The Break-up of Britain

"This is the earliest book in my selection. It’s a collection of essays that Nairn wrote in the 1970s, mostly originally published in the New Left Review —because he is very openly Marxist . This was a period when left-versus-right was a big issue, and—unlike a lot of Marxists—he was arguing for nationalism, which wasn’t always popular. Traditionally, the left presents a very encompassing worldview, whereas nationalism is far from that. So he upset a few people in that regards. The book was republished in the early 1980s, again in the early 2000s, and it was recently republished with a new foreword. Nairn makes some strong left-wing arguments for what he calls a ‘radical neo-nationalism’, because Scottish political nationalism was considered to be outwith the normal trends—it hadn’t cropped up when there was a wave of nationalism in Europe in the 1800s, or when there was another wave of nationalism around the world in the 1900s. So why did it come back on the scene in the 1960s and 1970s? What Nairn’s arguments bring together is the trajectory of Scottish nationalism. He talks about the decline of the United Kingdom as a geopolitical power, and how uneven economic development is an inherent part of the UK, as he sees it. He talks about how the UK was foundering on constitutional crises; they’d appointed a Royal Commission in the early 1970s to look at devolution, and one of the classic comments about a British Royal Commission is that they spend years taking minutes. It was very much an attempt to kick constitutionalism into the long grass. What Nairn was seeking to do with the essays in The Breakup of Britain was say: ‘Let’s not fall for this, folks. We’re on a roll here, let’s keep pushing forwards.’ “Scotland voted itself out of existence as a state, but it never voted itself out of existence as a nation” The other thing that I find is interesting is that, when it was published for a second time in the 1980s, he wrote a new foreword. As I say, he’s a Marxist, and very challenging of Thatcherite monetarism. But if you read it now, it could almost have been written today. Once again, you have Britain seeking a role in the world, foundering on internal challenges around the constitutional structure, and the uneven economic development of the different regions—because while we’re talking about Scottish nationalism, and this book is very much focused on Scotland, it does cover a little of Northern Ireland, Wales, and English nationalism. Almost fifty years on, it’s almost like we’ve come full circle, because the issues and challenges are coming up again. That’s always been an interesting question. While the SNP are the predominant party in Scotland in a way that most parties wish they were predominant—they’ve absolutely blitzed the last few elections—this is not the case in Wales with the party in power. In Wales, it’s the Welsh Labour Party. But I would argue that we’re back to the small-n nationalism versus big-n Nationalism—nobody could go to Wales and accuse members of the Labour Party of not being nationalists. But for much of its life, the nationalist party in Wales. Plaid Cymru has not necessarily been focused on independence and self-government, unlike the SNP. Wales has always been much more focused on the cultural aspects, on maintaining a cultural sense of identity. You have to go back to the roots of the country, you have to understand the history—nationalism is always drawing from the past. You could have an argument with a lot of Welsh historians and Welsh nationalists on this point, but Wales was absorbed firmly into the English legal system around the time of the Tudors, while Scotland established itself as an independent country for several centuries before it chose to join into a political union."