip on the movement, guiding it firmly into the path of constitutional...

30 Huhti 202314min

The passage of the Land Act for Ireland provided many tenant farmers with a wonderful way of getting their rents reduced. Sadly, that benefit had a downside, as it undermined the enthusiasm for contin...

23 Huhti 202314min