Because of the impact it has already had and because its influence continues to grow, Tom Nairn’s ‘The Break-Up of Britain’, first published in 1977, is the most significant book on British politics of the past half-century, even though it is not a famous best-seller. Today, its republication by Verso signals the post-Brexit renewal of a call to arms initially issued in the maelstrom of the 1970s.
Scottish journalist Alex Massie recently deployed a familiar, knee-jerk dismissal: “It is forty-three years since Nairn published ‘The Break-Up of Britain’… yet here we are not broken up”. The book’s title, however, is not a news story. It does not predict the imminent fragmentation of the UK but insists upon the long-term unsustainability of Britain’s Westminster state. Three key sentences at the end of the chapter on ‘The English Enigma’ capture Nairn’s perspective: “The English revolution is the most important element in the general upheaval of British affairs described in this book. It is also the hardest to foresee, and will take longest to achieve. Upon its character – conservative nationalist reaction or socialist advance – will depend the future political rearrangement of the British Isles as federation, confederation, or modernised multi-national state”. When Massie himself reflected on the traumatic nature of the UK’s 2016 Brexit referendum in The Sunday Times, he described it as “a very English revolution”. One that has “sparked nationalist revivals in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland that are, in part, reactions to England’s assertion of its prerogatives”.
Nairn was the first to see that there had to be an English revolution – as part of a British process that will determine the future of the UK. Writing from the Left, he feared a reactionary outcome. Since the 1960s he has been a forensic critic of the never-ending ‘revivalism’ of the Anglo-British state leading to an increasingly authoritarian parody of historic greatness. Today, it has led to the Johnson regime – which is all the more dangerous for being beyond parody – and its ongoing ‘assertion’ of its prerogatives. This will prove intolerable to majorities in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. So, unless England can find the stomach to reverse the present reactionary course of its Brexit-Britishness, disintegration is certain within the next five to thirty-five years.
