One of the odder aspects of Irish political culture is that, for all its obsession with the meaning and consequences of nationality, it has no equivalent of Tom Nairn. A world-class theorist of nationalism, capable of understanding the convulsions of identity on these islands in a wide international context. A nationalist intellectual who has no truck with romantic myths of nationhood. A sophisticated and cosmopolitan defender of the nation state who yet thinks globally. Or, come to that, a genuinely penetrating critic of the British state and the glamour of monarchy, of which the great modern critique is his book The Enchanted Glass. The best claim that Ireland has to such a figure is the fact that, when he is not teaching in Edinburgh or further afield, Tom Nairn happens to live in an old rectory in Co Roscommon.
One of the reasons why Tom Nairn is all of the above is that he is a Scot. In the Republic of Ireland, at least until very recently, nationalism was so instinctive that it seemed to demand no real intellectual rigour. In Scotland, however, the political meaning of national identity has been so open, so obviously up-for-grabs and so problematic that it demands subtle thinking. The British state, with its assembly of nationalities under the strangely anachronistic banner of royalty, has been a formidably resilient and slippery force. For a thinker like Nairn, who has been predicting its demise since he published the landmark book The Break-Up of Britain almost a quarter of a century ago, it has been a great stimulus. And now that there is a new manifestation of Britishness, re-fashioned and refurbished by Tony Blair, Nairn has come up with a bracing critique of Blairism, After Britain. In it, he argues that Blair's grand project of modernising the state that Nairn famously dubbed Ukania will not in fact halt its longterm dissolution.
Blair, in less than three years, has overseen the most radical shake-up in the structure of the United Kingdom since the foundation of the Irish Free State. Devolved parliaments have been established in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The Belfast Agreement has fundamentally altered the relationship of Northern Ireland to Britain and introduced radical new notions of citizenship. The process of reforming the House of Lords to remove the voting rights of hereditary peers has, however half-heartedly, been set in motion, with unpredictable consequences for the monarchy itself. But, according to Nairn, these changes are an attempt, not to transform the old regime, but to save it. "The ruling class," he says, "has gone and has been replaced by the Blairites. New Labour is now what's holding the whole thing together in its strangely regimented on-message, on-line form."
Looking at the television images of the opening of the Millennium Dome on New Year's Eve, with the Blairs leading a clearly uncomfortable Queen Elizabeth in Auld Lang Syne, it is hard to dispute Nairn's contention that the royals have been hauled into the New Labour project. "The monarchy has been saved by Blair," he argues, "saved and to some extent taken over really. If you look at the Blairs's Christmas card, it was a classic royal portrait, with Tony and Cherie posed like waxwork dummies. "And of course there's Cherie's new royal baby on the way. Somehow the prime ministerial family has now been subsumed into the regal glamour that unites the whole regime. This is undoubtedly now held to be desirable. Modernisation must stop at monarchy and must not affect it.
In those conditions, although the underlying decay of the institutions was unmistakable in the early 1990s, to some extent it has been arrested by the Blair project. But its weakness is that it now depends fundamentally on Blair. And once people become fed up by the pretence and rhetoric of Blairism, they will become even more disaffected with the monarchy."
"The Blair project," he says, "is a continuation of the management of decline under extremely new and vigorous management. It has high-powered PR and all the required electronic gadgets. It has acquired a rhetoric that it never had before, though it had begun to acquire it under Thatcher to some extent. But inevitably her version of it was backward-looking and stilted. She effectively left the politics of the state alone and concentrated on supposedly installing an entrepreneurial culture in the place of the corporate welfare state. When Blair and New Labour took over they both wanted to change that and in any case had no option but to do it. Now, there's no going back, or doing away with all of these operations, and yet they're going to generate constant hassle which cannot be conjured away by smart tricks."
The driving force behind Blair's devolution project, Nairn argues, was not a deep conviction that Scotland and Wales should have Home Rule. It was the peculiarly dominant position of Scots within the Labour hierarchy. "The Labour Party nearly went through the floor during the period of Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock's leadership. It might not have recovered and assumed the role of a possible government again. And during that period, the Scots couldn't help assuming a very prominent role. They were the most solid, passionate and effective group within the party. They became inordinately important in the whole New Labour project."
New Labour could not risk losing such a crucial bastion to the Scottish National Party, resurgent because of Scottish resentment at the seemingly endless rule of a Conservative Party for which the Scots had not voted. "Because of the challenge of the nationalists in Scotland, Home Rule became an essential part of the Labour agenda. Even the people most resolutely opposed to it before came to accept it. So when they had their stunning electoral victory, they had to do it. They tried to modify and downscale it a bit. But they failed and they had to live with the consequences, however much they have come to regret them."
Blair, then, is a reluctant constitutional radical, in the peculiar position of having created a potentially powerful set of new institutions for which he has no real blueprint. "It's a very strange situation," says Nairn. "Having set a process going, they have no real idea of how to guide and control it. But they do have all these Scots in the central government, so, for the moment there's a very unusual bridge between the new (Scottish) parliament and the old one (at Westminster)."
The key figure in all of this is Gordon Brown, who is on the one hand Chancellor of the Exchequer in London and on the other the leader of what Nairn calls "the most powerful political clan in Scotland", the Brownites. "He is striving to ensure that the party in Scotland can perform in a way that is acceptable both to its electorate in Scotland and to the grand project at Westminster. It's a very difficult thing to keep going and it can't be kept going indefinitely."
Nairn suspects that for as long as the London government is top-heavy with Scots, astute figures like Brown will be able to mediate between an increasingly independent Scottish parliament and the central State.
"On the other hand, they are not going to last forever, or even for a very long time, because the inordinately strong presence of Scots in the British government reflects the conditions of 10 years ago rather than today. The next election may change all this."
Even now, the task for New Labour of keeping the whole show on the road and avoiding splits between Scotland and England is formidable.
"It is true," says Nairn, "that the Blairites in Scotland are modernisers. They subscribe to the rhetoric. They want Scotland to modernise along with the rest of Britain. And they're correspondingly effective in doing this. But they also incur the risk of appearing to be directed from Westminster. This is a very, very difficult act for them. It brings them into conflict with the nationalists, obviously, but also with the old socialist-inclined Labour that is probably stronger in Scotland than anywhere else except the north-east of England. So this is a very precarious operation and there are so few rules for doing it."
One of the reasons there are no rules is that the idea of Britain itself is tied up with the notion of an "unwritten constitution" in which everything is supposed to evolve naturally.
"There's the strange situation where the Scottish parliament has been set up without a constitution. Its constitution is the Scotland Act of which about 25 per cent consists of strictures about what you're not allowed to do. It's a hopeless framework for a modern parliament. But how can they set up a more rational framework when (a) they're not allowed to do so by the Scotland Act and (b) there is no environment within which they can do so, since Blairism is now on the retreat in terms of constitutional reform, as the whole miserable House of Lords debacle shows so clearly? So actually there are very few directions they can choose and as soon as they choose one someone arrives from Westminster and says `We must set up a joint committee to work out a reasonable compromise so that what
happens in Edinburgh will not disturb the larger and most important operations at Westminster.' In effect, it's a process of constant, gentle strangulation that's done in the name of consensus and the unity of the party and winning the next general election."