Tom Nairn: An Exceptional Man of the Left
Tom Nairn who has died at 90 has been an important figure on the left since the early 1960s when he authored with Perry Anderson, Origins of the Present Crisis (New Left Review 1964). I touch on the Nairn-Anderson thesis below. He was also notable for writing the Break Up of Britain (1977) primarily on Scottish independence and The Enchanted Glass (1988) on the monarchy.
While I certainly didn’t concur with his specific analysis on many occasions his persistence as an opponent of the current British State was and is important. One wonders if this will be reflected in (any) media coverage of Nairn’s life and ideas.
In the case of Britain the idea that the British left and working-class are uniquely useless has been around for 60 years or so. This point is a sort of offshoot of declinist theories of British history that sees the country as never really becoming a modern industrial power, still stuck firmly in an aristocratic past.
Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn, writing in New Left Review in the mid-1960s declared themselves to be profoundly disappointed with the ‘labourist’ traditions of the British working class, compared to more exciting developments elsewhere in Europe.
While it’s true that TUC General Secretaries and Labour leaders are rarely radical firebrands leading militant action- so Anderson and Nairn had a point- the general thrust of their argument that Britain was exceptional was answered by the historian EP Thompson.
He noted that while it was true that the British working class had perhaps not developed a sustained and sophisticated marxist analysis of capitalism, this might have been because it was too busy opposing the activities of British imperialism and its numerous foreign interventions and wars. It still is.
For the historian the claim that something is exceptional always needs to be viewed with care. Comparative history is one of the most difficult aspects of the historians art because comparing like with like is so tricky.
But it is better history to explain what has or has not happened by careful reference to objective circumstances rather than simply noting things are better or worse elsewhere.
That said, it is true that the British labour movement does have one claim to exceptionality.
It genuinely was the first in the world.
When the Chartists formed the National Charter Association in 1841 it was the world’s first working-class party, although the development of working class political organisation in France and Germany, along similar but slightly different lines followed closely on.
An alternative way of understanding Anderson/Nairn is that the British labour movement paid a price for being first. It developed into forms of organisation that have been sustained but might have been different if they had been formed later…
Either way the writings and ideas of Tom Nairn have contributed a good deal to the ideas of the left since the 1960s. They still have something to offer, even if alternative conclusions may be reached
Update
it says something about the insularity of British politics and culture that while tributes have now come from Nicola Sturgeon and Gordon Brown nothing appears to have been said in the environs of Westminster
https://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/23268206.tributes-paid-professor-tom-nairn/
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