Pariah

Pariah is a retrospect of Tony Blair's recent New Labour plebiscite, so far the most absurd "election" of the 21st century. After a much-vaunted Constitutional Revolution, overwhelming victory was obtained on less than a quarter of the electoral register, with more people abstaining than voted for Blair. In 2000 the Constitution of the United States collapsed into farce; this year it was the turn of the United Kingdom, as the oldest and most stable of Western democracies turned into a despised pariah of the global age. "How is Britain breaking up?" asks this book. Is there any chance--or indeed any need--of its being repaired? In this corrosive polemic Nairn argues that democratic and constitutional reform alone provides an answer to such questions. But the longer the British ancien regime endures, the less chance there will be of such changes taking place by agreement. "Reform or perish" is the moral; but to perish further looks like the only way towards reform. "'Declining Britain' had been happening for a century of so; but parody-Britain is a mere twenty-three years old. In that sense it is curiously like an unwilling new nation. Only here, the novel 'identity' happens to consist in a ceaseless puppet-show of sere age, ever-unfolding legitimacy, and constant evocation of 1940, 'Our Finest Hour' ...Yet decomposition cannot really be kept at bay. In one way or another, the chemistry of decay is bound to creep in and replace or falsify the principles of an over-celebrated traditionalism. Thus Dorian Gray-Blair gazes every day into his reconstructed portrait of unfaltering youth, the rejuvenation and prolongation of a legendary past; but with each new shock or revelation, the truth shows through, like some subjacent and remorseless fungus."