Brexit will upend Irish and British history

Not since the 1920s has British politics been in such disarray and amazingly the same issue still dominate today as Brexit does enormous damage to the United Kingdom.

At the turn of the 20th century, the Liberal Party was ascendant in Britain, forging ahead of its perennial Tory rivals and seemingly set for dominance of the two-party system well into the future.

By 1922 the party was gone forever, a political fate that no one could have imagined.

These days it remains a rump party in British politics, its great days long behind it. Yes, World War I had a profound impact, but the dramatic changes were in motion long before.

The Liberal Party was torn apart by three issues: suffragette, the revolt in Ulster by hardline unionism, and the birth of the trade union movement which brought into being the Labour Party which stomped all over the Liberals.

Amazingly, two of those issues still mightily dominate the British political landscape today and will bring about as fundamental a change as the strange death of liberal England did.

Brexit has done and will do enormous damage to the entity known as the United Kingdom. The forces of English nationalism, as reflected in the original Brexit vote, seem certain to have their way and see Britain leave the European Union.

That will have a transformative impact on the Scottish nationalism debate, as Scotland voted handsomely to stay in the European Union in the 2016 Brexit referendum. The only way they can now achieve this is by voting in a new referendum to leave the U.K.

Stung by the uncaring response of their southern neighbors, the Scottish Nationalist Party has already called for a new referendum on Scottish independence. Polls show a vote for independence would succeed.

Then there's Northern Ireland, which also voted to stay in Europe. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) has hidden that fact amid their daily bluster that only they speak for Northern Ireland. Because of abstentionism by Sinn Fein, they have gotten away with it.

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But unionists have just uncovered their own unpleasant truth. English nationalists quite cheerfully abandoned them when it came to a choice of achieving Brexit or standing with their unionist colleagues like the Tories had back in 1914.

As for the future, a referendum in the next few years is promised to decide the status of Northern Ireland. Nothing has solidified support for a united Ireland more than the go-it-alone strategy of the DUP. As author George Dangerfield once wrote, “The Ulster unionists love no one but themselves.”

The final casualty of the great upheaval will likely be the Labour Party, forged in the birth of the trade union movement over a century ago.

If you want an example of dithering leadership look no further than Labour Jeremy Corbyn, whose party is facing, Janus-like, both ways on Brexit, with both a leave and remain faction. Somehow Corbyn thinks this will help win an election.

The upshot of Brexit within a decade will be an independent Scotland and Ireland, the death of the Labour Party and a landscape as different as it was with the death of the liberals in 1920. Such is the range of change that Brexit has wrought.