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still uttered the word socialism; and whose conferences were unpredictable assemblies capable of thwarting the will of its leaders, or wishing on them highly unwelcome policies. Fortunately for Blair, it was a party so demoralized by fifteen years of Tory rule that it could be taken in hand without much resistance. Within no time, Clause Four was abolished, talk of socialism vanished, class war became an iniquity of the other party, and conferences obedient acclamations of the leader. There was nothing wrong with capitalism: it just needed socially responsible rulers to ensure it benefited everyone. Thatcher had done the country a great deal of good, and far from reversing her achievements—legislation to prevent abuse of union power, privatization of inefficient public industries and services, lowering of corporate taxation, emancipation of finance—New Labour governments would now preserve and, where necessary, extend them: handing independence of action to the central bank, contracting schools and hospitals out to private enterprise, introducing student fees and tougher quantification of research to bring market discipline to universities, and unleashing the City to outpace Wall Street in competitive deregulation; not to speak of sweeping away legal anachronisms—unanimous decision by juries, no detention without an arrest warrant—hampering national security. But there were unattractive sides to Thatcherism that the nation had with good reason disliked, and with which New Labour would do away. It was too indifferent to the needs of the least well-off, who could be helped without affecting the better off, and neglectful of social services that required more funding; it was too strident in its rhetoric, and old-fashioned in its cultural outlook; it didn’t understand the advantages of a measure of devolution, or the disadvantages of quarrelling with Europe. Neo-labourism offered neo-liberalism without tears. Wasn’t that what the country wanted, as three electoral victories in a row showed? The electoral pluralities that Blair received were less than Thatcher’s, the last of them on the lowest share of the vote—35.2 per cent—of any government in post-war history, though overall—given the bias to Labour in the distribution of constituencies—a higher average in seats. The most striking difference between the two regimes, however, was the precipitous fall in electoral turn-out from the first to the second—72.7 per cent mid-way through Thatcher, 59.4 per cent mid-way through Blair. New Labour had a significantly weaker base, totaling some 7 million votes fewer than its Conservative predecessor. Thatcher’s achievement had been to add c2 strata—better placed working class—to the Tory camp. New Labour sought its gains in abc1 categories—managerial, professional and white-collar strata, the ‘Middle England’ of its self-image. This involved a tacit regional and national strategy whose consequences would come to haunt the party twenty years later, its logic already depicted with acid foresight by Tom Nairn at the time. New Labour was becoming ‘much more decisively a party of the English South’: an ‘adjustment towards heartland norms (actual or imagined) which entailed some withdrawal from the Labour Party’s old power base in the North and the periphery. Swimming with the tide, instead of floundering ineffectually against it, promised a more solid hegemony. However, this mutation had to be “covered” and justified for such a route-change to work: put more crudely, the North had to be given time to die off decently, while the New Labour authority-structure put down more durable roots in the formerly Tory South.’footnote63 For the time being, all went well. Voters might not be flocking to the polls as of old, but wasn’t that a sign of contentment with the state of the country? One big parliamentary majority after another, without precedent in the history of the party, was proof of how well society was being governed, in a nation at peace with itself. Two aspects of the regime, however, undid it. One was a novelty in the party and the country. The other was an atavism ingrained in both. The first was New Labour’s style of rule, of which a withering portrait would be drawn in the last year of Blair’s tenure by Peter Oborne in his study of the political class of the period—a formation some of whose seeds could be traced back to Thatcher’s time, but had burgeoned when New Labour came to power in 1997 with a parliamentary delegation of whom over two-fifths were political newcomers, nearly double the equivalent on the Tory benches of 1979. For Oborne, what then took shape was a novel phenomenon, defined by its existential dependence on political office for material and psychological support, and composed not just of denizens of the two houses of parliament, but a surrounding incrustation of advisers, assistants, researchers, lobbyists, think-tankers, client journalists and broadcasters, whose profile and habitus he etched in lethal ethnographic detail, down to its characteristic patterns of endogamy, forms of speech, styles of clothing, affectations of leisure.footnote64 Instrumental in all its relationships, without roots or connections beyond its own shallow, insecure, public-relations obsessed, ideas-empty world, this was a stratum infested with pervasive corruption and abuse of office, under a ruler who never bothered to leave his sofa in Downing St for over 90 per cent of Commons divisions, holidayed with Berlusconi, and ended up amassing millions for favours to petroleum despots. More politically damaging than venality was the mendacity with which Blair and his ministers took the country into the invasion of Iraq as an auxiliary of the United States, and the disasters of their occupation of it. The war itself was no anomaly, but an exercise in keeping with the imperial past of the party. The Attlee government, which still had 800,000 men in arms in 1949, was a year later devoting 20 per cent of its budget to military expenditure to help the us in Korea, to wage counter-insurgency in Malaya, and to build nuclear weapons in secret, a higher proportion of gdp than in America itself.footnote65 The Wilson government waged colonial war in Yemen; Callaghan colluded with Washington to ensure Britain’s military redoubt in Cyprus was no obstacle to Turkish ethnic cleansing. Exceeding any of his predecessors in zeal, Blair urged the us to invade Yugoslavia with ground troops, and told Bush ‘whither thou goest, I will go’, as Washington planned its attack on Iraq, a stamping-ground for Britain’s empire of old. After the debacle of the country’s return to Basra came the collapse of its financial bubble with the crash of 2008. By the time of electoral reckoning two years later, the two traditional prongs of Ukanian eversion, military and monetary, had each crumpled. Drenched in blood, sleaze and froth, Labour was unceremoniously ejected from power, with its second lowest vote since the coupon election of 1918. The pit of disgust and derision into which Blair had by then fallen—‘the most dishonest and disastrous prime ministership of modern times’, who for a good while could not show his face in publicfootnote66—was such that his otherwise natural heir, the older of the Miliband brothers, toast of the Guardian and the Financial Times, was defeated by the younger for the succession. Unlike Thatcherism, still a proud term for many Conservatives, New Labour became such a stigma that no section of the party wanted any longer to hear of it.footnote67 In practice—the younger Miliband had been a protégé of Brown—departures from its course were modest, and brought no reward at the polls, the Tories winning by a larger margin five years later. But in the interim, a decisive change had occurred. The accident of a drunken brawl in the Commons, leading to a disputed vote over selection of the next Labour candidate in a Scottish constituency, in which Miliband sought to burnish his image by standing up to supposed trade-union pressures, precipitated an unexpected alteration of the rules for leader of the party itself, abolishing not only the block vote of the unions, controlling two-fifths of the ballots in a leadership contest, but the one-third controlled by its mps, left the individual members of the party for the first time in its history masters of any future choice. Suddenly the ‘dead souls’ of Gogol’s Labourism which had historically secured the grip of its right-wing parliamentary leaders over the party—phantom ‘affiliates’ commanding 90 per cent of votes at its conferences as late as 1981, and still 50 per cent in 2011—were abrogated; and at the same stroke the oligarchs in the Commons who disposed of them.footnote68 When Miliband resigned in 2015, the result dumbfounded press and parliamentarians alike: Corbyn was elected with a sweeping majority. Labour had acquired the most left-wing leader in its history, as virtually overnight its membership doubled. Furious at this usurpation, within a year the parliamentary party voted by over 80 per cent to oust Corbyn after the referendum on Europe, on the grounds that he had campaigned insufficiently for Remain. The party’s membership re-elected him with an even larger majority, and in 2017 he led it to near victory at the polls with the biggest swing to Labour since 1945, on a vote larger than Blair’s in 2001 and 2005,footnote69 and a platform calling for renationalization of privatized transport and utilities, higher corporation tax, and more expenditure on welfare. With this triumph, had the Labour left, eternal impotent minority in the party, finally taken it over? Far from it. The Parliamentary Labour Party (plp) remained implacably hostile to Corbyn, the party apparatus stacked with apoplectic opponents, the press—Guardian in the lead, amplified by the bbc—vitriolic: a coalition united in the determination to destroy him. Against these, he had only a tiny group of allies—a handful of aides, scarcely more mps, two or three union leaders, and a membership on the rebound from New Labour, but in their vast majority, neither young nor old possessing any political culture beyond the enthusiasms of the moment or the illusions of the past. The overturn had been too sudden for there to be time for a serious alternative to the miseries of Labourism to develop. ‘Cadres decide everything’, and there were virtually none. In 2019, amid the disarray of its civil war, under a leader vilified by the media and his colleagues, and a now disjointed manifesto, the party crashed to a massive defeat in an election over Brexit, on which it had never been able to reach a coherent position, as a great swathe of its traditional strongholds in the North went over to the Conservatives. The indurated organizational form that defined the Labour Party for a century, from 1918 to 2015, lingers on at party conferences. But at leadership contests it is no more. Nor, with still more far-reaching consequences, is the social base on which it rested. In 1950, the British working class comprised over 60 per cent of the population. Over the next half century, the unequal social conditions defining it as a separate class—levels of pay, job security, education—did not change; nor did its identity—self-ascribed, even, by many from working-class families who have risen out of it.footnote70 But its size did, radically: by 2010, manufacturing workers were some 20 per cent of the population. In banning talk of class, and adjoining the Conservatives on common neo-liberal and career-pattern ground, New Labour effectively closed off any political space in which workers could find expression, even as belief at large that class differences and social polarization were widening actually increased.footnote71 The result, Evans and Tilley argue in their fundamental study of the ensuing landscape, was a transformation of the ideological scene, economic and ‘social’ (sc. cultural) value-axes coming apart. Dividing the middle class into three distinct groups, old (owners, managers, professionals), new (salaried employees, non-manual ancillary workers or supervisors) and junior (routine white-collar workers), The New Politics of Class classifies the first as economically right-wing and culturally authoritarian; the second and third as economically centrist and culturally liberal; and the contemporary working class as economically left-wing and culturally authoritarian.footnote72 As the Conservative and Labour parties converged in economic agenda and politician type (clearly perceived as such by workers), the working-class component of Labour’s electorate dropped vertically. In the post-war years, working-class support for Labour was 30 per cent higher than old and new middle-class support. By the 1990s, it was 10 per cent, and then disappeared altogether, as proletarian abstentions grew. In 2015, for the first time Labour had fewer working-class than new middle-class voters. Four years of Corbyn could not reverse thirteen of Blair and Brown: after such a legacy, realignment of value-axes required an ideal-political synthesis beyond its powers, perhaps any at short notice. By 2019, the Conservatives had a 21 per cent lead over Labour in the working class.footnote73 4. Intelligentsia Demarcation of the country’s intellectual landscape in any given period raises difficult questions of definition. For present purposes, it is enough to point out the obvious centrality of the academy to it, since far the largest number of those who could be described as intellectuals now work in universities—though many, perhaps most, of those who teach or research in them would neither accept nor warrant the term. In addition, the penumbra of print media, in its upper ranges, and to a lesser extent, the more ephemeral precincts of broadcasting, offer a related habitat. Uniformity of tendency or outlook is, of course, not to be expected in any of these. But what have been the dominants in the development of the intelligentsia since the turn of the eighties, and deviations from them, as it was buffeted by successive shocks to its post-war placidity—first Thatcherism, then Blairism, then Brexit? Under Thatcher, the universities became for the first time a direct ideological target of government—a Kulturkampf in the words of one of her ministers for higher education—with heavy cuts to their funding and openly expressed hostility to their ethos, viewed as indifferent to the needs of the market and a seedbed of political wrong-thinking. The dislike came to be reciprocated by the great majority of academics. In 1983, the Royal Society could still elect her a fellow by a two to one majority, but by 1985 Oxford famously refused to grant Thatcher an honorary degree by an even larger one, and by 1987 less than a fifth of lecturers country-wide supported the Conservatives. In literary circles outside the academy, hatred of Thatcher, who was widely regarded as an embodiment of philistine enmity to any kind of culture, was loudly expressed. The reality was otherwise. Her administration was more committed to ideas, and hospitable to intellectuals, than any British government post-1945, or since. Simply, these ideas were alien to the mainstream culture of the time. In a throw-back to the pattern of the fifties, her two principal inspirations were both imports from abroad, Friedman and Hayek—Hayek, a classic White émigré from Austria, having relocated from London to Chicago in the wake of a marital imbroglio, much the more important. Relaying their ideas, however, was a thriving cluster of local think-tanks—Institute for Economic Affairs, Adam Smith Institute, Centre for Policy Studies—developing radical recipes for revival of the nation. Leading historians of the right were brigaded for advice on foreign affairs, economists on domestic issues. Beyond this perimeter of counsel and proposal, and closely connected to it, lay the decade’s most successful weekly, the Spectator, supplying a steady stream of talent to Cabinet or Downing St staff positions—Ian Gilmour, Nigel Lawson, Ferdinand Mount, as ultimately Boris Johnson. Symmetrically, the New Statesman had become a shadow of the paper which in the sixties had reached a circulation of 90,000 under Paul Johnson, now another mentor of Thatcher. If in the academy thought lost its once easy comfort with power, on the front-lines of politics it was never more closely in touch with it. Blair at the helm, mainstream intellectual opinion swung rapidly from alienation to infatuation. Opposition to Thatcher, vehement in expression as it often had been, was for the most part moderate in substance, reflecting a traditional liberalism on good terms with a traditional conservatism, an outlook deeply embedded in church and state alike, permeating the civil service and the professions as well as the universities.footnote74 Jolted by the political polarization of the early eighties, it had found a temporary refuge in the Alliance. But when this faded, New Labour offered a welcome substitute. Since the Murdoch press and in due course most other tabloids switched their allegiance to the new regime, it enjoyed at the outset a rapt consensus, gutter-to-gaiters, unknown since the National Government of 1931. In the chorus of adulation, the leading lights of intellectual opinion in the media outdid all others in sycophancy to Blair as a leader.footnote75 Even his launching of the war on Iraq was met at first with dithyrambs to his eloquence. Only when it misfired did enthusiasm cool. As far as ideas went, the pattern under Blairism reversed the configuration under Thatcherism. The regime itself, basking in a width of acclaim that Thatcher’s had never enjoyed, unlike hers had no interest in serious ideas of any sort, subsisting on a diet of spin-doctors and hucksters, or criers of the Third Way like Giddens and Adonis, fodder for the Lords, leaving not a trace in the memoirs of their book-proof leader. In the intelligentsia at large most, though not all, of the fawning came from liberal journalists, sheltered from the impact of New Labour policies on their kin in the academy. There, hopes that these would repair the damage to higher education left by the Thatcher period were soon gone, as it became clear that, on the contrary, the new regime was going not only to accept, but to extend it, with still more far-reaching measures of managerial control and marketization. By the end of the New Labour era, the universities had been battered thrice over. First, with deep spending cuts and subjection of scholarship to crudely quantified targeting of output under Thatcher; then by imposition of corporate management systems, inflating bureaucracy at the expense of teaching and research; then by the introduction of fees converting students into customers, and of public—sc. market—‘impact’ as a criterion of promotion and funding. No other country in the advanced capitalist world saw a reduction of higher education to commercial logic so extreme. What was the reaction? Within the academy, a single scholar, Stefan Collini, published two books of eloquent protest, each well received; outside it, a single independent researcher, Andrew McGettigan, produced two books dismantling the economics of the changes, each well documented.footnote76 Neither to the smallest visible effect. The intelligentsia on the receiving end of two decades of brutal neo-liberal assault lifted scarcely a finger of collective resistance to it. Finally, after twenty-five years, when even its pensions were cut, token strikes (absences of a fortnight at a time), bungled by the union, ignored by the majority of university teachers, and shutting down not a single campus, began in fits and starts in 2018, petering out fruitlessly in 2020—all belated, all confined to narrowly economic issues, none raising broader structural questions. Passively mutinous under Thatcher, collusively supine under Blair and Brown, the liberal academy sprang to life not over the ref or Iraq but over Europe, once the Referendum on it was lost.footnote77 At the oldest universities Remainer passions ran so high that the occasional Leaver misfit could become a social leper; at Cambridge, the Vice-Chancellor’s office censored unwelcome opinion with stone-walling worthy of the Writers’ Union under Brezhnev. The correspondence columns of leading dailies overflowed with professorial fury at the prospect of exiting the Union, literary periodicals raised a din such as London had not heard for a century, students chanted in the streets under eu banners. Yet the virtual unanimity of educated opinion, not to speak of the country’s wider establishment, had proved unable to sway the outcome of a referendum taken as a foregone conclusion by government and opposition alike only a few months earlier. How far can that be taken as a gauge of the weight of today’s intelligentsia in the cultural and political system of the country? The circulation of the newspapers that different sectors read has declined steadily over the past decade, when the Telegraph, Guardian, and Financial Times all saw their sales drop by over half, The Times by a quarter.footnote78 Periodicals, on the other hand—costing much less to produce, losses often small change to their proprietors—have held steady or grown. Stripping out free copies and overseas sales, the Economist currently has a domestic circulation of some 141,000, the Spectator 67,000, the London Review of Books 36,000, Prospect 29,000, the New Statesman 25,000, the Times Literary Supplement 12,000.footnote79 Online hits are typically multiples of these figures. So far as political impact goes, two of the dailies—the Telegraph and Guardian—are best seen as structural components of the parties with which they are associated, Conservative and Labour respectively, exercising more power over the mps of each than its members or its apparatus.footnote80 Of the periodicals, the Spectator alone has furnished leaders and operators to the political class, as well as to the daily press. In sum, this complex is by no means a negligible factor in affairs of state, though obviously—as the referendum on Europe confirmed—its weight in opinion formation as a whole is not to be compared with the tabloid media proper, or television. How durable, of course, the influence of any part of this communications system will prove to be, in a time when younger generations, immersed in social media, bypass newspapers and television altogether, remains to be seen: probably more so than frequently predicted. As for the culture of the country in any wider sense, a symptomatic celebration of it came in 2015 from Dominic Sandbrook, whose Great British Dream Factory, hailing the matchless global success of its television series, detective stories, fantasy literature, pop music, children’s books, action films, science fiction etc. across five hundred pages, proudly announced: ‘I have stuck to the middle ground—the “middlebrow” some might say—and have deliberately not picked things that appeal only to self-styled intellectuals.’footnote81 5. Scotland Scottish nationalism gained its first toe-hold in British politics in the late sixties, when a by-election victory of the snp moved Wilson to set up a Commission on devolution to see how its possible danger to Labour in Scotland was best handled. Recommending an elected Scottish body with limited powers, it appeared under Heath in 1973. Lifted by this prospect, and the discovery of North Sea oil in Scottish waters, in the election of February 1974 the snp won 22 per cent of the vote in Scotland, and in the October sequel jumped to 30 per cent, giving it 11 seats at Westminster under a Labour government with an overall majority of just 3, soon whittled away. When an Act under Callaghan granting Scotland a devolved assembly, that would be approved by a majority in a referendum, was torpedoed by a Labour unionist amendment requiring a threshold that wasn’t met, the snp brought down the government. Far from benefiting the party, it then slumped throughout the succeeding 18 years of Tory rule, when its average poll fell to 16.5 per cent, and 3 seats in Parliament. When New Labour came to power in 1997, it passed a Scotland Act, creating a local ‘Executive’ in Edinburgh along much the same lines as the original commission, confident that its uk-wide electoral strength—it had just won three-quarters of all the Scottish seats at Westminster—meant it could dominate this body, and kill off independence with its measure of kindness.footnote82 For the better part of a decade, its calculation appeared to hold good. Having taken the precaution, as it thought, of introducing proportional representation for elections to the Scottish assembly as a safeguard against the snp ever scooping the pool with a bit more than a third of the vote, as it would itself come to do in Britain, Labour ruled Scotland in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats until 2007. But in that year the snp got one more seat than Labour in the third election to Holyrood and formed a minority government. This proved so popular that in 2011, the snp won an absolute majority in the (now renamed by it) Scottish Parliament. By 2016, it had over double the Labour vote in Scotland, and has now been in power in Edinburgh for as long as New Labour was in London. What is the character of the party that has risen to such a height? Founded in the thirties, it was originally a bourgeois nationalist party pure and simple, whose sole objective, disavowing any connection with right or left, was Scottish independence. Much later, in the sixties, it started to position itself on the centre-left, and by the time of its breakthrough in 1974 was describing itself as social-democratic. At the turn of the eighties, a more radical group within the party sought to press it in a socialist direction, but was promptly expelled. Though its members were later readmitted, there was little to distinguish the snp from Labour in social or economic stance until it approved popular refusal to pay Thatcher’s poll tax in 1988, a movement which Labour characteristically declined to support. What did set it apart, from the sixties onwards, were two foreign policy goals: ejection of Polaris—later Trident—nuclear submarines from Scotland, and exit from nato. Under New Labour, the party’s leader Alex Salmond denounced Blair’s militarism not only in Iraq but Kosovo. So long as the Tories were in power, Labour had held its working-class strongholds in Scotland without much difficulty. But once it became the government in London, the contemptuous treatment of its proletarian base and corruption in its rotten boroughs, which would undo the party in the North of England, had the same consequences much earlier in Scotland, because there a political alternative to the left of it emerged, which could not be smashed with the sledgehammer of first-past-the-post. In the space created by the Blair–Brown regime, the snp could win widespread support in attacking not only its imperial record in Iraq, but its neo-liberal record at home—the green-lighting of de-industrialization, contracting out of public services and introduction of student fees. As the extension of a dilute form of proportional representation to local elections—a concession to the Liberal Democrats to keep the coalition with them going—broke the padlocks on Labour’s municipal fastnesses, increasing numbers of workers went over to the snp, bringing it to power at Holyrood after a decade of local Blairism.footnote83 The party that formed a government in 2007 was not untouched by the model it replaced. Competing with New Labour, the snp reproduced traits resembling it: stardom of the leader, sound-bite culture, on-message directives. Numerically, it was still a small organization of 15,000 members, in which discipline from above could be enforced. Nor were the effects of this imprint just organizational. In power, they set limitations of policy too. The record of the snp in office has not been a replica of New Labour; but there has been no clean break with it either.footnote84 On the positive side came complete abolition of student fees. Later scrapping of prescription charges, introduction of free bus passes and provision of personal care; eventually, income tax was lowered a little for the least well-off and increased a little for the best-off. On the other side of the ledger, spending on higher education was cut, the number of school teachers reduced. Above all, the enormities of Scottish real estate were left unaltered—the most unequal distribution of land in Europe: less than a thousand individuals controlling 60 per cent of it; a quarter of all estates over a thousand acres in the same hereditary hands for four hundred years or more; average urban rents over 80 per cent of the minimum wage of 18 to 20 year-olds.footnote85 As to financial regulation, Salmond—formerly an economist on the Royal Bank of Scotland payroll, who in office applauded its infamous boss Goodwin and his calamitous operations—could reproach Brown for too heavy a hand on banking. The commitment to expulsion of Trident remains, but departure from nato has been dropped, and the party now upholds the monarchy. Royalism is not the result of any deep conversion of snp membership to the throne, most of the party’s historic nucleus no doubt remaining republican. It is tactical, designed to avoid affronting voters whom it seeks to win to the cause of independence. Electorally, the snp’s position appears virtually impregnable, since with even just a core support of some 36 per cent, well below its current levels, it would require an alliance between Conservatives and Labour to dislodge it from power; its opponents are at present too divided to pose much of a threat.footnote86 But mere continuity in office cannot suffice for a party whose raison d’être has historically been independence. In the eighties, it turned away from the ethno-cultural nationalism of its origins, towards a socio-civic one. Not as far as its most significant theorist of the time, Stephen Maxwell, wanted,footnote87 but nonetheless stressing the more equal and just society that independence could bring. Ambiguity, however, has remained: is the prospect of independence the means to such a society, or is the prospect of such a society the means to independence? In 2014, the referendum on independence the snp had long sought was held. With Tories, Labour and Liberal Democrats shoulder to shoulder in warning that its economic consequences would be dire, and calling for its rejection, the No camp won handsomely, with 55.3 per cent of those who voted supporting it. On a higher turnout, the losing 44.7 per cent was actually a fraction lower than the snp’s score of 45.4 per cent in its victory at Holyrood three years earlier. It looked as if voters had resolved the party’s ambivalence for it: what they were after was not national sovereignty, but a better brand of social democracy. That, at least, was the reading of those who saw in the energy and self-organization of the Yes campaign the impetus of a social rather than a national movement.footnote88 For others, it was independence which electrified the newly engaged. On either view, the snp was certainly no loser. The result of the referendum, far from deflating its support in society, unleashed a torrent of new members into the party, whose membership leapt from 25,000 before the vote to 80,000 a month later. Today it stands at 125,000, making it proportionately far the largest mass party in Britain, with a ratio of members to population ten times higher than the Conservatives (180,000) and nearly four times higher than Labour (580,000). In the election of 2015 that followed the referendum, the snp hit a full 50 per cent of the vote in Scotland, something no party has achieved in Britain since the war.footnote89 In a historical perspective, how do the prospects of the party and its society stand today? The significant comparison is close by, in the other kingdom ruled from London in the composite British monarchy, whose religion determined its contrasting fate. Ireland was a colony, whose Catholic peasantry was for the better part of three centuries ruthlessly dispossessed and exploited, then decimated, while Scotland—its Highlands cleared in similar fashion—became a partner in the global empire of which Ireland was the first victim. Co-beneficiary of the industrial revolution, acting as a military reservation for overseas expansion—‘the Punjab of the North’—by the early 20th century Scotland enjoyed a per capita income well over double that of Ireland, as the Easter Rising set the stage for the Irish War of Independence. Today, the Republic of Ireland has a per capita income some 50 per cent higher than Scotland. More strikingly still, half-way through the 20th century, the Republic—shorn of six counties in the north—had a population of 2.96 million, Scotland 5.09 million. Today, the Republic has 4.86 million, Scotland, 5.44. In other words, where the human proportions of an independent Ireland grew by 65 per cent, a dependent Scotland stagnated at 6.7 per cent. Higher Catholic than Calvinist birth-rates played their part in this, but critical too was greater Irish prosperity attracting immigration,footnote90 where emigration was draining energy and ambition from Scotland to England, whose population grew 45 per cent in the same period; even that of Wales at three times the level of Scotland. Could a harsher climate be a factor? Hardly. Further north, Norway grew 62 per cent, Sweden 46 per cent, Finland 36 per cent. Contextually, Scotland is a stark outlier. Economically and demographically, ceteris paribus sovereignty matters. That such figures offer obvious material evidence of the advantages Scotland has foregone by its inability to break with a Union from which it once benefited does not mean that at this point in time independence is either bound to come, or would automatically gain what has been lost. In the consumer capitalist societies of the post-war world, the fire of nineteenth and early twentieth century nationalism has gone. To date, though there have been substantial movements demanding it, no secession has come to pass. There the relevant comparison is not with Ireland under the rule of Dublin Castle, but Quebec and Catalonia in the post-colonial, neo-liberal epoch, two societies which half-way through the 20th century were both smaller in numbers than Scotland, and now larger, and each double the weight of Scotland in the economy of their respective states—Quebec accounting for a fifth of Canada’s gdp, Catalonia a fifth of Spain’s, Scotland less than a tenth of the uk’s. Each possesses a language distinct from that of the rest of the country, Scotland for the most part only a variant of it. Against these potential advantages, both Quebec and Catalonia have large immigrant populations whose native language is not French or Catalan, and which have resisted assimilation. In each case, in good measure for this reason, movements for independence have fallen short of a majority—in the referendums in Quebec, 40 per cent in 1980 and 49 per cent in 1995; in the recent elections in Catalonia, 47 per cent.footnote91 In neither case does the central state accept that any secession could be legal. In that respect, Scotland—unlike these, with centuries of prior existence as an independent kingdom—was better placed, London conceding the right to secede. But so far, the same invisible barrier has held at the threshold of a majority, consumer preference trumping national allegiance. Decisive in the rejection of independence for Scotland in 2014 was the economic argument that its costs to the pocket would be too high, on which London and its parties played relentlessly. For the snp, Europe offered the answer: joining the eu as another member state would give it the same access to a continental market and the same rights within it as Britain enjoyed: why should it lose, rather than gain from the change? Six years later, Britain now out of the eu, after a referendum in which Scotland voted to remain within it by the largest majority of any part of the uk, where has Brexit left the party? In political terms, in a stronger position to argue that the overwhelming will of the Scottish people has been ignored, and—as widespread commentary in London fears—the only way for it to be respected is a second, successful referendum on independence. In economic terms, in a weaker position, since secession from the uk would no longer guarantee access to the rest of it, on which 60 per cent of Scottish exports depend, as it would have done if both countries belonged to the eu, to which only 15 per of Scottish exports now go. In that sense, the logic of Brexit is to close the escape-hatch of Europe, leaving Scotland trapped in the Union bought with English gold in 1707, now far more at the mercy of London than London is to Brussels. Project Fear, which Cameron and Osborne were sure would give them victory once again in the referendum on Europe, did not deter the English from putting considerations of sovereignty before calculations of prosperity. The risks would be much higher for the Scots. Would the same be true of them? 6. Europe Overwhelmingly approved, by a two-thirds majority in the referendum of 1975, and in a dozen successive elections thereafter never an important concern of voters,footnote92 why was membership of the European Community at length suddenly rejected in 2016? That it soon lost the attraction it possessed in 1975 had long been evident, opinion polls showing consistently significant levels of disaffection with it. But such grumbling remained muted and remote even in the minds of those prone to it, Europe coming very low on the list of issues preoccupying the population at election time. What changed this were two developments, not in Britain, but in Europe. The first of these was the Treaty of Maastricht, proclaiming a European Union with a single currency to match. Its effect was to convert the small band of Conservative mps radically opposed to the whole institutional complex in Brussels as a negation of the constitutional sovereignty of Westminster, hitherto generally regarded within the party as more or less eccentric bores, into a henceforward powerful wing of it, backed by Thatcher herself. The second was the expansion of the Union to the countries of Eastern Europe, releasing a large pool of poor but relatively skilled labour to seek better opportunities in Western Europe—Britain was swift off the mark in opening its doors, Blair rewarding Poland as a staunch ally in the war on Iraq before even Germany did so. The result was for the first time a major wave of immigrants, no longer just from the former Empire but from the eu, fuelling popular xenophobia and employment anxiety. Unlike the ostensible juridical issues agitating Eurosceptic benches in parliament, abstruse to most, mounting levels of immigration after the Great Recession quickly became a mass concern, capitalized by ukip, and threatening Conservative rule if it was not contained. To head off the danger, Cameron called his referendum. Why did he lose it? The Brexit referendum was a domestic quarrel, in which both sides were at mass level essentially oblivious of the ostensible object of the occasion, the European Union itself, other than as an object of polar cathexis; Remain and Leave opinion at large equally ignorant of, and indifferent to, its structures and mutations. At elite level, where the rival campaigns that mattered were ranged against each other within the Tory party, Cameron and Osborne were out-generalled from start to finish by the tacticians of ‘Conservatives for Britain’ in the Commons, whose success in determining both the wording and the timing of the referendum was decisive in its outcome, and by the skills of Cummings, the strategist of Vote Leave, inventor of the slogan that won it, ‘Take Back Control’. Believing all they had to do was repurpose the message with which they had won the Scottish referendum and the election of 2015, Cameron and Osborne thought they could neutralize the issue of immigration—record levels of which, making a mockery of government promises to the contrary, were released on the eve of the referendum—by a second Project Fear, warning of the economic catastrophe that would befall the country if it left the Union, and failing to grasp that for many, immigration was not just a nativist identity issue but itself an economic one, the threat of joblessness. Afterwards, a staffer in the Remain hq would ruefully remark: ‘Project Fear does work, we were just out-project feared.’footnote93 Cameron also forgot that he had won in 2014 and 2015 with the tabloids of the right behind him; this time they were in full cry against him. Labour, unlike the Conservatives formally at one in calling for Remain, did little more than its Tory counterparts to make a positive case for the eu, it too essentially just warning of the costs of exit. The upshot was a stinging popular rebuff to the political class as a whole, united (the minority of Conservative Brexiteers aside) in an empty defence of the status quo. That ‘Take Back Control’ struck home among large numbers of ordinary people for whom Europe as such had hardly ever mattered was made plain by the turn-out: at 72 per cent, a full 9 points above the average of the four elections before the referendum, with the largest increases in the working-class districts of the North where it had previously been lowest.footnote94 There, as detailed cartography has shown, the impact of austerity after 2008—as Crafts describes it, ‘bipartisan fiscal consolidation’—was decisive. While cuts in public expenditure slashed grants to local authorities overall by 36 per cent, drops in spending varied dramatically from 6.2 per cent per capita in the least deprived to 46.3 per cent per capita in the most deprived areas, hitting the poorest parts of the country, most dependent on social services, hardest. It was these which tipped the balance for Leave.footnote95 Overall, the class division of the vote was stark: 57 per cent of the wealthiest ab group voted Remain, the only such stratum in which it held a clear majority: 64 per cent of the poorest c2de voted Leave. Polarization by age was equally clear-cut—between 18 and 45 years old, majorities for Remain; from 45 years upwards, for Leave. By party, Labour supporters voted 63 per cent Remain, Conservative supporters 58 per cent Leave. Motivations in each camp were no less eloquent. For Remainers, far the most important reason—over two fifths of respondents—was economic: fear of losses if Britain left. Less than one in ten expressed any strong attachment to the eu. For Leavers, the top reason—for nearly half of them—was political: returning decisions affecting the country to Westminster, where they belonged. Immigration was uppermost in the minds of a third.footnote96 Youth (18–24) voted 73 per cent for Remain, but this was a mere 26 per cent of this age group, of whom 64 per cent didn’t bother to vote, and 10 per cent voted Leave.footnote97 Likewise in the Remain stronghold of London the vote rose only 4 per cent over the previous election; in Scotland the vote actually fell. In these figures, the fate of Labour in 2019, when the Conservatives held a lead of 50 per cent over it among workers who voted Leave,footnote98 was already written. Within the overall dichotomy separating them, each camp contained cross-cutting impulses and discrepant constituencies. Status anxieties haunted both: nostalgia for empire among Leavers, fear of demotion at loss of its replacement by the eu among Remainers. Neither knew much or felt strongly about the entity nominally in dispute between, but the passions it masked were real enough. The rustbelt revolted not against a distant bureaucracy in Brussels by which it was scarcely touched, but against the neo-liberal order in London it had endured for a quarter of a century, and the political caste that had imposed it. Youth rebelled against a claustral racism and insular jingoism; in favour of notionally open employment and life-style horizons. But the immigrants with whom it identified were more likely to be black and brown, second-generation Anglophone residents from the former empire, rather than more transient white arrivals from Eastern or Southern Europe. In that sense, its principal cosmopolis may have been less the Union under whose flag it marched than the Commonwealth. Beneath such differences lay a range of alternative identifications. When asked, 60 per cent of Remain voters described themselves as ‘British, not English’; 79 per cent of Leave voters as ‘English, not British’; though, predictably, the two identities could not be easily disentangled in the minds of the respondents, half of each bloc also terming themselves ‘equally English and British’.footnote99 How far did the referendum itself crystallize—or give displaced expression to—a growing, if hitherto somewhat submerged, sense of English identity?footnote100 If it did, would it mean that ‘Englishness’ is today principally an outlook of the kind to which Enoch Powell gave notorious expression at the turn of the seventies? Or might this strain coexist with a sensibility closer to the historic connotations of ‘Little England’—insular, but unambitious and pacific, socially somewhat Scandinavian, free of all illusions of grandeur? Or is the very idea of a distinct English identity something of a mare’s nest, the reality being an unshakeable, if now also malleable British identity,footnote101 of which Johnson’s Cabinet could be taken as an emblem, encompassing chauvinist natives and go-go immigrants alike, that is unlikely ever to drop the Great before Britain? On 31 January 2020 Ukania finally left the European Union, yet the issue of its relations with Europe will persist. Some of the Remainer emotion of recent memory, the part reminiscent of mourning for Diana, will presumably fade. But much of it will not, continuing to be a significant current in the life of the country, by no means reconciled to defeat, as further battles lie ahead over the terms of exit. What are likely to be the consequences of a still smouldering culture war over Europe? Could it be simply folded into the party system, Labour eventually becoming a united party of Rejoin as the Tories under Johnson become the party of Never Again? If such a twist seems improbable, it is because Labour’s performance over Brexit, immobilized like Buridan’s ass while the Tories fought among themselves over the direction of the country, was so continuous with its unbroken record of subalternity in affairs of state—from Macdonald to Attlee, Wilson to Blair without independent initiative: subaltern to the sacristy of Westminster, subaltern to the will of Washington. Now a mutant in so many other ways, in this Labour has remained unchanged. 7. Nexus The upshot? Without any mass upheaval, or even such turbulence as marked the seventies, the order of Ukania has been disrupted as never before since 1911–14, with no new equilibrium in sight. All its components—economy, polity, ideology, territory, diplomacy—have simultaneously and interconnectedly been destabilized. The model of growth around which the country has been built since the late nineteenth century has generated such internal tensions that it has finally backfired. Contracting manufactures, swelling financial and commercial services, deepening regional inequalities, stagnant wages, soaring house prices, escalating inequalities, and when this pattern exploded in a banking crisis, the imposition of austerity to contain it, produced the convulsion of Brexit, and with it the risk of a drop in British gdp potentially greater than any on record. Decline, banished for a season from reputable discourse, has returned in more drastic guise. What lies ahead, many declare, is more like the term in Spengler’s mistranslated title—Untergang: not decline, but downfall; or perhaps, in its abruptness, the French dégringolade. In reality, though the current dénouement is sudden enough, it is the continuity of a British anomaly that marks the successive phases of development since the fifties. Simply, during the trente glorieuses of post-war capitalism, when its war-time rivals were retooling and growing fast, Britain failed to invest and lagged behind the pack. Then, when the long down-turn set in, growth rates dropped and, as Wolfgang Streeck has shown, capitalism became ever more dependent on successive forms of credit to maintain its political stability, Britain—still underinvesting—now led the pack down the path of debt-fuelled accumulation and financialization, boasting of its exemplary performance in speeding ahead of the rest. Such was the neo-liberal recovery of Thatcher and Blair, which ended in tears in 2008, the ‘rude shock’ that so surprised its admirers, driving Britain into a longer recession than its peers, leaving it in the grip of a sharply rising public debt and more cruel fiscal consolidation. Today economic relations between classes under its financialized capitalism are steadily less coherent, as wage earners are exploited along ‘secondary’ lines, as tenants, debtors and savers; foreign firms loom increasingly large in a mainly service-sector economy, itself sustained by surplus value ultimately extracted, often enough, from the Chinese worker. Yet these broken economic relations are still locked within the same political community of fate as in the less troubled past. If the logic of continuous eversion culminated in Brexit, it was not just in generating a trip-wire of popular revolt against the hardships to which it led, but also in fostering a well-off rebellion against the price it had come to require in loss of the kind of sovereignty it had once embodied: not the autonomy of one empire among others, but the paramountcy of a global imperium inordinate in the system of states, in a class by itself for wealth, power and extent of possessions. Inspired by the latter insurgency, recruiting the former, the Tories swept to victory in 2019 under a leader of postmodern charisma. But the contradiction of its origins, before even the costs of the pandemic weighed on it, persists: combining two antithetical forces with a promise to relieve the lot of the poor by making a break whose immediate effect will be to reduce the resources for doing so, and a promise to all of the ultimate grail of a Greater Britain no more credible than its previous iterations. Not only are the strains in the class coalition Johnson has assembled liable to become acute, but the capacity of the Conservatives to handle them is likely to be weaker than in the past. One-Nation Toryism was a going concern down to the time of Macmillan, when a ruling elite of long historical experience was still intact, and ‘you’ve never had it so good’ was not an empty bluff. The campaigns of 2016 and 2019 were fought effectively telling the masses that they had never had it so bad, and were won because enough had come to feel just that. But by the end the Conservatives themselves had been in power for a decade, and today their ministerial cadre, purged of Remainers, has (save for the Chancellor) never looked thinner or more brittle. In a way unlike that of any previous Tory administration, the party has become close to a one-man band, under a leader visibly more at ease campaigning than ruling, committing in office one blunder after another whose sum threatens to put his legacy at risk.footnote102 Numerically, they hold sway; substantively, their command of the situation is insecure, an ascendancy without much ballast. Labour, having lost the working class in 2019 by a huge margin, is in a still less secure position, penned in to the corral of an increasingly middle-class—professional, managerial, clerical—Europeanist constituency, where it risks competing more with Liberal Democrats than Conservatives, with lesser vote-banks among ethnic minorities and youth. Douglas Carswell gave early expression to a view that has since become common: ‘what is fundamentally happening is the disalignment of the Labour intelligentsia from the working-class Labour vote. The fragmentation of that alliance, which has been in place basically since the 1920s, that is what is going to reshape politics.’footnote103 Such is the hope of the right, mainstream and marginal, and fear of the left. If the prediction were accurate, Labour would repeat the trajectory of French social democracy. But for three reasons, this is unlikely. The fate of the Parti socialiste (ps), reduced close to extinction, stands as an obvious warning; the electoral system blocks the rise of a Front National; and though workers may have deserted Labour in large numbers, the trade unions have not, and remain embedded as an institutional force in the party with which, if only on financial grounds, it cannot dispense. Henceforward every effort will be made to paper over the divisions in its traditional constituencies, where the working class as historically understood has itself split along lines of age and asset, as a generation now in its seventies reaps a one-off bonus from council-house sales—a critical factor in defining first-time Tory/Brexit voters in small towns in the North, a legacy of Thatcherism detonating thirty years after her fall—while their children or grandchildren, quite often first-generation university graduates in their families, leave home for precarious jobs in larger, more cosmopolitan cities, electorally still prisoners of Labourism.footnote104 The party has no option, however forlorn a prospect it might for the moment appear, but to seek a revival of the alliance preached by Hobsbawm and now a mantra across all sections of Labour. Writing on the eve of the 2019 election, two advocates of this view—critical of Corbyn’s campaign two years earlier as a narrow-minded pitch, incapable of speaking ‘a language that reconciles identity politics and social liberalism’—concluded that ‘only a significant electoral failure and the election of a new party leader would create conditions ripe for a more maximalist strategy that was able to recover losses in places that have drifted away from Labour.’footnote105 It would be belated to say no sooner said than done, since it is now clear that top levels of the Labour apparatus itself were already hoping, and working, for a defeat of the party in 2017, in order to oust Corbyn, and dismayed that it then did so well. But they did not have to wait long. The arrival of Starmer has restored the party to its normal political self. His Shadow Cabinet indicates the direction of change. Its two most experienced members—and pointed choices—are veterans of New Labour: Charlie Falconer, who engineered the legal justification for the Iraq War, now Shadow Attorney General, and Nick Brown, Chief Whip, back in his old office; the first a familiar of Blair, the second a henchman of Brown, giving Starmer a direct line to both. Among the rest, two-thirds of them mps elected since 2010, diversity of race and gender has been amply catered for, of outlook much less. The only significant hold-over from Corbyn’s team was soon dismissed on a pretext. The fact that so many could hope for the best from Starmer, or believed that he would keep the Manifesto pledges while cultivating a better image in the media, has confirmed Nairn’s depiction in 1964 of the party, and its left, with a vengeance: there, ‘one finds the greatest confusion about simple organizational questions, and the most total ignorance about how the Party works and ought to work.’ Socialists could not do without a theory—a culture—that went beyond the hand-me-down Victorian utilitarianism of the Fabians, to whom trade unions were at the outset content to grant control over policy, and who continue to form the right-wing leadership tradition of the party to this day. Even the scandal at the Labour hq, and the outcry of the left at its effects on the 2017 election, however justifiable, belongs squarely to this uniquely Labourist lineage. Nairn: ‘it is doubtful, indeed, if any other working-class movement has produced as many “traitors”—or at least as many unashamed, magnificently naked traitors—as has Labourism.’ Such a pattern was not just the fault of its leaders, however, but of a ‘system’ that generated the underlying conditions of betrayal—a fundamental tension going back to 1918 or earlier, between the evolutionary ‘reforms’ proposed by the plp, divorced from the goal of building a socialist society, and a left-wing pole of force descended from non-conformism found in the ilp and associated radicalism, too often content to languish as the ‘subjectivity’ or ‘mindless passion’ of the party, useful as militants in elections or at party conferences, yet ‘completely loyal’ to Labour.footnote106 In the new configuration, Starmer himself has a spotless record of political rectitude: supporting the party’s decision, pre-Corbyn, not to oppose Osborne’s cuts to welfare in 2015; backing the attempted coup against Corbyn in 2016; leading the demand for a second referendum to overturn Brexit; and now explaining that since Britain has left the Union, there is no point in arguing about the decision any longer. From the start, the primary aim of the campaign against Brexit by the Guardian and the Labour establishment was always to isolate and remove Corbyn rather than to defend the Union à l’outrance, and once he was gone, the flag of the eu could be dropped without a tremor, no doubt with pragmatic nods from the gargoyle heads of New Labour. On arrival, Starmer was conventionally described—along with most of his picks—as ‘soft left’. A more accurate term would be soft right, a surface that is virtually bound to become harder as he settles into power, as with Kinnock and Blair before him, though in a style more sober than that of windbag or disc-jockey. A reversion to the mean is not an exact reproduction of the same. Though Corbynism was in many obvious ways a version of the emotional Labour left of old whose portrait was drawn by Tom Nairn, Corbyn himself is not a typical product of this strain. What set him apart from it, and made him the object of much more violent vituperation, was his rejection of imperial practices, in whatever guise—humanitarian, anti-totalitarian, patriotarian, testamentarian—they presented themselves: it is enough to compare his record with a Foot or Mikardo, even Benn. Unforgivable, especially, was his stance on Palestine. Under Starmer, a clean slate is being made of all of this. A quarter of his Shadow Cabinet are Labour Friends of Israel. What of Corbyn’s following, the hundreds of thousands drawn into the party as he became leader of it? That they represented something new in Labour is plain. But what was it? No good study of this levy, which suddenly more than doubled the Party’s membership, exists—only surmises are possible. But it now looks as if it was a gust of enthusiasm, not confined to youth, attracted by sheer novelty, rather than driven by conviction, an influx which the culture of Labourism—its ugliest features hidden from sight in nauseous email traffic at party hq—was incapable of educating, but not of absorbing. Corbyn was elected as leader in 2015 with some 250,000 votes, a majority of 59.5 per cent. Five years later, Starmer was elected with 276,000 votes, and a majority of the same order—56 per cent, if on a considerably lower turn-out, at just under 63 per cent as against 76 per cent. There was no massive turnover of membership in between. The half of the party’s membership that predated Corbyn remained weakly or staunchly Blairite, while the candidate of the left, Rebecca Long-Bailey, received just over a quarter of the vote. In other words, most of Corbyn’s supporters decamped without compunction to a politician who had conspired with others to depose him within a year of his election. Whether the residue who did not will make more of a difference to the party than their forebears in the time of Foot or Benn remains to be seen. There are reasons to suspect they might. For the warmth with which Corbyn was initially received among the young, however ephemeral or uncritical, was not just an attraction to his person, but came out of successive reactions, first to the invasion of Iraq and then the crash of 2008 and its consequences. These left a marked generational hostility to both imperial war and economic austerity, an outlook since intensified by conflicts of race and gender, and crises of climate and environment, to which xr and Black Lives Matter testify as much in Britain as in America. There is also the acute material pressure on the newest cohorts to enter the labour market, as they face precarious jobs, stagnant wages, the rising costs and hazards of any kind of urban accommodation, and the burden of student debt. All, in principle, fuel for persisting radicalization. In practice, the possibility that fatigue and demoralization could eventually deaden impulses of revolt, generating a disillusioned inertia, cannot equally be ruled out. Yet should such a shift lead not to apathy, but a slippage in the direction of conformist moderation, Newest Labour would still not be out of the woods. For the party is confronted with the task, not just of reconciling ‘identity politics’ (sc. Leaver proletariat) and ‘social liberalism’ (sc. middle-class and youth Remainderdom), but of developing an agenda to compete with Johnson’s One-Nation Toryism, and not preempted by it. Recycling amanuenses of New Labour, or scouring for sub-Fabian scrub in the tundra of ‘public policy’ studies, will not be enough. Might the indignation over Brexit of the liberal intelligentsia—understood not as an elevated catch-all for professional and managerial strata intermediate between capital and labour, but in a more classical sense—provide mental fire-power for the job, of the kind that Labour has so long lacked? Its knighted leader, whose London constituency covers Bloomsbury, King’s Cross (with its Guardian hq), Regent’s Park, Primrose Hill, Chalk Farm, Kentish Town, Haverstock Hill and Highgate, could hardly be more symbolically situated for such a rapprochement, eagerly sought by his local backers as soon as he was adopted. Nor is there much doubt that the party can count on the vast majority of intellectuals south of the Tees for its votes, as New Labour could do. To generate creative enthusiasm and commitment is another matter. The speed with which the banner of Remain has been cast away is unlikely to excite a stratum which mobilized behind it with some delay, but then in overwhelming numbers. The feminization of the plp, a majority of whose members and half of the Shadow Cabinet are now women, could attract constructive political energy from their counterparts in the academy. But it is difficult to imagine a real change of attitude in the intelligentsia as a whole, or the balance of forces within it, so long as universities creak in the monetized vice, now tightened by the pandemic, left by New Labour and its managers, whose achievements Starmer has declared the party has no intention of repudiating. Bitterness over Europe will remain, not just for reasons of cultural or moral attachment, but also because eu research funds were sometimes a welcome supplement to niggardly local provision, and not least because in Britain so many university teachers themselves come from the eu—a quarter of the total, probably the highest proportion in any professional group of the country. But whether this will issue into spirited mobilization or sullen withdrawal is unforeseeable. The card of Rejoin, were Starmer ever to play it, would galvanize many. But though perhaps held behind his hand for use at some point in the future, for the time being it takes no tricks. Students, equally pro-European, but stultified by their conversion into customers purchasing credentials for the market, are unlikely to spur their teachers into action. The bruise is not healed, and will go on hurting. In Scotland, the position is very different. While intellectual opinion has long been split between unionism and nationalism, but virtually unanimous in favour of the eu, nationalism became under the rule of New Labour the more dominant and more pro-European of the two camps, as the neo-liberal regime in London, packed with vociferously unionist Scots—Brown, Cook, Reid, Darling, Campbell et al: bards of Britishness to a manfootnote107—antagonized more and more sectors of Scottish society, fuelling the rise of the snp. When Scotland voted heavily for Remain in the referendum on Europe, Brexit came as a vindication, not an alienation, of pre-existing separatist sensibility among the majority of the intelligentsia. Not that the snp itself paid much more attention to the latter than Labour to its English counterparts, in a political landscape still in some ways remarkably undeveloped for a renascent nation, lacking any long-established national—as distinct from principally city-local—press or widely read periodicals of its own. Prudent and pragmatic in office, stressing ‘competency’ and identity as much or more than any consistent policy agenda, the party’s electoral strength—nine victories at the polls in a row—has relieved it of the need to develop any coherent ideology beyond demands for independence. That despite this score-card, these have so far failed to gain majority support need not discourage it. Had the referendum of 2014 been confined to those born in Scotland, it would have passed by a majority of 52.7 per cent; it was those born in the rest of the uk who defeated it, voting by 72 per cent against independence. Among all those under the age of 54, wherever they were born, there was also a comfortable majority for independence.footnote108 On this reading, the snp can outwait the Tory government in London, which has made it clear it will not grant a second referendum, until time does its work and unionist elderlies die off, hoping meanwhile to secure one from a Labour Party needing its votes in a hung parliament, as once Irish nationalists had the necessary leverage to force Home Rule on Liberals in Westminster. Such a prospect, of course, is not without risk. Too long a sojourn in power without delivering the rationale of the party could erode its popularity with voters, allowing a come-back of some unionist coalition. To which a European-minded snp supporter could reply, in Andreotti’s famous retort to those who said the same of the Democrazia Cristiana in Italy, Il potere logora chi non ce l’ha: ‘power wears out those who don’t have it’—not those who do. Alternatively, if the aim of the party is the creation of a just and equal Scottish society, as it claims, where is the prospectus for doing so? Recalling Tom Nairn’s autopsy half a century ago of the three dreams of Scottish nationalism till then—Calvinist, romantic, neo-third-worldist—a mordant compatriot has judged it the fourth: ‘Ultimately, yet another “dream” of Scottish nationalism, one that has carried it into government and to hitherto fantastical electoral heights, seems unlikely to be redeemed, though whether that betrayal will occur pre or post independence is less clear. What was it that Alex Salmond proclaimed during his resignation speech? “The dream” he asserted—probably correctly—“will never die”.’footnote109 For the moment, imprisoned within a Britain that has taken Scotland with it out of the Europe to which Edinburgh looked as its better home, the snp faces more of an impasse than it admits. Entry into Europe as an independent state alongside Britain as another member of the eu was one thing. Despite Spanish threats, Brussels could hardly have expelled a territory up till then an integral part of its jurisdiction. Continuity would have demanded it be retained, as just another flag on the podium. Now, however, negotiation for entry would come from a secessionist applicant outside its jurisdiction. In Yugoslavia, the eu was content to follow Germany’s lead in patronizing its break-up, and then proceed to a piece-meal gradual absorption of its successor states—so far, two out of six, ab initio Berlin’s favourites. But Yugoslavia was a communist country, and a federation at that, whose constitution—like that of the ussr—formally permitted secession. Breaking it up was no skin off the nose of capitalism, and whatever the collateral damage in lives, served the geo-political interests of the West. Even so, there was a taboo on boundary changes, Brussels insisting on the retention of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which could only be held together as a protectorate, and when Kosovo was detached from Serbia by nato bombardment, unable to broker general agreement to its independence—Spain in the lead, Cyprus, Greece, Slovakia and Romania all refusing it recognition, for fear of the example it set. Scotland is not a communist state, and the precedent it might offer to Catalonia would be a red-line to any of the alternative royalist regimes—in complexion psoe or pp, both unionist à l’outrance—in Madrid. Spain could hardly have vetoed Scottish membership of the eu, so long as Britain itself was a member. Once that restraint is gone, it certainly could and in all probability would. In what conceivable ways, if any, Edinburgh could seek to circumvent this obstacle is not a question to be raised at Holyrood, which has its own taboos. The obstacle is the reflection of a reality that is consistently ignored in Britain. The eu is a political construction, first and foremost. Economic integration, however important in its own right, to a point where it can give the appearance of an aim in itself, is not its raison d’être, and where the two conflict, the logic of politics, state or inter-state, over-rides the sense, good or bad, of economics. Obsessed with internal disputes, Ukanian perceptions of Brexit have paid little attention to the European part in it. But viewed from Brussels, the priority has been clear from the start, and is political. Britain must be punished for the example it has set in showing that ever closer union is not irreversible, regardless of whether or not the eu itself incurs an economic cost for its retribution, provided the uk pays a greater one. Commercially, it would be less disruptive to the Union to minimize, rather than maximize, the penalties for leaving it, especially to a state of Britain’s size and inter-connectedness with the eu. But politically, to do so would defeat the purpose of intimidation, emboldening—so it is feared—others to consider departure too. To this intention, Conservative negotiators had no answer, which in logic could only have been political too, a warning that if pressed on this plane, the eu could suffer security—military and diplomatic—costs as well. Any such notion, above all, May and her ministers were voluble in disavowing. Post-Brexit, the Johnson government faces another version of the same, eminently geo-political, problem. Now that exit from the eu has been, at any rate legally, consummated, what kind of foreign policy is open for London to adopt? Today’s Republican administration has little interest in allies of any sort, no matter how eager to please it, and may have only a few short months of life left to it. Tomorrow’s probable Democratic administration, Biden on the lead-strings of Obama, will find its ally in the eu. Where then will be the diplomatic space left for Britain? In abstraction, logic would point once again in the direction of a coalition of the wing powers, Britain and Russia, against Continental Europe, as in the Napoleonic and Second World Wars. But could even Dominic Cummings’s musings on unsentimental Bismarckian statecraft stretch to that? Cold War ideology in full spate of revival, Tory backbenchers already barking in chorus against Beijing and Moscow, forbids it. Might just that be the prophylactic against British isolation, the West closing ranks in Atlantic unity against a dual totalitarian menace in Eurasia once again? Surely what is most probable, but also, of course, least self-standing or distinct: not taking, but handing back control, as a dinghy towed by the capital ships of Washington and Brussels. Meanwhile, at home the emergencies of departure and contagion loom unforgiving ahead of the restyled Conservative administration. Brexit remains unfinished business, its materialization suspended. London may reckon that the shock of a hard exit would not register much amid the larger earthquake of lockdown and a global recession. But how the huge ongoing blow to capital is to be repaired and labour relieved without a fiscal Götterdämmerung is clear to no-one in the government or out of it. Before the pandemic struck, two loyalists of the status quo worried that Brexit, by removing the ‘policy anchor’ of bipartisan consensus supplied by the eu—excluding the irresponsible nostrums right or left of those who had opposed entry to it—‘shook to its core the world-view that the big contours of the uk’s economic policy were firmly set and resided outside the reach of democratic contest.’footnote110 Another of the company provided disabused reassurance. The central fact of the country’s modern history was the deep continuity of Britain’s ‘liberal market economy’, whatever its apparent anomalies, from Edwardian times, if not earlier, onwards. That had persisted, its basic shape unaltered, through Keynesian and Monetarist episodes alike. By contrast with both of these, no significant battle of ideas had preceded Brexit, nor had any significant economic interest favoured it—business and trade unions were united in opposition. There was no chance of it representing a paradigm shift. ‘The foundations of Britain’s liberal market economy survived both the Keynesian revolution and the neo-liberal counter-revolution. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect they will also weather the leaving of the eu. For all the talk of a radical change in the economic policy set-up, it is just as likely that the end result is a very British attempt to “muddle through” with a model which is itself not working and of which one of the key props (eu membership) has been knocked away. The implication of this is that Brexit will not generate a new model for the uk, but simply an inferior version of the existing one.’footnote111 Middle England is right to be upset, but need not fret overmuch. Familiar landmarks are not going to be washed away. Britain’s liberal market economy—read: secular eversion—generated the two-fold revolt that produced Brexit. The victory of Brexit led to Conservative capture of a majority of the working class. Working-class expectations require concessions from a suddenly altered Conservative regime that Brexit impedes. The desertion of its proletarian base leaves Labour sociologically adrift in the eddies of a protean middle class. Its share of the middle class is attached to Europe, no part of it more passionately than the liberal intelligentsia. Attracted towards Labour by its stance in the cultural war over Europe, the English intelligentsia is alienated from it by what became of its own principal habitat under it. In Scotland, alienation of all classes of society from Labour has given power to a nationalism looking to Europe. Departure from Europe has both inflamed Scottish nationalism and entrapped it. The price of departure, indexed by the eu to political not economic considerations, has left Britain’s rulers answerless politically and, in all probability, the wells of Brexit further poisoned economically. No part of the current configuration is independent of the others. Their nexus is bound to dissolve, in one way or another. When or how is anyone’s guess.