For Nairn, one of the underlying difficulties for Blair's project is an unconscious projection of English notions onto "Britishness". "Whenever the issue of a written constitution is raised, the response is that the English electorate doesn't want it, isn't interested. It's not popular. So why should it be forced on them? Many of them, including Gordon Brown, intellectually accept the argument that what is needed is a new state under a new constitution - something like what already exists in Spain or Germany. They acknowledge this on the level of theoretical argument. But they think it's just not worth pushing because the English are, well, the English."
"It rarely occurs to them that what might be happening behind these arguments is a form of English nationalism - the rooted conviction that this is not the British, i.e. English, way of a flexible, open-door constitution that allows freedom of action with less fuss. And to some extent, after all, they have some good reasons for thinking this. In just two years since 1997 they have actually accomplished things, especially in Ireland, and they were able to do it without going through any constitutional court or adjudication. So there's some reason for a degree of complacency. But they then project this forward and think they can carry on in this way indefinitely and things will work out. If proper precautions are taken and proper committees are put in place and proper consultation is held then they'll carry on and Blair will carry on and Britain will carry on, winning the occasional war when called for and that will be that. So in their apparent novelty there is an element of really profound rearguard conservatism."
He sees Blair's Britain, in fact, as a state rather like the old regimes of France or Russia before their revolutions, introducing reforms intended to pacify dissent but in fact spurring it on. "Revolutions always come about when changes are conceded that are supposed to modernise things in an acceptable way but that fail to do so. They bring about instead an immediate and rapid disenchantment and annoyance.
Devolution is also part of that. It's trying to make changes which, as soon as they're made, produce a kind of sourness. No one wants to go back and yet the present situation is vexing and frustrating people much more than it is satisfying the aspirations of any part of society. Rather than soothing things, it produces a desire for a more radical political change." Buried in all of this is the problem of English identity, a passionate English nationalism that has been subsumed for centuries in an imperial British identity that no longer makes much sense. Nairn suspects that one of the things that may eventually bring the issue of England to the fore is the Council of the Isles established under the Belfast Agreement in which everyone except the English has its own representation.
"There's a basic absurdity in a Council of the Isles in which the government at Westminster contrives to represent not only itself as a state but in effect everyone except Dublin as well. And England is left out. You have a council supposedly representing the various ethnic groups on this archipelago, where the overwhelmingly dominant group in every sense you care to mention - ethnically, economically, numerically - is actually not represented."