The Green Ribbon Books

After Britain: New Labour and the Return of Scotland

Tom Nairn
Granta
2000

Nairn, arguably the leading Scottish nationalist intellectual, greeted the creation of the Scottish Parliament with this bold polemic, predicting the break-up of the union and calling for the emergence of new English and Scottish civic nationalisms.

The book depicted Britain as 'Ukania' a contemporary counterpart to the Austro-Hungarian empire, in which an early-modern monarchy struggled to contain emerging nationalisms.

After Britain included an early dissection of Blairism, predicting that the Scottish Parliament would transcend New Labour's limited aims for devolution. That judgment is perhaps already being vindicated by events

The most significant of the wave of book-length essays that emerged in the wake of Scottish devolution.

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The Enchanted Glass: Britain And Its Monarchy

Tom Nairn
Radius, 1988

An incisive critique of the Monarchy and its role in sustaining the British establishment. Nairn sees the monarchy as the lynchpin of an oligarchy in which Westminster, Whitehall and the City of London all seek to contain popular democratic/nationalist demands in order to maintain a residual sense of global greatness.

Some of Nairn's targets; Trident - 'the Royal bomb', the 'pseudo-feudal socialism' of much of the Labour Party, appear even more well taken twenty years on.

Indeed, it has become ever more apparent that New Labour's early constitutional reforms were ultimately an attempt to shore up the system Nairn describes rather than challenge it. This book is arguably even more timely now than when it was written.

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