The Archbishop was at the centre of a plot. ibid.
Lang hated what he called Edward’s liking for vulgar society ... Lang: ‘That dreadful common American woman’. ibid.
The Archbishop of Canterbury knew more about Mrs Simpson than most. He was at the centre of a well-oiled intelligence gathering machine. ibid.
The King met Lang to plan the Coronation. And yet again things did not go well. ibid.
Lang: ‘I had a long talk with the prime minister Baldwin’ ... Lang was forcing events to a head. ibid.
The next day after meeting the editor of The Times, Baldwin authorised the delivery of a letter warning the king. ibid.
To Lang’s fury, the popular press sided with the King and turned on him. ibid.
Edward found himself alone against the full force of the old gang. ibid.
Lang’s words backfired ... The vengeful speech had destroyed the Archbishop’s reputation. ibid.
I was telling you I went down a coalmine the other day. We sank into a pit half a mile deep. We then walked underneath the mountain, and we did about three-quarters of a mile with rock and shale above us. The earth seemed to be straining around us and above us to crush us in.
You could see the pit-props bent and twisted and sundered until you saw their fibres split in resisting the pressure. Sometimes they give way, and then there is mutilation and death. Often a spark ignites: the whole pit is deluged in fire, and the breath of life is scorched out of hundreds of breasts by the consuming flame. In the very next colliery to the one I descended just a few years ago three hundred people lost their lives in that way. And yet when the Prime Minister and I knock at the door of these great landlords, and say to them: Here, you know, these poor fellows who have been digging up royalties at the risk of their lives, some of them are old, they have survived the perils of their trade, they are broken, they can earn no more. Won’t you give them something towards keeping them out of the workhouse? They scowl at us, and we say: Only a ha’penny, just a copper. They say: You thieves! And they turn their dogs on to us, and you can hear their bark every morning. If this is an indication of the view taken by these great landlords of their responsibility to the people who at the risk of life create their wealth, then I say their day of reckoning is at hand. Lloyd George, address Edinburgh Castle, Limehouse, London
Britain and Europe start working out how exactly this conscious coupling with proceed and what Brexit actually means. Life After Brexit: A Newsnight Special, BBC 2016
How did we get such a divided country? … The most fraught issue of all – the gulf between Inners and Outers. The new national divide. ibid.
Theresa May is about to push the button on Brexit and head off on a mission … For Brexiteers the dream is a quicky divorce. Brexit: Britain’s Biggest Deal, BBC 2017
A lot of money is on the table ... That potentially massive bill is for Britain’s share of existing EU spending commitments like the pensions of EU officials. ibid.
Our skies are governed right now by the EU with a myriad of European legislation. ibid.
They set themselves a new target of negotiating a trade deal within two years. On top of all that tricky divorce. ibid.
Tonight: Will it be deal or no deal? The countdown to Brexit is on. Getting it right on trade: the biggest political test of Theresa May’s life. Tonight: Deal or No Deal? Brexit Britain, ITV 2016
The EU has said there’ll be a so-called divorce settlement which some say could cost us up to £50 billion. ibid.
Is the United Kingdom on the brink of a break-up? Why do so many in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland want to go it alone? And could a new deal for England help save the Union? … It’s a union that’s lasted centuries but after five years of political turmoil it feels more in jeopardy than ever before. Tonight: UK: The End of the Union, ITV 2021
‘Between 1920 and 1922 Belfast is the most violent place in Ireland. It is really the epicentre of revolutionary violence. What we see again and again is violence in one part of Ireland leads to violence in another part.’ The Road to Partition s1e1, historian, BBC 2021
On 22 June 1921 King George V and Queen Mary arrived in Belfast for the first official opening of the Northern Ireland parliament. Fearful for their lives, they had come to a city scarred with sectarian division. The occasion marked the creation of the new state of Northern Ireland. ibid.
This is the story of the dramatic events that led to the partition of Ireland. A story that continues to reverberate to the present day. And dominate the relationship between the islands of Britain and Ireland. ibid.
For Britain, the loudest and most strident demands for self-determination came from very close to home, from a country that it had ruled for centuries: Ireland. Prior to the war, and in response to long-standing demands from Irish nationalists, Britain had been preparing to devolve some powers to a Dublin-based parliament, through so-called home-rule. But home-rule was fiercely resisted by Unionists, particularly in Belfast and large parts of Ulster, where for centuries the population had been impacted by migration from Scotland and England. ibid.
By the end of the nineteenth century Ulster’s distinctiveness was marked by its status as the most industrialised part of Ireland. ibid.
The outbreak of the First World War averted the threat of a violent confrontation between Ulster Unionists and the British government, and home rule was suspended. ibid.
Nine weeks after the Easter rising, on the western front the men of the 36th Division made a very different blood sacrifice. In July, during the first two days of fighting at the battle of the Somme, the Division suffered an appalling 5,500 casualties. Men fighting for Britain … ‘The battle of the Somme was absolute slaughter particularly for Ulster Unionists.’ ibid.
As Ireland went to the polls in December 1918, voters had a choice between Sinn Fein and the Irish Parliamentary Party, and between two radically different visions of Ireland’s future. ibid.
Both Unionists and Republicans would take advantage of another political force that emerged for the first time in 1918: Women. They had become more politically engaged before the war, and were voting now for the first time. They included the members of the Ulster Women’s Unionist Council. ibid.
‘Sinn Fein took matters into their own hands and formed an independent though illegal parliament in Dublin … the Dail is rapidly backed by force which is known as the IRA.’ ibid.
Republicans in favour of taking up arms had already done so. On the same day as the Dail sat in Dublin for the first time, two members of the Irish Royal Constabulary were killed in an IRA ambush in County Tipperary. The first shots of the Irish War of Independence had been fired. ibid.
Lisburn: Loyalists went on the rampage in the two, looting and burning Catholic homes and businesses. ibid.
The deployment of the Black-and-Tans was to backfire, and their reputation for brutality and reprisal attacks on civilians and property intensified the conflict in the south, leading to international condemnation. ibid.
Despite the war of independence raging across the island, Unionists in the north continued to lay the foundations for a new state. ibid.
1918: In Ireland, Nationalist demands for independence from Britain had already resulted in an armed rebellion in 1916, and the bloody fallout from radicalised public opinion. While Nationalists wanted to break from centuries of British rule, in the industrial north-east of the island, many Unionists feared the loss of their cultural and economic ties to Britain and the empire. The Road to Partition II
This was a royal visit like no other. The King and Queen had come to a land where a bloody war to win independence from Britain still raged, and a city ravaged by sectarian violence. ibid.
The Irish delegation succumbed to pressure and signed the Treaty. But deeply conflicted by its terms, Collins said that he had in fact signed his own death warrant. ibid.
Just two months later in August 1922 the civil war was to take a dramatic turn and claim its most high-profile victim, Michael Collins. ibid.
Governments in Britain and America rescued the banks, but they then decided to transfer the debt that incurred away from the private sector to the public sector. And what was called austerity began. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head VI Are We a Pigeon? Or Are We Dancer? ***** BBCiplayer 2021
All the major banks had been rigging interest rates, and many of them had been laundering money for organised crime, including the drug cartels of Mexico. ibid.
The UK is now a pointless entity, existing solely to protect entrenched privilege. Irvine Welsh
There is a moment in which the union of nations and the creation of Britain was almost stopped before it had begun. It began one night in the winter of 1605 when a man was arrested in London and taken to the Tower … Guy Fawkes. Union with David Olusoga I: The Making of Britain, BBC 2023
What Fawkes and the others intended to do was to present their act of terrorism as having saved England from what was then the key political project of King James which was a union between his kingdoms, England and Wales and Scotland. ibid.
But that history has always been one of rival competing identities, loyalties and nationalist passions. ibid.
A vast social experiment was under way. Ireland was another kingdom ruled by King James. But it was overwhelmingly a Catholic country. In 1610 a new project was launched to colonise the northern province of Ulster. ibid.
The English and Scottish Protestant settlers set about fulfilling the terms upon which they had been granted their land. ibid.
The legacy of the plantation of Ulster continues today. ibid.
The Glorious Revolution … was anything but bloodless in Ireland. ibid.