John Stewart – who transformed our understanding of the capabilities of local government

I have just learned that the man who inspired me to start a Local Government 
Research Unit in the West of Scotland in 1970; who made local government believe 
in itself; and whose example helped me in my policy innovation work in Strathclyde Region 
from 1974 died in November, aged 93. 
But such are the curious selection criteria of UK newspapers that it was only a few
days ago that I discovered his obituary – in the “Other Lives” section of The
Guardian, reserved for friends and family. He wasn’t considered important enough to
warrant inclusion on his own merits! But his work had a huge influence on so many
officials and politicians in British local government. It’s his voice which can be heard 
in the paean of praise I offered up to corporate management in my contribution
 (on page 76) to the 1975 Red Paper on Scotland – What Sort of Overgovernment? 
As one of his colleagues says about his work -

less about management and more a political theory of local government with
 equality and the redistribution of power and resources at its heart. 
I concluded he was a son of the Fabian tradition.

John Stewart was appointed in 1966 to the Institute of Local Government –
 (INLOGOV) at the University of Birmingham. This was just 2 years before I was
 first elected to a town council and then appointed as a Lecturer in a Polytechnic
I will let his daughter’s tribute establish the essentials

The following year he created the Advanced Management Development
Programme, consisting of 10-week-long residential courses held at
Wast Hills House outside Birmingham. It had its own culture –
everything was off the record, there was no assessment or exams,
references were not given on the basis of the courses. Through these
courses John knew most of the chief executives of councils in England
and Wales. This, and his articles in the Local Government Chronicle and 
John was born and brought up in Stockport. His father, David, was a doctor
and a lecturer at Manchester University. His mother, Phyllis (nee
Crossley), had worked at the Manchester Stationery Office before her
marriage. From Stockport grammar school John won a place at Balliol
College, Oxford. But first he did national service; he was posted to
Iraq, where he caught polio and was invalided home. He came off
relatively lightly, still able to walk. He went to Oxford in
1949, where he studied philosophy, politics and economics, and joined
the Oxford Union. After graduating, John studied for a DPhil at
Nuffield College, Oxford, on the influence of British pressure
groups on the government. This was published in 1958. By then he
was working for the National Coal Board, where he became head
of industrial relations in the South Yorkshire coalfield. However,
when the Conservative government appointed Alf Robens as NCB chair,
he became disillusioned. John decided to move into academia, and in
1966 was appointed to lead work on British local government at
INLOGOV; he was later made professor and then director.
I can’t remember the first visit I made to INLOGOV or my first
encounter of John – nor the sequence of events which led to the
establishment of my own little Unit in Paisley. Rod Rhodes – whom I
knew briefly in the 1970s – paints a wonderful vignette of John in this tribute
John was an idiosyncratic and inspiring speaker. He held his local government
 audiences in the palm of his hand as he talked about such potentially uninspiring 
subjects as corporate management. In part, it was his appearance. He threw on his
 suits and missed. He walked with a limp, a hangover from polio in his youth. He shaved 
but random patches of stubble would remain. He would twist and break biros and paper
 clips in his fingers as he talked. He would pace the floor, then twist himself around a
 chair or a table. Svengali-like, he mesmerized his audience. I have been on teaching
 courses, which advised me either on how to present to live audiences or on TV. No
 course recommended John's style or anything near to it. How could it? The man was 
the style. Like it or loathe it, it was distinctive, and it worked. I learned that lecturing
 was about having your own presence. Universities have templates for appraising staff. 
At best, they set a minimum standard. To command an audience, to communicate your
 enthusiasm and love of your subject, you must project yourself. In a small way, you
 are an actor. John showed me by example how to lecture, and his lesson stood me in
 good stead. 

INLOGOV marketed its wares to local government, so we had to write for the local
 government magazines such as the Local Government Chronicle and Municipal Journal.
 The advantage of publishing in these journals is that I learned to write for a local
 government audience. The magazines had copy editors. My colleagues from local
 government offered advice. INLOGOV encouraged me to practice the art of
 translating one's research for practitioners. The problem was that such
 translations counted for nought on my academic CV. To move to another university,
 to gain promotion at my existing university, I had to publish in academic journals. The
 academic tradition and the search for relevance to practitioners posed a dilemma for
 me. Mainly, my work was practitioner-oriented, and the worst practical project was
 about the impact of European Community regulations on British local government. The
 pamphlet I wrote sold literally tens of thousands of copies to local authorities, many
 of whom bought it in bulk. It was worse than useless on my CV. John was aware of the
 practitioner/academic dilemma confronting all his younger colleagues, not just me, and
 sought to change the intellectual ethos of INLOGOV. 

I was commissioned by the Committee of Inquiry into Local Government Finance
 (Layfield) to look broadly at the relationship between central and local government. It
 was a turning point in my career. I was indebted yet again to John Stewart, who was a
 member of the Committee. John gave me the opportunity to write about
 intergovernmental relations while Bob suggested I look for inspiration in the theories
 about organizations. Most of my report to the Layfield Committee Rhodes, (1976) was
 a review of the literature but it contained one novel idea. I suggested that central
 government–local government relations should be seen as a set of actors embedded in
 complex networks of administrative politics. This notion of policy networks was to
 inform my work for the next 10 years. I am struck by the happenstance of it all.
 There is a great temptation to suggest that your career had a logic; that it unfolded 
according to a plan, in a linear way. In practice, it was a case of grasping opportunities
 that others presented to me. I was lucky to have John Stewart as a mentor actively
 seeking out opportunities for me. I was looking for my own voice and he helped me
 find it. John supported my academic endeavours, and, on occasion, he too would write
 for an academic audience. But his heart lay with local government, with defending and
 improving it. As I look back, I do not think the academic community ever gave him
 due credit for this work. The local government community was more discerning. His
 1972 book “Managenent in Local Government” was less a book about management
 and more a political theory of local government with equality and the
 redistribution of power and resources at its heart. I concluded he was a son of the
 Fabian tradition. Of course, his work had an important impact on the management of
 local government but equally it was a stirring defence of local democracy. INLOGOV
 remains as a monument to his contribution, and we need it to carry on his teachings.
 We need a voice defending local democracy as much today as we ever did. 

John Stewart wanted local government to be to exercise community leadership. Sadly, 
in Britain, the scale of local, unelected Quangos has made that impossible – but it still remains an important
dream. In a future post, I want to explore further the notion of “Joined-up” or “Holistic
 Government” which was an important theme in New Labour’s last spell 1997-2010.
Rest In Peace, John Stewart.

Bad Economics and journalistic responsibility

Bad Economics and journalistic accountability

Journalism is such an important bridge between experts, governments and citizens that it used to be called “the Fourth Estate” in recognition of its quasi-constitutional significance. The conduct of democracy required citizens to feel confident that what they read in newspapers had some resemblance to “the facts” – but postmodernity has eaten away at such faith. And more and more of us accept that journalism has become part of what Guy Debord called a gigantic industry of “spectacle”

But where does that leave accountability – and ethical responsibility?

I can hear my readers laugh at such naivety

But it is a serious question which I’ve tried to deal with in previous posts listed here

The question arose again this past week in the UK – with the publication of a report on how the BBC has dealt with economics issues in the past few decades. The BBC’s news summary of the report is here. And the full report, which was written by Michael Blastland and Sir Andrew Dilnot, is here. The Guardian eventually had an economist make a typical comment which failed to offer any solutions to the issue of journalistic economic ignorance which had been exposed

So let me repair this deficiency on the part of journalism and offer my list of books which could help the citizen and general reader understand the basics of economics.

And, as a bonus, a master class in how television interviewing should be done

Best written books about Economics for the general reader (chronological order)

Title, author and date	Comment
Almost Everyone’s Guide to Economics;JK Galbraith and N Salinger (1978)	One of the world’s best non-fiction writers and economists is quizzed by a Frenchwoman. Superb
Short Circuit – strengthening local economies in an unstable world” - Ronald Douthwaite (1996)	Very practical insight into local economic development by an Irishman – but also inspirational….24 years on, it hasn’t really been bettered.
Debunking Economics – the naked emperor dethroned; Steve Keen (2001 and 2011)	Written before the crash, it might be called the first alternative textbook (except it’s much greater fun to read!). By an Australian
Economics for Everyone – a short guide to the economics of capitalism”; Jim Stanford (2008)	a very user-friendly book commissioned by Canadian trade unions with excellent graphics and “further reading” list ….for full version see table 2 …..
Zombie Economics - how dead ideas still walk among us; by John Quiggin (2010)	is a great read – with a self-explanatory title. He is also an Australian
23 Things they didn’t tell you about capitalism; Ha Joon-Chang (2010)	superbly-written demolition job on the myths perpetrated on us by economists. By a Cambridge economist educated in South Korea
The Delusions of Economics - the Misguided Certainties of a Hazardous Science; Gilbert Rist (2010)	Be Warned – this is not a guide but rather a short critique which ridicules economics. More for light relief!
"The End of Progress - how modern economics has failed us"; Graham Maxton (2011)	a highly readable book by an ex-Director-General of the Club of Rome
Austerity – the history of a dangerous ides; Mark Blyth (2013)	written by a Scottish political scientist/political economist (now working at Brown Uni in US) , it shows how old theories still affect the contemporary world profoundly
Economics of the 1% - how mainstream economics serves the rich, obscures reality and distorts policy; John F Weeks (2014)	One of the best introductions to the subject - which can't be faulted for being over-diplomatic!  By a US economist who worked in London from the 2000s
Credo – economic beliefs in a world of crisis; Brian Davey (2015)	An alternative approach to economics which situates it in its cultural and historical context. It may be long (at 500 pages) but is definitely worth persevering with....
Economics Rules – the rights and wrongs of the dismal science; Dani Rodrik (2016)	Rodrik is from Turkey and is one of the few economists prepared to challenge the mainstream. This is a balanced rather than critical analysis
The Econocracy – the perils of leaving economics to the experts; Earle, Moran and Ward-Perkins (2017)	This is a highly readable little book from those who took part in the protests about the irrelevance of economic teaching and set out the deficiencies they experienced. This is one of the few which is not freely downloadable
Vampire Capitalism – fractured societies and alternative futures; Paul Kennedy (2017)	A sociologist’s treatment which earns high points by stating in the very first sentence that it has “stood on the shoulders of so many giants that he is dizzy” and then proves the point by having an extensive bibliography with lots of hyperlinks…
Doughnut ;economics – 7 ways to think like a 21st century economist Kate Raworth (2017). google excerpts only	This Oxford economist’s book is advertised as a new perspective on the subject. These last four are not fully downloadable
Economics for the common good; Jean Tirole (2017) A French Nobel-prize winning economist	A useful review here
Economics in Two Lessons; John Quiggin (2019)	Quiggin wrote this book on his website, seeking feedback as he went
What’s wrong with economics – a primer for the perplexed; Robert Skidelsky (2020)	Skidelsky is a stylish writer – historian and biographer of Keynes – I’ve long admired. I’ve not had a chance to read the book yet – although Diana Coyle’s not impressed

Tom Nairn – a resource

Tom Nairn – A Resource

The 2 previous posts on Tom Nairn were https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/01/anthony-barnett-and-tom-nairn.html and https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/01/tom-nairn-curmudgeon-extraordinaire.html

This last post will simply try to summarise his significance and reference his key articles

• Tom was involved in the discussions in the late 1950s which led to the establishment of the New Left Review and a prolific author for them (see list of pieces below)

• He was of of one of the Hornsey Art School staff who sided with the students in 1968. He was fired and blacklisted and only got a tenured academic job when he was 70 – in Australia. He celebrated with Global Matrix – nationalism, globalism and state terrorism published with Paul James in 2005

• Apart from his discovery of Gramsci in Italy, another seminal period was his time in the early 1970s as a Fellow of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam which is well captured here -

The TNI, founded by the American radical Sam Reuben, was a left-wing think-tank which became a refuge and agora for a multitude of socialist intellectuals from all over Europe, including the so-called socialist countries in the Soviet bloc, and from the developing world. Most were independent Marxists of one shade or another. Nairn was a Fellow of the TNI between 1972 and 1976. He has said that

“once I was there, a lot of things changed completely as a result, including my relationship with home, and earlier versions of ideology and so on. I learned about different styles of Marxism, from a variety of points of view that the TNI made possible.”

At the Transnational Institute, he was encountering dissident Marxists from eastern Europe, who were finding their way to the TNI in Amsterdam by many routes. Nairn recalls those meetings as “a process of Europeanisation”, confirming another of his own original lines of reflection.

It’s only in the last few years that attempts have been made to summarise his work for a larger public - with Neil Davidson, Neal Ascherson, Gerry Hassan, Ben Jackson, Scott Hames and Rory Scothorne all publishing overviews in the past decade or so.

• In Perspective, Tom Nairn; Neil Davidson (1998) a detailed dissection of Nairn’s writings

• The Breakup of Tom Nairn? (2002) one of the few sustained critiques of his writings

• Gordon Brown – Bard of Britishness (2006) – a rather sarcastic essay of his with critical commentary from a range of opinions.

• Globalisation and Nationalism – the new Deal Tom Nairn (Open Democracy 2008)

• The Enchanted Nat; (2010) s critical piece which tries too hard to be clever

• A Global Scot of Ideas; Gerry Hassan (Scotsman 2012) Positive if not hagiography

• A Scottish Watershed? Neil Davidson (NLR 2014) more an analysis of the Scottish referendum

• Lucky Thinker – an interview with Tom Nairn by Scott Hames (Scottish Affairs 2016)

• Painting Nationalism Red? Neal Ascherson (2018) a quite excellent and sympathetic overview of of Nairn’s opus

• “From the Outer Edge” - Review of Asherson’s book; Rory Scothorne (LRB 2018)

• "The Case for Scottish Independence – a history of nationalist political thought in modern Scotland” Ben Jackson (2019) the most thorough exploration of this strand of thinking with detailed consideration of Tom Nairn’s contribution

• Tom Nairn – the prophet of post-Britain; Rory Scothorne (New Statesman article 2021) a sympathetic and overdue profile from the leftist London journal

• Tom Nairn – a guide through the ruins of Britain; Gerry Hassan (Scottish Review Jan 2023) A suitable tribute

• The New Statesman tribute is here

• Neal Asherson’s final tribute https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n04/neal-ascherson/on-tom-nairn is behind an LRB paywall

• Tom Nairn – globalisation and the new middle class - George Kerevan’s Farewell (Conter Jan 2023) a fascinating piece from someone who followed him down the nationalist route. And a Conter podcast had this discussion with Kerevan

• even the Jacobin journal honoured him with this tribute

His “New Left Review” articles (as a subscriber, I’m able to view them in full but some of them will be behind a paywall)

https://newleftreview.org/issues/i17/articles/tom-nairn-crowds-and-critics 1962

https://newleftreview.org/issues/i23/articles/tom-nairn-the-british-political-elite?token=tQCkpxUTLCC6 1964

https://newleftreview.org/issues/i27/articles/tom-nairn-the-nature-of-the-labour-party-part-i 1964

https://newleftreview.org/issues/i28/articles/tom-nairn-the-nature-of-the-labour-party-part-ii.pdf 1964

https://newleftreview.org/issues/i49/articles/tom-nairn-the-three-dreams-of-scottish-nationalism.pdf 1968

https://newleftreview.org/issues/i75/articles/tom-nairn-the-left-against-europe-special-issue.pdf 1972

https://newleftreview.org/issues/i83/articles/tom-nairn-scotland-and-europe.pdf 1974

https://newleftreview.org/issues/i94/articles/tom-nairn-the-modern-janus.pdf 1975

https://newleftreview.org/issues/i130/articles/tom-nairn-the-crisis-of-the-british-state 1981

https://newleftreview.org/issues/i200/articles/tom-nairn-the-sole-survivor 1993

https://newleftreview.org/issues/i230/articles/tom-nairn-reflections-on-nationalist-disasters 1998

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii1/articles/tom-nairn-ukania-under-blair 2000

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii9/articles/tom-nairn-mario-and-the-magician 2001

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii7/articles/tom-nairn-farewell-britannia-break-up-or-new-union

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii23/articles/tom-nairn-a-myriad-byzantiums 2003

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii37/articles/tom-nairn-the-new-furies 2006 on Tariq Ali

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii43/articles/tom-nairn-union-on-the-rocks 2007

90th anniversary of Hitler's accession to power

Today is the 90^th anniversary of the appointment of Adolf Hitleras Germany’s ReichsKanzler but it was January 28-30 1923 when the Nazis held their first mass rally in Munich - as Tom Nairn reminded us in 1998 in one of his many contributions to the NLR, Reflections on Nationalist Disasters which contains a wonderful diagram (which I'm, unfortunately, not able to reproduce) of the various explanations which have been offered for the collapse into Nazism. These events were also recently discussed in a 3-part series of “The Rest is History” podcast which culminated on 26 January

I’ve recounted here several times my own interest in things German which I owe to my father and his links with the country as a Protestant Pastor who in the post-war period established “Versohnung-saustauschen” (reconciliation exchanges) with North German churches in the Detmold and Bad Meinberg areas. Last year I came across a fascinating account of the 10 weeks or so which led up to Hitler’s accession - The Gravediggers – the last winter of the Weimar Republic by R Barth and H Friedrichs (2019 eng tr). The German newspaper headlines of each day between 17 November and 30 January are used ro give a brief description of key events that day – giving a real sense of how finely balanced things were. This is also the sense conveyed by Was Hitler’s Seizure of Power inevitable? Published by Eberhard Kolb in 1997.

The post-war years saw a huge literature about Fascism and how it might have been stopped - but the recent discussions about the rise of the Right seems to take little account of that literature to which I drew attention recently. 

Geoff Eley is, with Richard Evans, someone who has looked deeply at the course of German history and wrote in 1983 a 30 page paper which tried to answer the question “What produces Fascism?” And in 1985 Richard Evans gave us a magisterial tour of the writing on the subject with “The Myth of Germany’s Missing Revolution”

Sociology in Germany by Stephen Moebius (2021) is one of these wonderful finds which suddenly open up a new world for you - how a European country as important as Germany understood such an important discipline as Sociology. I wonder what the French equivalent is? 

The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert Paxton (2004) also looks an important read.

A Rare insight into the creative process that produced Tom Nairn’s “The Break-up of Britain”

 Anthony Barnett is one of Britain’s finest contemporary essayists – a genre which no longer seems fashionable. With Twitter shortening our attention spans, essays which stray beyond the 5,000 word mark get designated “Long Read”. Apart from the "New Left Review", about the only journal which will, occasionally, publish such lengthy pieces is the London Review of Books – eg the series journalist James Meek ran on privatisation in Britain and Perry Anderson’s on the European Union. But 20 years ago Barnett helped set up the Open Democracy site which offers critical global analyses and he was kind enough to send me yesterday a typical (10,000 word) essay of his - “Deciding Britain’s Future:Tom Nairn, Gordon Brown, Marxism and Nationalism” - which throws a fascinating light on the debate about nationalism which was waging particularly in left circles in the early 1970s. The essay was published a year ago so I must have seen it (an article of Barnett's is always an event) but didn't give it the attention it warranted and now needs in the light of Nairn’s death last weekend

Young English readers may not be aware of Nairn’s standing in these arguments, now coming back to life. A recent survey records his impact within Scotland and therefore Britain: John Lloyd’s ‘Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot: The Great Mistake Of Scottish Independence’. A long-time reporter for the Financial Times, Lloyd’s purpose is to preserve Britain by inquiring into the threat posed by Scottish independence. In a chapter on the growth of a self-conscious Scottish political culture, he says of Tom Nairn,

“This one Scots writer has been more influential in the nationalist cause than any other: one who has achieved what many intellectuals desire; that is, to have a marked influence on a movement or a period… He is the one who has laid down the battle lines of attack, on the Union and on England”.

What is it that makes for Nairn’s success when, since Tom Paine and Percy Shelley hurled themselves fruitlessly against the monstrosities of British power, generation upon generation of radicals have until now failed to make any lasting impression, with the sole exception of the suffragettes and despite the success of the anticolonial movements? I set out my initial answer to this question in my introduction to the new Verso edition of ‘The Break-up of Britain’. Briefly, the answer is four-fold.

• First: commitment. Nairn demands a new politics of democratic, national independence from the Union state. Lloyd is right to see his argument as a call to battle against the incubus of Whitehall, Westminster and Windsor. But not against England. On the contrary, Nairn is positively in favour of England. His arguments are a starting point for English liberation.

• Second: real-time analysis. Nairn’s commitment is not underwritten by dogmatism but by an ongoing, open-minded and self-reflective engagement. The book itself gathers essays published across a seven-year period, and the new edition includes reassessments from 1981 and 2003. In 1999, ‘Break-Up’ was reworked in ‘After Britain’. In 2002, he set out his contempt for Tony Blair’s pseudo-modernisation in ‘Pariah: Misfortunes of the British Kingdom’. Nairn’s motivation is always to work out how to move forward in a profoundly changing world. This is the beating heart of his method. He expressed it strongly in 1972 in ‘The Left Against Europe?’, a dissection of the futility of left-wing opposition to EU membership. Integral to it is a moral quality perhaps best described as determined modesty – a recognition that we do not know what this reality will deliver. You can hear it for yourself in an interview he gave in 2020, to open Democracy editor Adam Ramsay.

• Third: a theory of nationalism. At the centre of Nairn’s originality is his insistence on nationalism as an inescapable necessity that has a dual-nature – captured in his image of it as a two-faced Janus, the Roman god of doorways, that looks towards both past and future. It is a conception that repudiates the idea that there are intrinsically progressive or ‘good’ nationalisms. Nationalism, Nairn argues, is always both good and bad. …..Rory Scothorne put it succinctly in a recent New Statesman profile. Nairn seeks a nationalism that is a “transforming… ongoing self-determination… that opens up collective identity to the creative involvement of as many participants and experiences as possible”.

• The fourth reason for Nairn’s continued relevance is his role in the emergence of modern Scotland. For nearly half a century, two towering political intellectuals have wrestled over and shaped the Left’s view of the United Kingdom, while one of them had directly shaped the Kingdom itself. The joint story of Tom Nairn and Gordon Brown has never been told as such. It starts with their 1975 collaboration in Edinburgh on ‘"The Red Paper on Scotland’, which Brown edited and in which Nairn was the lead contributor. Today, both have retired to their Scottish homeland having failed to save it from the insurgency of Anglo-British reaction. Yet the difference between them remains the defining one for those living in the archipelago of Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales. For the vortex of reaction currently sucking us all into the jaws of Brexit will eventually consume itself. After which, and however long it takes, a left-of-centre government will emerge in Westminster to shape all the four nations of the Kingdom with a framework that will be either Brownite or Nairnite. An account of the contested birth of Nairn’s arguments may help illuminate the still unresolved issues now posed anew in this ongoing contest.

What Barnett’s essay then does is offer a rare insight into the creative process which occurred almost 50 years ago as Nairn worked out his ideas about nationalism – initially with a full-length text which was subjected to critiques from the likes of Barnett, Perry Anderson, EP Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm (the latter in particular being hostile to its arguments). The result was that the text never saw the light of day – its thinking being absorbed into Nairn’s “The Break-up of Britain” (1977), the opening chapter of which was published in 1975 in NLR as “The Modern Janus”. Hobsbawm was not impressed with the book – as he demonstrated in a subsequent article in NLR.

There is lots more to say about Tom Nairn – but tomorrow sees the 90^th anniversary of Hitler’s accession to power in Germany and requires a special post

Tom Nairn - Curmudgeon extraordinaire

A Scottish intellectual giant passed from us at the weekend, aged 90,

Upon his passing, Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon called Tom Nairn “one of the greatest thinkers, political theorists and intellectuals that Scotland has ever produced” while Alex Salmond credited him with “providing the intellectual base which turned Scottish nationalism from a romantic notion to a powerful left wing challenge to the British state”. Gordon Brown, for whose “The Red Paper on Scotland” Nairn wrote in 1975 an influential essay, wrote: “He disagreed with me on many things but his books and scholarship will long be remembered.”

The best way to honour such people is to go back and read what they have written (and also what others have said about them!) – an enormous task in Nairn’s case since he wrote so much. He was, with Perry Anderson, an early editor of New Left Review (NLR) – bringing to it the understanding he gained in Italy of Gramsci – and he was one of the companions on my own political journey from 1960-1990. In late 1964, my tutor at the LSE was Ralph Miliband whose Parliamentary Socialism (1961) had set the left alight and Tom Nairn produced his major critique of the Labour party in the columns of NLR (all 58 pages) in precisely the months I was at the LSE. Along the way, he managed to lose his Marxism and became increasingly fascinated with nationalism. When, in 1967, the Scottish Nationalists won their famous victory in Hamilton, Nairn duly responded with a typically caustic article in New Left Review entitled “The Three Dreams of Scottish Nationalism” (1968). But a few years later he was singing to a different tune in a longer piece ("Scotland and Europ") in that same journal. In 1972, just before the successful negotiations for UK entry into Europe, NLR published his powerful critique of the UK Left’s position on Europe – running to 116 pages

The closest he and I came to meeting was in the pages of the famous “Red Paper on Scotland” of 1975 when his was the lead chapter (on “Old Nationalism and New Nationalism” as I recall) and mine, after a chapter on “Devolution and Democracy”, followed - on “What Sort of Over-government?”

Neil Davidson was a Scottish academic who retained his Marxism and died at the tragically early age of 60. In 1998 he produced In Perspective, Tom Nairn which remains probably the most sustained critique of the course Tom Nairn has taken -

The extent to which Nairn has abandoned not only Marxism, but socialism itself, has been missed by both his critics and his supporters. Such misunderstandings should not be allowed to continue. What Nairn advances is nothing less than a theoretical justification for the endless subdivision of the world into competing capitalist nation states.

A more considered and recent treatment of Nairn’s thinking can be found in the quite excellent The Case for Scottish independence – a history of nationalist political thought in modern Scotland by Ben Jackson 2019. This is a terrific and very balanced analysis which I would strongly recommend to anyone interested in the Scottish experience.

For a taste of Tom Nairn’s writing, I would suggest readers have a look at the little book which contains a typical attack he wrote on Gordon Brown just before the latter became PM Gordon Brown – Bard of Britishness (2006) – with commentary from a range of opinions. And, for a more critical sense of the writer, The Breakup of Tom Nairn? (2002) will give a sense of his role as provocateur.

It;s too early to get definitive assessments of Tom Nairn – but I liked what Gerry Hassan said about Nairn more than a decade ago and Jonathan Shafi’s tribute this week.

Our Fate is not in our hands

Why do I keep banging on about Strathclyde Region’s social strategy? Basically because I got a decade to ensure that it was firmly embedded – which is 5 times longer than any other strategy I handled. To be fair, I’ve been responsible for only 4 strategies in my time – in Scotland, Azerbaijan, Krgyzystan and Bulgaria

I did start what was to be a 4 year project in 2010 in China but resigned after only a few weeks because I couldn’t cope with life in Beijing – expressed in this (short) paper Lost in Beijing – the loneliness of a long-distance consultant which, in offering the various reasons for my departure, also argued the importance of fitting people properly to context.

Most of us like to think that we are, at least, partially responsible for our “lucky breaks” although I have increasing respect for the view of my fellow-blogger, Dave Pollard who has, in recent years, taken to the argument that denies there is any such thing as Free Will. In a recent post he explained

Caitlin Johnstone got to the heart of why we continue to tolerate the massive dysfunction, corruption and inequality of wealth and power that characterizes our political, economic and social systems. She wrote:

People say “I’m free because where I live I can say, do and experience anything I want!” But that’s not true; you can’t. You can only say, do and experience what you’ve been conditioned to want to say, do and experience by the mass-scale psychological manipulation you’ve been marinating in since birth. You can do what you want, but they control what it is that you want.

It appears that we can, on the one hand, appreciate that we have no free will — that everything we believe and do is strictly the result of our biological and cultural conditioning, given the circumstances of the moment — and, on the other hand, rail against stupidity, greed, incompetence and the thousand other sins that, somehow, ‘shouldn’t’ be allowed, or ‘shouldn’t’ be. As if we had some choice in the matter. So the questions that Caitlin’s remarkable paragraph raises for me are:

1. She says we are conditioned by “psychological manipulation”. By whom? Just the rich and powerful control freaks? Or everyone we meet, read, and otherwise interact with?

2. She says they control what we want. I might agree, but that depends on who they are. Again, just the rich and powerful they? Or everyone?

3. Presumably they control what we want through persuasion, manipulation, propaganda, censorship, advertising, PR, misinformation, and otherwise feeding into our conditioned beliefs and desires. Don’t family, friends, co-workers, writers, artists, scientists, philosophers, neighbours, acquaintances, community-members and just about everyone else we interact with basically do the same things? And don’t they often have more influence than the miscreants Caitlin principally seems to want to blame?

4. Where exactly do the miscreants and other influencers who condition us get the ideas, beliefs etc that they try to push on us? Aren’t they just conditioned the same as we are?

A few years ago, another writer made the same point - Raoul Martinez’s Creating Freedom – the lottery of birth, the illusion of consent and the fight for our future (2016)

British artist and documentarian Martinez makes his literary debut writing on a theme taken up recently by writers such as economists Thomas Piketty and Joseph Stiglitz, journalist Bob Herbert, and activist Ralph Nader: inequality, injustice, greed, and entrenched power have undermined democracy and threaten the common good and the future of our planet. Because the forces that shape identity act so insidiously, individuals may feel they have freedom of choice; however, as the author insists, freedom is a delusion. 

In reality, we are manipulated by capitalism, which indoctrinates us to be consumers; the media, controlled by wealthy owners who make sure their own self-serving views are promoted; an electoral system hijacked by big donors and lobbyists; and an economy that benefits the wealthy with access to better education and resources. Our idea of freedom, Martinez argues, has been “expertly moulded to suit the interests of those with the power to shape it.” He devotes a third of the book to examining limits on “innate freedom,” which include the economic and social conditions into which a child is born, early nurturing and education, and “variations in genes and experience.” 

In Part 2, “The Illusion of Consent,” Martinez examines limits on political freedom from government institutions and policies, economic theories that endorse capitalism, and media that have spun “webs of deceit and secrecy” throughout society. To the author, “free market” is an oxymoron. His final section proposes ways “to change the game.” The arts, he says, can help us imagine a better future; equally important are individual “acts of courage, generosity and compassion.” Drawing on a wide range of sources, including political theory, philosophy, and the social sciences, Martinez argues earnestly and densely for an alternative to our “impoverished vision of humanity.” The choir to which he preaches, though, is likely to want more than a well-intentioned manifesto of familiar ideas; it will also want concrete suggestions for change.