The Green Ribbon

Nairn and Aughey on the Brown era

It looks as if the Blair-Brown handover has prompted some significant academic voices to join the online debate about the future of the British state.

Not content with launching his own blog, leading nationalist thinker Tom Nairn has a piece over at Scottish Futures:

it would be easy to conclude that ‘Brownism’ will be nothing but a
faltering and hypocritical continuation of Blairism. Yet one can’t be
so sure, for a quite straightforward reason: some democratic reform of
the UK state has become unavoidable. The new Prime Minister has already
expressed his wish for ‘constitutional changes’, without saying what
these will be. (Scottish Futures)

Meanwhile, in a neat piece of symmetry, leading unionist thinker Arthur Aughey has a post at the Campaign for an English Parliament’s blog that reaches a very similar conclusion:

The results of the Scottish Parliamentary and the Welsh Assembly
elections can hardly make the prime minister-in-waiting so certain that
the reforms which the Labour government instituted after 1997 have
brought into being Brown’s vision of Britain as ‘a community of
citizens with common needs, mutual interests, shared objectives,
related goals and, most of all, linked destinies’.

Where Brown too easily synthesised the ideas of popular and
constitutional sovereignty, the new Scottish National Party Executive
in Edinburgh and the new first minister, Alex Salmond, have a very
different notion of who and what is sovereign. And in present
circumstances it becomes ever clearer that the constitution really does
need a proper tidying up.(CEP Blog)

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2 responses to “Nairn and Aughey on the Brown era”

  1. Maria avatar
    Maria

    “It looks as if Blair-Brown handover has prompted some significant academic voices to join the online debate about the future of the British state.”
    Ooh, Tom – “significant academic voices”? What a nice change from the everyday rabble usually gobbing off about the situation, eh? And are these “significant academic voices” both purely “Celtic” as well? I bet that would really make your heart sing.

    Reply
  2. Tom Griffin avatar
    Tom Griffin

    “significant academic voices”?
    Okay that was a pompous line, I admit, but perhaps there’s a kind of progress in the fact that the academics feel the need to engage in the same forums members of the ‘gobby everday rabble’ like myself.
    I suppose both Nairn and Aughey could be described as Celts in the broad sense I used it in the previous post which you took exception to, as covering Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Having said that, their views on the constitutional issue are diametrically opposed to each other, so I doubt they could both make my heart sing at the same time.
    Of course, If I were a Celtic chauvinist what would really make my heart sing would be Gordon Brown’s dominance over English domestic politics.
    However, since I’m not and it doesn’t, I dont expect the English to accept inequality any more than anyone else.

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