Main points in this very illuminating piece. To what extent are Nairn’s argument and dissection relevant to today’s Britain?
Britain is … a description of the projection of imperial power out of a core whose boundaries remain misty, miasmic, and amorphous. There is, therefore, something very anachronistic about Britain: it is a nation which seems to exist with one foot in modernity and another in a mutant feudal-imperial past.
Scotland had been forced to share an admittedly rather cramped first-class carriage dominated by England — it had not, however, been kicked into the luggage hold.
The Scottish historian Tom Nairn (1932-2023) proclaimed that: “Scotland will be free when the last minister is strangled by the last copy of the Sunday Post.” For Nairn, there was no guarantee of justice in independence, only the possibility. Indeed, the current dominance of a Conservative, rather than a progressive, opposition in the devolved parliament supports this conclusion: the inevitable collective Scottish state is a half-formed apparition.
The current trade-off in the Scottish parliament between, on the one hand, an SNP embroiled in a ghostly national ethos paired with neoliberal economics, and on the other, a Conservative opposition conjuring a spectral union while pushing a nearly identical set of material policies, left much to be desired at the end of Nairn’s life.
For the historian Perry Anderson, only Brexit and Corbynism signified any break with the rot at the heart of Westminster that Nairn had depicted. However, both Corbynism and Brexit are being reabsorbed into the Westminster nexus, becoming fodder for the strategies of politicians or requiring compromise to survive.
Instead, only an exogenous shock might wake the population from sleep. This need for exogenous shock is demonstrable in the fact that five years of Corbyn’s leadership failed to swing the electorate decisively away from the Conservatives.
Nairn often argued, expressing a half-formed accelerationism, that it might take a catastrophic outside defeat on Britain’s part to force both the Left and the Right, malformed by first-mover benefits, to enact proper constitutional and political reform.
Harold Wilson’s government “was revolutionary in transforming social policy around divorce, homosexuality, and abortion. It was half-heartedly reformist in its attempts to create high economic growth driven by technology, but incredibly meek in its attempts to reengineer the British constitution and state. By the end of the Wilson-Callaghan government in 1979, the House of Lords and monarchy still existed and there had been no real breakthrough in devolution for Scotland.”
“Britain was incapable of restoring its global dominance in manufacturing and could not weaken the power of finance or the City of London over its economy.”
As “the decline of the UK takes a further plunge in 2023, with stagnant wages and high inflation, the gulf between London and regional cities, regional cities and towns, towns and the countryside will increase. Ironically, the breakdown of Britain may prevent its total breakup.”
Comments