DB: WI no Home Rule?

[Smuz]

What would have happened if the Tories had stuck to their guns and supported the Ulstermen in the 1890s/1900s? I suspect Home Rule would still be inevitable, as the King could always meddle with the House of Lords, but would the Conservatives have avoided the smear of "betrayers of the protestants" that ironically drove many Christian Britons to the Liberals?

Would the Conservatives/Tories stayed in one party, rather than splitting off the Conservatives and the Reactionists? Might the situation in Ireland risen to the point of open violence? Would this affect other Imperial provinces?

 

[DoleScum]

What would have happened if the Tories had stuck to their guns and supported the Ulstermen in the 1890s/1900s? I suspect Home Rule would still be inevitable, as the King could always meddle with the House of Lords, but would the Conservatives have avoided the smear of "betrayers of the protestants" that ironically drove many Christian Britons to the Liberals?

Would the Conservatives/Tories stayed in one party, rather than splitting off the Conservatives and the Reactionists? Might the situation in Ireland risen to the point of open violence? Would this affect other Imperial provinces?

Home Rule in some form was an inevitability, what the British should have done is what they later did in dismanteling imperial control in the 50s and 60s which was to fast track Ireland towards Home Rule as a means of heading off extremist / hardline Catholic Republicanism. An Irish Free State set up prior to World War One with dominion status in the Empire and British monarch as head of state, would have led to the creation of Ireland as a British satelitte state rather than as a bugbear in British politics up until the 1920s.
As for the imperial implications of Home Rule I suspect that it would have strengthed Britain's imperial leadership rather than (in OTL) weakening it. It would have shown other nationalist groups such as the Indian National Congress that Britain's claims that Imperial rule would eventually lead to amicable independence had some validity. In reality the messy withdrawl from Ireland seriously weakend Britain's imperial image and the Irish example provided a major boost to colonial nationalism in India, Asia and Africa.

 

[Smuz]

Home Rule in some form was an inevitability, what the British should have done is what they later did in dismanteling imperial control in the 50s and 60s which was to fast track Ireland towards Home Rule as a means of heading off extremist / hardline Catholic Republicanism. An Irish Free State set up prior to World War One with dominion status in the Empire and British monarch as head of state, would have led to the creation of Ireland as a British satelitte state rather than as a bugbear in British politics up until the 1920s.
As for the imperial implications of Home Rule I suspect that it would have strengthed Britain's imperial leadership rather than (in OTL) weakening it. It would have shown other nationalist groups such as the Indian National Congress that Britain's claims that Imperial rule would eventually lead to amicable independence had some validity. In reality the messy withdrawl from Ireland seriously weakend Britain's imperial image and the Irish example provided a major boost to colonial nationalism in India, Asia and Africa.

You have read what I types, right? I'm suggesting Ireland got Home Rule prior to 1910... and asking for suggestions as to different scenarios if the Conservatives had (as OTL) delayed it until WWI or later.

 

[Straha]

Well we wouldn't have the 3 power system of the United States from maine to the yucatan, the british raj with its biggest territory of india and the white dominsions and the southron Republic in africa. The world would be different if one of the major superpowers was removed. Perhaps instead of a world with all 3 superpowers being pluralistic democracies we have some odd power like a revancist germany of some sorty?.

 

[Rabbit Scribe]

What would have happened if the Tories had stuck to their guns and supported the Ulstermen in the 1890s/1900s? I suspect Home Rule would still be inevitable, as the King could always meddle with the House of Lords

I am, like, so suuure that the King would have really enobled people like Shaw and Wilde. If Queensbury had lived, he would have prevailed in that lawsuit and Wilde would have been sent up the river for buggery, and everybody knew it. Forgive me if I view with some skepticism the notion that Wilde may have died an Earl. This old poker player smells a bluff...

Would the Conservatives have avoided the smear of "betrayers of the protestants" that ironically drove many Christian Britons to the Liberals?

Ironic indeed- Daddy goes Liberal/ Radical because the Tories won't spend blood and treasure to support a triumphalist Protestant minority in an overwhelmingly Catholic country, and as a direct result, twenty-five years later Junior is a hardened atheistic crypto-Communist campaigining for the whack job du jour who supports disestablishing and taxing the Church of England at home. Come to think of it, that's almost as ironic as "Sportsman of the Year" Queensbury tearing around the countryside jumping four-foot hedges blind in the morning and dieing in a golfing accident that afternoon. Who gets killed golfing? But I digress.

Would the Conservatives/Tories stayed in one party, rather than splitting off the Conservatives and the Reactionists?

Yes. OK, seriously, what else would have ignited passions powerful enough to split the party? Conservatives, by definition, tend not to do things like that.

Might the situation in Ireland risen to the point of open violence?

Well, there was "open violence" driven by the Catholic-Protestant and Republican-Unionist conflicts before, during, and after the period you mention. Of course, you mean outright civil war- armed bodies of thousands seizing barracks and armories and, I dunno, post offices in Dublin, right? Well, I tend to think that would have been very likely, if not inevitable. Look at what did, in fact, happen with the Kaiser's "Devil's Bargain" in 1921. Griffith and Collins disembark from the German submarine that had brought them home from exile in America, unload the arms and ammunition originally intended for a newly-created German Great War regiment (i.e., 1000 men at most), and less than six weeks later they have two-thirds of the country, two Royal Navy destroyers are flying the Republican flag, and the First Division of the Irish Republican Army is steaming towards Hamburg in German troopships while the British Expeditionary Force, sorely needed on the Continent, is holding Ulster against an imaginary siege. To be sure, that couldn't have happened in the '80s or '90s, if only because British armed forces weren't tied down elsewhere, but the point is that Republicanism had been on a simmer and could have boiled over at any point. In retrospect, if Gladstone or whoever had been able to successfully create a valve to let off some steam, then things might well have turned out less disastrous for everybody, including even the Republicans.

Would this affect other Imperial provinces?

Meh. That might be going a bit too far. What do you mean by "Imperial provinces," exactly? India? I just don't think that an Irish Rebellion would have meaningfully encouraged another Mutiny, any more than, I dunno, ethnic Chinese chasing the Governer out of Hong Kong would have, at least in the short term. They didn't get much CNN back then... Actually, if anything, Welshmen may have gotten up the courage to agitate for greater Home Rule. I sure know one former Imperial province that was dramatically affected by Irish affairs decades later: Massachusetts, USA. You just can't overrate the extent to which pressure from the Irish-American community, excited by the Reprisals of 1923, contributed to the endless dithering with respect to whether or not the US would get involved in the Great War at any level. Again, if there had been any sort of Home Rule before the Tories split, the pressure wouldn't have built to the point that a Boston mob would have lynched a United States Senator for introducing legislation allowing war material to be shipped to the Allied Powers, that's for sure.