Tom Nairn
London: Verso, 2002, hb £13
I really like Tom Nairn. He is wonderful writer and this is a delight. If you’ve read Nairn all you need to know is that this is more of the same. But if you haven’t I’m not sure how to convey what he is about. This is the latest in Nairn’s ruminations on the state of Britain, or Ukania, as he christened it; on the state of the British state; and on the dominance of London and Roseland (rest of the south of England); and on nationalism and identity. Nairn has a powerful mind, a wide knowledge rooted in Marxism, and wonderful savage rhetoric. Here are some quotations. You could almost pick quotes at random; much of it is like this.
‘Britain has remorselessly crumbled into vaudeville “Britain”, a realm of general impersonation and self-delusion’ (p.11)
‘Thus Blairland is less the continuation of historical Britain than a degenerate parody of it – a substitute kept going only because it has, as yet, proved impossible to abolish the former state and system of political authority.’ (p. 12)
‘…..”British identity” and its inseparable shadow, British nationalism, a taken-for-granted belief-system which informs most state attitudes, and still has an extensive penumbra of credibility among intellectuals linked to the metropolis or heartland, as well as some popular support (notably in Northern Ireland).’ (p. 13)
‘Thus, as Charles de Gaulle perceived long ago, a Euro-UK may exist alongside but will never be put ahead of the Special Relationship to the USA, the Commonwealth, over-valued sterling and the Crown. For Europe to become more important would somehow imply abandoning treasured stigmata: no longer being “special” in that sense which means far more than “different”. Exceptionality in this archaic sense is bestowed by either Providence or genes. To become European in the sense of identifying “British interests” with European Union would therefore mean betrayal.’ (p. 15)
‘While the origins of Ukanian downfall may be traced back far enough, to World War 1 and beyond, the acute phase we now know dates mainly from 1979. “Declining Britain” had been happening for a century or so; but parody-Britain is a mere twenty-three years old.’ (p. 16)
‘Unable to reform itself decisively enough, the United Kingdom state has in turn fallen back into a kind of institutional palsy, rigor mortis disguised as resolution, and fixed-grin happiness with a resplendent past.’ (p. 31)
‘It was in the late part of this era that the Labour Party graduated into that original “Establishment”; by the fifties it had completely absorbed most of its world view. Such assumptions are extraordinarily tenacious – as “Blairism” was to demonstrate, right up to the present. Once institutionally embedded, they are like the “deep grammar” of state-life, underlying the surface eddies of policies and events.’ (p. 39)
‘Instead of blessed ordinariness, therefore, from 1979 onwards HM’s subjects have been consoled with the iron sacraments of neo-liberalism, Margaret Thatcher, the Falklands War, fake Americanisation, and then more recently New Labour’s successor to British Socialism, the Third Way – and a subsequent “resignation” of half the electorate. All this and the Dome as well. ‘ (p. 60)
And finally, from his epilogue:
‘Globalisation involves a lot more than One Market Under God (to quote the title of Thomas Frank’s recent and delightful polemic, 2001). As Emmanuel Tod has show in his L’Illusion économique, it has depended so far upon the dissemination of a secular faith, the new monotheism of cure-all Free Trade, or marketolatry. During the 1980 and 90s, political economy in the older, classical sense was deserted for this skeletal and philistine parody. A supposed dissol-ution of the ‘nation-state’ left economic forces as the sole agency of development and advance. Abandonment of political will-power compelled a displacement into an improbable alternative, the “realism” of management boards, growth (or decline) tables, and share or property ownership. Propagated by increasingly by an zealotic and worldwide clerisy of economists, journalists, think-tanks and politicians, this faith then became almost the “common sense” of the initial phase of the globalisation that followed the collapse of communism in the 1980s.’
Notes
2 Here is Gordon Brown on 26 February 1992: ‘Let no one, absolutely no one on the Conservative benches, try to peddle the misleading statement that the Labour party is not committed to playing its full part within the workings of the ERM and ensuring that it bears down on inflation. We were committed to the ERM well before it became fashionable on the other side of the House. We understand the disciplines that are involved.’ (Quoted in The Spectator 4 September 2002.)