Why it's time to revisit a decades-old book on the Union's failings

In my start-up years as a constitutional activist, during the mid-80s, you’d see its yellow, black and blue cover blaring out of bookshelves, parked next to cludgies, wedged between folder and shoulder.

Like most, I bet, I eventually read it cover to cover – but only by dipping into it for over three decades. It was something to reach for when a local or national election promised some kind of indy advance.

Or conversely, you’d pull it out when the British establishment reasserted balance and “normality” over upstart forces. You needed some sense of historical inevitability that might justify The Cause. The Break-Up delivered it.

Yet even to possess this book is quite something, with its uncompromising title (Nairn fought his editors successfully to have a question-mark dropped). It felt like – and still feels like – one of the most challenging political stances around.

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I’m holding before me a Kindle of the elegant new edition. Its title is brutally stamped over a picture of the Queen opening the Westminster Parliament. I feel more than the usual digital buzz.

This title does not imply a British federation or confederation, some new and capacious governing national structure. Nor even a “Scandinavian/Nordic” Britain, where Britishness might be the background historical hum that connects congenial nation-states.

No: It’s the Break-Up of Britain. And Tom means it. The dismantling, deconstructing, and delegitimation of this post-imperial nation. Something “broken up” is essentially no more: The egg gets scrambled, the chair is splintered. Are we still up for that?

It’s worth remembering that Nairn was writing in the 70s and 80s as primarily a Marxist-influenced thinker. So the shadow title might have easily been “The Break-Up of the British State”.

One of Tom’s primary tasks in the book was to alert his hairy Leninist pals to the possibility that the resurgence of Scottish nationalism (at that time, in 1977, motoring along nicely) could be as just effective as industrial action or class struggle.

His argument was rooted in the history of these islands, and globally as well.

Firstly, in terms of the United Kingdom, Nairn (along with his thinking partner Perry Anderson) wanted to show how weird and ill-formed “Britain” is as a political entity.

England may have had the first popular revolution in 1688 – but it was a deeply compromised affair. The aristocracy made a deal with the rising merchant classes to create “the Crown in Parliament”. This structure effectively suppressed any republicanism-from-below, which marked following national revolutions in the 18th and 19th century.

Much of the Break-Up pokes fun, but often despairingly, at the permanent archaism and foggy nostalgia this settlement has produced in the political life of Britain. It’s the part of the book which strikes you as being the most far-sighted.

We watch the Etonians, Baronets and public-schoolboys of the Tory elite strut around their palaces. We also watch former mill, mining and steel-town communities buy into the British exceptionalism invoked by Boris and his Brexitry. And it’s easy to be perplexed.

What is the continuing attraction of the less-well-off for the much-better-off, as they traipse around in their Brexitannic raiment? (And as the hapless Starmer tries to emulate them, in his Union-Jack wrapping?)

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Nairn’s answer is as worthwhile as anyone else’s thesis: That history has embedded some deep programming and automatic responses into what British identity means.

The global part of his argument begins to explain why a British break-up might happen sooner rather than later. One of the great benefits in this book, and in Tom’s subsequent works, is that he outlines a plausible theory of nationalism.

He describes nationalism as a response to, and engagement with, modern times and challenges. Rather than a half-tribal, semi-monstrous reaction against it.

Certainly, if you take the European national revolutions of the 19th century, and the various liberations from colonialism of the 20th, you can see them as ways of handling powerful forces of history – commerce, technology, resources – that would otherwise overwhelm a people or territory.

Drawing from the studies of Ernest Gellner, Nairn showed that nationalism (particularly for smaller nations) had a functional role. For example, it often standardised education systems and national languages, so that broad policies for developing the country could be better effected.

UNLIKE many of his comrades, Nairn has always understood the attraction of nationalism. There’s a lovely quote from a 2003 postscript, collected in the new edition: “Nationalism has often been diagnosed as a substitute religion, or metaphorical faith – it invites transcendence in the name of a purer goal, for the sake of some visionary future condition.

“The individual is aware he or she may never know this” continues Nairn, “but the community (and offspring) could be luckier, and happier ... It is difficult to think of an alternative secular vehicle for this somehow essential imagined goodness.”

Clearly this power can be imagined progressively or regressively. Ideally, it’s about “the creation of space to experiment with distinct national development strategies, suited to the circumstances, traditions, and aspirations of each country”, as the book puts it.

But that has been the lesson of The Break-Up for nearly 40 years now. The left (and now the greens) have to occupy this terrain, not disdain it as an inescapably slippery slide to primitivism.

Undoubtedly guided by reading Nairn, that was the ground which politicians like Sillars, McDonald, Salmond, MacAskill pulled the SNP onto, in the 80s and 90s. Sturgeon is their – and Tom’s – towering electoral beneficiary.

The Labour Party – in its stolid and huffy 70s incarnation – is regularly (and brilliantly) flayed by Nairn in the Break-Up. Yet stupefyingly, the comrades still seem unable to fully grasp the possibilities of what Stephen Maxwell once called “left-wing nationalism”.

Another startling consistency you see in the Break-Up book is Nairn’s realism about the European realm, or “EEC” as it was then.

The European zone “may never be a world super-state”, he writes in 1977. “However, it is unlikely to cease being a real force in the world either.”

But Scotland seeing its next stage of development as a European member state, cleverly working the machinery of its evolving system, is more than just pragmatics and realpolitik for Tom.

As I found out in a series of video interviews with Nairn and his peers, which I conducted before the pandemic (hopefully available soon), there could be no-one more inspired by European civil society than Tom.

Indeed, to be specific, by the Italy of the early to mid 50s, where Nairn studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.

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The environs were beautiful, the food memorable, the post-war politics idealistic, the philosophy (which he was there to study, recommended by the novelist Iris Murdoch) elemental.

There’s a specific pleasure to be taken from The Break-Up of Britain, and which his great friend Anthony Barnett’s introduction to the new edition confirms. Nairn always seems to be writing about these islands from a position of worldly, cosmopolitan confidence.

He shares the tendency of many other Scottish intellectuals and writers, particularly over the grim years of democratic deficit. Tom’s very writing style – which repays slowly savouring like few others – tries to do the very job of substantiating Scotland to the world, phrase by memorable phrase. Here we are, look at us, writing like a dream. We exist!

The Break-Up of Britain, both the project and the text, was always meant to release energy and invention, smashing the carapace of old, sclerotic structures.

Reading it again will reconnect you to one of the healthiest outcomes of being indy-minded: a brain and a life on fire.

The new edition of Tom Nairn’s The Break-up of Britain is published by Verso Books, with a new introduction by Anthony Barnett, is available now. For more information visit www.versobooks.com/books/3748-the-break-up-of-britain