Home Rule
Between 1886 and 1891, Home Rule dominated Liberal policy debates but two events damaged their Irish allies. In 1887, The Times published letters, implicating Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish Home Rule party leader, in the Phoenix Park murders of a government minister and a civil servant, although a high profile government inquiry later discovered the letters to be forgeries. In 1890, the divorce of Katharine O'Shea, which identified Parnell as Mrs O'Shea's lover, split the Irish party and scandalised nonconformist Liberals. The split in the Irish Home Rule party in 1890 weakened the likelihood of a successful Home Rule Bill. At the 1891 meeting of the NLF in Newcastle upon Tyne Gladstone reaffirmed the primacy of Home Rule, but associated it with reforms on the mainland by adopting various proposals of the NLF Council, in particular: land reform; reform of the Lords; shorter parliaments; district and parish councils; registration reform and abolition of plural voting; local veto on drink sales; employers' liability for workers' accidents; Scottish and Welsh disestablishment. The Newcastle programme was to be the solution to these dilemmas, a manifesto for British government.
Read more about this topic: The Newcastle Programme
Famous quotes containing the words home and/or rule:
“Back home the black women are all beautiful”
—Imamu Amiri Baraka (b. 1934)
“Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)