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Tom Nairn and the Decline of Britain

Main points in this very illuminating piece . To what extent are Nairn’s argument and dissection relevant to today’s Britain?  Britain is … a description of the projection of imperial power out of a core whose boundaries remain misty, miasmic, and amorphous. There is, therefore, something very anachronistic about Britain: it is a nation which seems to exist with one foot in modernity and another in a mutant feudal-imperial past. Scotland had been forced to share an admittedly rather cramped first-class carriage dominated by England — it had  not,  however, been kicked into the luggage hold. The Scottish historian Tom Nairn (1932-2023) proclaimed  that: “Scotland will be free when the last minister is strangled by the last copy of the  Sunday Post .” For Nairn, there was no guarantee of justice in independence, only the possibility. Indeed, the current dominance of a Conservative, rather than a progressive, opposition in the devolved parliament supports this conclusion: the inevitable c
"Late in life, William F. Buckley made a confession to Corey Robin. Capitalism is "boring," said the founding father of the American right. "Devoting your life to it," as conservatives do, "is horrifying if only because it's so repetitious. It's like sex." With this unlikely conversation began Robin's decade-long foray into the conservative mind. What is conservatism, and what's truly at stake for its proponents? If capitalism bores them, what excites them? Tracing conservatism back to its roots in the reaction against the French Revolution, Robin argues that the right is fundamentally inspired by a hostility to emancipating the lower orders. Some conservatives endorse the free market, others oppose it. Some criticize the state, others celebrate it. Underlying these differences is the impulse to defend power and privilege against movements demanding freedom and equality. Despite their opposition to these movements, conservatives favor
Britain May emerged as the preferred candidate of the Tory establishment. Her job, it seems, is to organize the transition to a new form of Conservative politics with less emphasis on austerity and economic competence and more on racist populism. Amid a record period of declining living standards and economic stagnation, the currency of politics today is resentment; it is never just “the economy, stupid.” Theresa May's Le Pen Moment