UPDATE: 

“A day after overwhelmingly rejecting her Brexit deal, rebel Tories and Democratic Unionist party MPs swung behind the prime minister to defeat Labour’s motion of no confidence by 325 votes to 306 – a majority of 19,” The Irish Times reports.

BBC Q & A on Brexit and the Northern Ireland/Republic of Ireland border,  and cool multimedia feature, The hardest border, from 2017.

ORIGINAL POST:

The U.K. Parliament has overwhelmingly rejected Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit proposal. Now she faces a no confidence vote. There’s plenty of online coverage of May’s 432-202 humiliation, but what most caught my eye was this historical note in The Washington Post:

Historians had to go as far back as the Victorian age to find a comparable party split and parliamentary defeat — to Prime Minister William Gladstone’s support for Irish home rule in 1886, which cut the Liberal Party in two.

Gladstone lost by a smaller margin than May, but he was removed from office soon after. He returned as PM in 1892, for the fourth time; and he tried and failed for the second time to pass home rule for Ireland.

Gladstone, standing, proposed home rule for Ireland in 1886.

Arlene Foster, leader of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, which props up May’s current government, has said her members will continue their support and not vote no confidence. I’ll update this post with the outcome of that vote and other Brexit developments.

For now, I close by paraphrasing 19th century American journalist William Henry Hurlbert, who wrote about the 1886 home rule vote during his 1888 travels in Ireland. Hurlbert opposed the efforts of Irish nationalists to secure home rule. Here, I’m substituting Brexit for home rule, Britain for Ireland:

Brexit for Britain is not now a plan–nor so much as a proposition. It is merely a polemical phrase, of little importance to persons really interested in the condition of Britain, however invaluable it may be to the makers of party platforms … or to Parliamentary candidates.