3 - Britain in Decline

Summary

This chapter turns to the nationalist critique of the British state from the 1960s. It demonstrates how indebted independence supporters have been to the writings of Tom Nairn and the wider New Left’s characterisation of Britain as an antediluvian relic that historically evaded an adequate process of modernisation. In particular, the chapter demonstrates the importance of ‘imperialism’ to nationalist thinking, insofar as nationalists saw the fundamental weakness of British national identity as its close connection with empire and the economic ‘decline’ of the British state as related to its loss of colonial possessions. However, the chapter also documents the fading away of the Marxist and economistic elements of this critique of Britain over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, to be replaced by a robust, but avowedly political, democratic republicanism, which identified the British state’s chief shortcoming as a failure to become a proper bourgeois democracy.