Archive of Scott Lavery

At the height of the crisis of the 1970s Tom Nairn published his collection of essays The Break-Up of Britain, which soon became a key intellectual reference point for the Scottish and British left. Post-Brexit, could those same trends that Nairn predicted would lead to the break-up of Britain be returning? In this article, Scott Lavery asks what Nairn can teach us today.

History is filled with cases of left wing governments whose economic plans were sunk by the disciplinary power of global financial markets. With the very real chance of the Labour Party winning any forthcoming general election, would the same happen to them? In this article, Scott Lavery analyses the current conjuncture of global capitalism to see what room to maneuver Corbyn's Labour would have.