After Britain: New Labour and the Return of Scotland - Hardcover

If only all constitutional politics could be as lively as this, even the English might start to take an interest in their future as a nation. In this provocative work Tom Nairn suggests--or, rather, bludgeons his reader over the head with the idea--that Tony Blair and his New Labour government are intent on the preservation of a decaying British state, only replacing one set of ruling elite with another. Giving Scotland devolution will solve nothing: the Scots now know that they must have independence, restoring that right to run their own affairs which they lost with the Act of Union in 1707. That in turn will force the English, no longer able to rely on their Britishness for their sense of identity, to determine who they really are and what they really want. Someone else can fill in the detail of how it will all work, Nairn's is an extended pamphlet of broad brush analysis, a mischievous lecture employing outrageous generalisations, dollops of public and private emotion and entertaining personal anecdotes. Best of all, he acknowledges that the Scots have brought many of their problems on themselves. By the end of this book, independence is such an inevitability that the only wonder is that it has not already happened. I certainly wouldn't fancy my chances debating the issue with Nairn. Whether he's right, of course, remains to be seen. --Kim Fletcher

Tom Nairn was born in Freuchie, Fife on 2nd June 1932. Educated in Soctland, Tom went to Dunfermline High School before attending the Edinburgh College of Art from 1950-51. After the first year of his Fine Art degree, however, he switched to Philosophy, graduating from the University of Edinburgh in 1956 with a first class Honours degree in Mental Philosophy. Heading south, Tom went on to study at Oriel College, Oxford under Iris Murdoch but he left in 1959 without completing his B.Litt degree. After a 'therapeutic conversion to mild-mannered Marxism', and a Carnegie Scholarship at Rome University, Tom lived in France for a couple of years. In 1962 he joined the editorial board of the New Left Review and it was from this period that what would later be called the 'Nairn-Anderson theses' on British Decline emerged. From 1962 until 1969 Tom Nairn lectured at various universities in the UK, including Birmingham University and the Hornsey College of Art. Sacked from the latter af