Nairn’s analysis also put the tensions between the different countries in the United Kingdom, and the dominance of England within it, at the heart of his analysis. As Nairn put it, the monarchical state has been used to incorporate the forces of progress in the 20th century and tame them, then to act as a catalyst for the reconfiguration of power, which happened in the latter half of the 20th century and early 21st century, and which has deformed society, life chances and opportunities. The British state today is still characterised by backwardness, its reactionary nature and anti-democracy. (Another version of this is that it had a revolution-in England, in the mid-17th century-but it had it too early.) But the same tension was seen in the post-war period, when the Labour party tried to make progressive change possible but constantly bumped into the limits “of a political order built to maintain privilege, inequality and deference”: The rising bourgeoisie was accommodated within the pre-democratic framework of the 17th century. The idea that Britain still remains in part a feudal state, because it had an incomplete revolution, is from Nairn’s work. The 1977 date of The Break-up of Britain marked the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, and perhaps the book and the Sex Pistols’ song are two ends of the same cultural strand.

Subsequent books such as After Britain: New Labour and the Return of Scotland (2000) and Pariah: Misfortunes of the British Kingdom(2002) updated his critique of what he called ‘Ukania’, while The Enchanted Glass (1988) located monarchy as central to the creation of ‘the glamour of backwardness’ which offered protection to the undemocratic, unreformed state and political system.

Nairn’s great magnum opus was The Break-Up of Britain, first published in 1977, and which went through four editions: the third published by myself in 2002, the last in 2021 with a foreword by Anthony Barnett.

Hassan, a friend of Nairn’s, reminded us that Nairn had been influential over a long period of time in a whole range of political debates: about the nature of Britain’s politics and constitution, about Scotland and indepoendence, and more broadly about notions of nationalism: The Scottish writer Gerry Hassan assessed his large legacy in an article in The Scottish Review. I only realised this week that the great Scottish political theorist Tom Nairn had died at the end of January, at the age of 90.

The Unreformed Kingdom by Tom Anderson