Confronting the UKs democratic crisis!
At the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh on 18th November 2023, we are convening a major event on the future of the United Kingdom, its nations, and the European Union, inspired by the work of Tom Nairn.
One of the speakers, Caroline Lucas, the Green MP for Brighton Pavilion, calls the event “incredibly timely and important.” Other speakers include The National columnist Lesley Riddoch, writer Neal Ascherson, journalist Isabel Hilton, Clive Lewis MP, The Scotsman journalist Joyce McMillan, author James Robertson, Professor Richard Wyn Jones, former Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood and Radical Independence Campaign co-founder Jonathon Shafi – with many more speakers soon to be confirmed.
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Tom Nairn on why Scotland missed the European national revival 1800s
Nationalism, Nairn argues is always both \good and bad.' And originated from that derived in – the impossibility of escape from the uneven development of capitalism.’ Nationalism is not a question of simple identity, but rather of something more – a catalyst.
Scotland’s greatest political theorist of the modern times.Tom Nairn’s brilliant Break Up of Britain (1977), is one of the best reads on how and why the archaic institutions of the British state and its pre-democracy of the constitution of 1688, before universal suffrage, are failing us.
One of the best books on the British state's constitutional crisis. He writes on why Scottish nationalism is different to the rest of Europe. “All I’m arguing for is nations, minus the dratted “ism”; democratic natural, independent, diverse, ordinary, even boring rather than the museum pieces, or dictatorship or hustlers like Blair of Berlusconi.” Tom Nairn, Free worlds End, opendemocracy, Dec 4th 2004.
Intrinsically there is the dual nature of nationalism, captured in his image of it as a two–faced Janus, the Roman good of doorways, for both past and future, which repudiates concepts of either good or bad nationalism.
*TOM Nairn
“All I’m arguing for is nations, minus the dratted “ism”; democratic natural, independent, diverse, ordinary, even boring rather than the museum pieces, or dictatorship or hustlers like Blair of Berlusconi.” Tom Nairn, Free worlds End, opendemocracy, Dec 4th 2004.
Misfit of the British state to the modern world and not from the express of romantic tartanry, which the author excoriates – and the centrality of nation in political change. Several commentators name Tom Nairn as one of the most influential Scottish political theorists of the 20th century. “The most influential book on British politics to be published in the last half century” Anthony Burnett writes in the 2021 Introduction to Nairn’s Break up of Britain.
