AN INTRODUCTION TO TOM NAIRN The Enchanted Nat by Mitch Miller & Johnny Rodger

Who was Tom Nairn? One of the great political thinkers of his age, we mark his passing away with an introduction to his thought. This piece is excerpted from Tartan Pimps, a 2010 book by Mitch Miller and Johnny Rodger, which examined how the new Scottish politics were written into being. Some of the parliamentary politics here have aged a bit -Nairn’s thought has not.

Introduction: Garlic, vinegar and the taste of Tom Nairn

I for one am enough of a nationalist, and have enough faith in the students and young workers of Glasgow and Edinburgh, to believe that these forces are also present in them. I will not admit that the great dreams of May 1968 are foreign to us, that the great words on the Sorbonne walls would not be at home on the walls of Aberdeen or St Andrews, or that Linwood and Dundee could not be Flins and Nantes. Nor will I admit that, faced with a choice between the Mouvement du 22 mars and Mrs Ewing, we owe it to ‘Scotland’ to choose the latter.

Tom Nairn, Three Dreams of Scottish Nationalism, 1968

It is somewhat appropriate that the articles gathered here under the banner of Suns of Scotland should be written during May 2008, the 40^th anniversary of the fabled 1968 protests and the emergence of a ‘new left’. Whether you believe that whole ’68 thang to be a sideshow or a landmark is entirely up to you (it is interesting of course, how the glamorous student protests in London and Paris take centre stage, and the desperate struggles of Prague and Belfast barely feature) but the reader must have spotted the merchandising. The Glasgow celebrations range from the GFT’s ‘Mai ‘68’ season, a special Radical Independent Book Fair in Govan and a stop-off on a special international speaking tour by various celebrity ‘68ers’.  Prospect and the New Statesman have released ’68 themed issues commemorating ‘the year that changed the world’ and ‘Placard’, a third person shoot-em-up for the Playstation 3 must surely follow.

Is this acknowledgement of the significance of the event, or the stature of such as Tariq Ali or Christopher Hitchens (profiled in the Prospect Souvenir Edition) – now identified as the ’68ers – and the attendant nostalgia they conjure over how ‘the band’ got together? Alternatively, do we see this as another sort of nostalgia altogether, one held by younger, post-68 generations who have read the books and rediscovered the pop music, aching for a time when revolutionary change could be believed in? Either way we are confronted with the extraordinary spectacle where the ringleaders of the popular imagination, pin-ups of a massive civil disturbance are now the stuff of souvenir supplements, of ‘our’ ‘heritage’ or, as in the case of Ali, rock-star-style reminisces in the Sydney Morning Herald (replete with photograph of the young, black-mouser’d firebrand locking elbows with the young, willowy Vanessa Redgrave).

Scotland had a long 1968 that continued well into the 1970s culminating in the nationalist victories of the 1974 election. The part played by Tom Nairn, the first writer profiled in our Suns of Scotland series in this ferment is (in hindsight) surprising. He co-authored an account of the ’68 events with Angelo Quatrocchi and in that same year, published a hostile analysis of the SNP’s first flush of election victory in ‘The Three Dreams of Scottish Nationalism’, published in The New Left Review.  Madame Ecosse failed to impress him at the time, but in due course his mind changed in parallel with the thesis of British decline he developed with Perry Anderson.  From this he would emerge as on the one hand, the scourge of pseudo tradition and ‘heritage’ as outlined in The Enchanted Glass (something all the left could cheer about) and on the other a fierce and withering critic of old style socialist internationalism as shown in The Left in Europe and Faces of Nationalism (cue sectarian fragmentation …).  Mixing these two formulae presented a seemingly straightforward solution, one he has spent the best part of his career presenting to anyone who would listen; independence for Scotland, leading ultimately, to the dismantling of the British state and rescuing the left from the ‘big gun’ school of history.

Such hard and unpopular paths have been Nairn’s by choice, at a skip rather than a trudge, so surely this is one 68er who would disdain the ‘Mick n’ Keef’ anecdotes, poke at the misty eye rather than wipe it?    But on the face of it, Nairn has also become respectable, having made his own progress into elder-statesmanship within Scottish nationalist circles, and it is this trajectory we have documented in this special, glossy, limited edition Souvenir Supplement (sponsored by Ukania plc).  Suns of Scotland is a recurring series on the writers, thinkers and analysts that have fed, nurtured or scorched (or done all three) the institutions, ideologies and ‘civil society’ that has sustained a distinct, if subsumed, Scottish political identity. It truly began in issue 21 with an exhaustive analysis of Gordon Brown’s literary career, ring-mastering the ferocious exchanges of The Red Paper on Scotland in the seventies (described by many who participated in its making as a continuation of the ‘war’ of ’68 by other means), to the technical manuals that underpinned New Labour in the eighties, to adopting the transatlantic prudences of his Chancellorship. It may be a prejudice of whatever passes for literati at The Drouth, but is it not arguable that without these books, Scotland as it exists today would be, if not unthinkable, certainly less likely? To say that is of course to embrace an example of what Nairn calls ‘symbol operation’, a potent conceit of ourselves as a country founded on the word – a written republic of declarations, trumpet blasts, Covenants, Letters, Disputations, Parish Records, Red Papers, Claims of Right, Scotland Acts …  It may be just as mythical as the notion that all Scots are basically Calvinist, but we will entertain it here.  In the beginning was the Word, and in the midst of it all were the wordy.

And as we doubt Nairn would protest that he is not one of the wordy we have shoe-horned him into this litany of notes, memoirs and confessions by reviewing a selection of the most important books he has published over the last three decades – The Left and Europe (1973), The Break up of Britain (1979), The Enchanted Glass (1988), The Modern Janus (1990), After Britain (2000) and Pariah (2002), followed by an essay from Owen Dudley Edwards, an oft-time collaborator and at times, fellow accused (see the Macdunciad). Edwards gives a thoughtful and substantial account of Nairn’s evolution in print and person, reflecting on Nairn’s most recent essay, published by the Institute of Welsh Affairs in Gordon Brown – Bard of Britishness (ed by Tom Nairn, 2006).  Short but timely, it is an interesting reiteration of Nairn’s views which are then interrogated by those of a different Parish, guest contributors culled from (Welsh) politics, English universities and old acquaintances from the Scottish intelligentsia (David Gow of The Red Paper and Neil Ascherson each make an appearance). The contributors pay their respects to the preacher, but it is hard to miss the occasional scrape of knives over whetstones. Labour’s Leighton Andrews is particularly scathing:

Reading Nairn today is like eating lettuce doused in vinegar: void of nutritional value, and indigestible, at the end all that remains is the acid.

With the amiable, entertaining malice at which Tories excel (to the envy of their left-wing adversaries) David Melding declines to comment on the ‘personal antipathy Professor Nairn feels towards Mr Brown’, leaving the room as the fists start to fly. Melding  also enjoys ‘the rich, garlicky vituperation with which … [Nairn] … dresses his prose’ and with an additional rabbit-food punch, wonders if Nairn is a Burke parodist:

… like Burke [Nairn] makes some prescient observations, even though he fails to convert them to sound judgements.

Leave it, in these topsy-turvy times, to a Tory to accuse a Marxist theorist of being a closet reactionary – and an impotent one at that. But what should most interest the serious Nairnologist picking up this book is the drafting in of multiculturalism to replace internationalism as the default objection to Scottish or Welsh independence. Nairn had oft-noted that internationalism was the last refuge of the eternally disappointed leftist, the wider revolution being logically, the only priority, a view resurrected somewhat anachronistically in the second Red Paper on Scotland (ed. Vince Mills, 2005).  But in the IWA book there are signs of arguments evolving. Now that the notion of ‘the workers’ has changed its meaning and inter-community harmony and minority rights have superseded for many at least, the redistribution of wealth as the quantum of social justice, multiculturalism has created a new form of unionist argument along the principles of some kind of convergent evolution, here espoused by Andrews and in the following example, sociologist Charlotte Williams:

His construction of Welshness/Scottishness implicitly relies on a retreat at least to the organising principle of a cultural homogeneity, albeit in a new configuration.

And:

If renationalisation – Welsh or Scottish-Style – is Nairn’s answer then it is an inadequate one in the face of contemporary realities. This is not a radical agenda at all. It is not for example an appeal to the broad-based equality strategy of socialism or feminism. It is not a call to revolution or a call for a sophisticated anti-race philosophy but to a reawakening of the clans …  White Welshness and white Scottishness, for want of better terms, with all its ethnically exclusive referents all too readily form a powerful allegiance with all things British when it comes to managing the alien wedge …

… Breaking Britain up into its constituent pieces may do no more than replicate the problem [of excluding or ignoring certain identities] as we spin off in search of an all-embracing Welshness or Scottishness without considering the new and novel ways in which identities converge, coalesce and emerge.

The notion of Britain is thus protected by a degree of cynicism over the ability of corporate identities such as the Scots, Welsh or English to deal with their own internal complexity, which may be fudged by Edinburgh as easily as in London … so best stick with being Brits. Williams emerges as somewhat ignorant of Scotland’s long tradition as a civic identity (and does not say whether managing the alien wedge is any better within a British context, or worse in a Welsh one), but what is important here is to understand how Nairn’s opponents can change their shape, face and language at will while he must remain adamantly, stubbornly, sometimes maddeningly fixed on his great theme.

That being the case, is there any other Scottish theorist who could attract such strong reactions (even if these are to sum up his contribution as so much bad breath and heartburn?).  But so it goes with Nairn – as ODE’s epilude to this section shows, he has survived worse. But this is a writer who does not just play in the domestic leagues. International recognition was just one of many distinctions that marked Gramsci’s interpreter out from the influential group of Scottish public intellectuals who laid the groundwork for home rule in the 80s and 90s. David McCrone, Alice Brown, Arthur Midwinter, Henry Drucker, Lindsay Paterson and James Kellas were social scientists, organisers and analysts of data, who marshalled facts and labelled trends to prove that something called Scotland existed, and that this existence somehow mattered beyond the wish-fulfilment of a few Tartan chauvinists. Nairn was on the other hand, a polyglot philosopher, the interpreter of Gramsci, who formulated the Nairn-Anderson thesis and argued for Scotland’s relevance as a rational reversal of uneven economic development. Bolstered by what Vernon Bogdanor in Bard of Britishness describes as a faith that ‘The people are Ironsides but their leaders are flunkeys’. Scotland mattered because it was one of the best examples of where we were headed; that the United Kingdom was a ‘pseudo-synthesis’ that throttled democratic progress and rational truth made the case all the stronger. His gift for phrasing, shibboleths and scornful semi-satirical conceptualisations (Ukania being the most memorable) set him in a different literary class too, as an academic whose truths were based as much on his Burkean understanding and manipulation of language as they were on the accumulation of knowledge.

Nairn’s first forays into his great theme, The Left and Europe and The Break up of Britain,enraged radicals and conservatives of every political stripe. They still do.  Bad enough that they pricked many cherished bubbles of self-delusion and mythology, the author’s (garlicky) humour and intellectual agility established him as a distinctive prose stylist. He also, through his appreciation of Gramsci and the notion of ‘hegemony’, injected a powerful dose of continental thinking into the bread and butter, empirical tradition of British political thought. And it may have been this, as much as his desire to dismantle the central state (a logical conclusion of his analysis of British hegemony) that was so shocking.  As Melding puts it (cheerfully stealing from elsewhere, while wearing his own assumptions proudly on his sleeve): ‘We Brits don’t like to see clever ideas wandering around unchaperoned by experience.’ Bogdanor’s Jesuitical piece likewise notes that: ‘Nairn is not very interested in empirical explanations – for they would endanger the sweep of his rhetoric.’  He further notes:

In the old days of the New Left, many of its adherents used to dismiss a respect for the empirical as ‘positivism’, mere fact grubbing, unworthy of attention from serious thinkers. This made it easier for them to present their own fantasies as securely grounded. It was a form of wish fulfilment that could not survive cold contact with reality. Sadly Tom Nairn stands four square in this tradition.

And he also has the bad taste to wield theories in open debate and suggest some of them might actually be applied to do more than line stomachs and protect house prices (as he remarks in the Bard of Britishness essay, ‘those things deemed “the real stuff” of politics’). The Gramscian strain is what allows him to make a convincing case in books such as The Enchanted Glass that constitutions and ‘traditions’ have their own ideological content – and thus, agenda. Without so much as a by your leave Nairn has (to an extent) mainstreamed a ‘European’ current into political thought on the archipelago. If you doubt it, then simply pick up Bard of Britishness and count how many of the fellow contributors-cum-disputants use the word ‘hegemony’ to contradict him.

His subsequent books accordingly won him widespread recognition, even grudging admiration as one of the four leading experts on nationalism alongside Benedict Anderson, Anthony Smith and Nairn’s de facto mentor Ernst Gellner. His status as a ‘professional outsider’ and outspoken critic of the political mainstream was assured and gave him a strange security from which he could launch successive strikes against the British establishment and the Scottish politicians who supported it. Contrast this with the fortunes of Gordon Brown, embossed within the British Labour establishment (whatever the hell that is) and you will struggle to find, at this present time, any starker. The grinding power struggle over Number 10 seems to have left the flamboyant student rector broken and bewildered, while First Minister Alex Salmond gleefully tugs at every rein (or reign …) he can grasp. The sense that the intensive debate over Scotland’s future initiated by the original Red Paper has reached a climactic point is hard to avoid. If this sense can be trusted, then the ramifications extend far beyond Sark and Tweed.

In the first instance, there is the potential of break-up, initiated not by disgruntled Scots but black-affronted English. Watching the ‘Broonites’ at work in London, all cliquish and clannish and ultra-defensive, it is tempting to compare them to Jamie Saxt’s gang of Scottish Lords who followed their king over the border in 1603, to grab as much graft as could be grabbed. Once enthroned the wise fool and his favourites ran England with the same cunning and jealousy they had exercised in Scotland to devastating effect. But England was different; their failure to take account of this nearly derailed the impending shotgun wedding, but began the slow push towards closer union. Will the Broonite covenant now have the opposite effect and lay the ground for divorce?

Such ahistorical speculation is fun, but limiting. What can be said is that while Scots tend to blame England for its insensitivity to Scottish sensibilities, traditions and lifeways, the prevailing assumption that a Scottish carrot, stick and cabal methodology suits England just as well is one of the most pernicious and dangerous myths underpinning Unionist ideology, and is also one of the most dangerous and pernicious practices for those keen to keep the family together. And yet, as ODE reminded us during the drafting of this introduction, Brown has appointed from beyond his natural clique – Alistair Darling, far from being a traditional Broonite, was of a very different cut, while Douglas Alexander was still in the short trousers when Brown forged his most significant political alliances in the Scottish Labour Party. But to an English audience – and an English establishment – it seems like an enclave, a cabal of graspin’ Jocks – and the British system of government and politics is heavily reliant on ‘seeming’. In any case, is there not something of the big fish mentality to be detected in the Brown sulk, casting a pall then expecting the minnows to come a-swimming – only to find it doesn’t work in those waters? We must probably wait for the memoirs, and other items from Brown’s political post-mortem.

It pays to bear such matters in mind when considering Nairn’s central thesis; that Scotland can – and should – act as a laboratory for a new, forward-facing nationalism that will dismantle the phoneyness of Britain’s arrested revolution – and presumably, provide a model for other polities similarly hobbled by crafty elites. Is it not also interesting to note the extent to which this 68er has taken a talismanic significance for a currently ascendant political faction (though not, mercifully, the neo-con hawks perched on Hitchen’s shoulders)?  In March this year First Minister Alex Salmond bounced onto a podium in Edinburgh’s Surgeons’ Hall to introduce Tom Nairn as the final speaker in the Lothian Lecture Series.  Leader of what Edwards has called an established anti-establishment, Salmond milked the symbolism and kudos by association, stating that if he wasn’t allowed to give the lecture himself, then the professional outsider would be the next best thing.  A joke, but it masked a deeper solemnity of the moment; nothing less than the anointment of Nairn as the Pythagoras of Scottish Nationalism, the man who described it, measured it then found cosmic significance in the numbers.

Take the politics of the moment, of this very week in which we write. The Establishment – or should we say, the Establishment Establishment – seems to be breaking up quicker than Brown in his wildest post- —— nightmares could ever have imagined. With Brown and Wendy Alexander’s respective TV appearances at questions in Westminster and Holyrood it is disintegrating before our very eyes – although not perhaps as quickly as Nairn would wish.  Doubtless by the time you read this the constitutional question will already have shifted quite some.  But for the moment what we have – not to put a fine point on it at all – is the unedifying spectacle of an establishment which can’t find North-South consensus on whether to force now a Wendyrendum (if it sounds speedy, bouncy and bendy, it’s because it is), and an anti-establishment flying by the leisurely teeth of its pants and insisting on the slow-working bacterium of a Salmondendum.

The point being that referenda themselves were unthinkable in the United Kingdom of 40 years ago, and unconstitutional from the point of Parliamentary Sovereignty.  They were even declared undemocratic by Keith Joseph when Labour announced their EEC (and Britain’s first) referendum in 1975.  (Such democrats of the parliamentary dictatorship feather like Joseph always have, of course, the alibi of the ‘hanging’ question ready to frighten the liberal horses from galloping too readily out into the country.)  But now we bandy referenda with the dogs in the street, we needn’t even stretch our tongues to articulation of the full name, we whistle on a plebiscite, we call it by its pet, its diminutive, its nickname: referendums, that is to say, are become the meat and drink of quotidian plebs’ politics.  And no-one is more vindicated in this crucial turn of the political screw than Tribune Thomas himself.  We can hardly assert that he actually led the liberal horse to a public watering, but the fact is that the only topics on which Her Majesty’s Government have ever taken such a thoroughly public sounding are Europe and the nations’ fates.  And are these not the two very badly tied-up ends from which, as Nairn has always said since the beginning with Left Against Europe and Break-Up of Britain, the stitched-up Constitution of the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries would unravel?

Main Image: Tom Nairn Verso Author photo