Review 2000. It seems obvious now that he has been the most forceful and original mind to confront, demask and anatomise the British state. The perception that Great Britain was a multinational state and not a united nation had never quite been lost over the centuries, but it was Tom Nairn who almost single-handedly hammered this truth into the skull of British intellectuals and campaigners until it became – as it is today – practically uncontested by the political class. The widespread recognition that the English/ British ‘constitution’ is uniquely archaic and authoritarian, that this archaism derives from the incomplete English Revolution of the 17th century which merely transferred absolutism from Monarch to Parliament, and that the system-failure of British institutions is largely responsible for the debility of the economy in the later 20th century – all these flowed from the Gramscian revaluations of English/British history undertaken by Nairn and Perry Anderson in the 1960s. One solid and effective consequence of that recognition was Charter 88, a fresh campaign for constitutional reform which took shape in the late 1980s. Ten years before, in The Break-Up of Britain (1977), Nairn had put forward the proposition that the United Kingdom was ineluctably disintegrating. At the time, and especially after the advent of Mrs Thatcher, he was regarded in London as a Celtic-fringe fantasist or – worse – as a traitor to socialist internationalism. Today, it is possible to hear placid English voices on the radio, from Women’s Institutes and the like, discussing the break-up of the United Kingdom as if it had already taken place, while Britain-wide polls suggest – again without any evidence of panic – that Scotland’s independence is generally supposed to be inevitable.
Posted on: Sat, 02 Aug 2014 15:55:32 +0000
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