Pariah is a retrospect of Tony Blair’s recent New Labour plebiscite, so far the most absurd “election” of the 21st century. After a much-vaunted Constitutional Revolution, overwhelming victory was obtained on less than a quarter of the electoral register, with more people abstaining than voted for Blair. In 2000 the Constitution of the United States collapsed into farce; this year it was the turn of the United Kingdom, as the oldest and most stable of Western democracies turned into a despised pariah of the global age. “How is Britain breaking up?” asks this book. Is there any chance—or indeed any need—of its being repaired?

In this corrosive polemic Nairn argues that democratic and constitutional reform alone provides an answer to such questions. But the longer the British ancien régime endures, the less chance there will be of such changes taking place by agreement. “Reform or perish” is the moral; but to perish further looks like the only way towards reform.

“It seems obvious now that he has been the most forceful and original mind to confront, demask and anatomise the British state.” — Neal Ascherson, London Review of Books

Tom Nairn is the author of The Breakup of Britain and Faces of Nationalism, both from Verso. He is Professor of Nationalism and Cultural Diversity, Globalism Research Institute, RMIT University, Melbourne.

 Publication
April 2002

160 paqes

Cloth
1 85984 657 2
£13 / US$22 / CAN$32