Labour's timidity over Brexit dissected

The new issue of the London Review of Books carries a review of Neal Ascherson's book Tom Nairn: ‘Painting Nationalism Red’? by Rory Scothorne.

In the course of it (and behind the LRB paywall), Scothorne nicely dissects Labour's timidity over Brexit:

None of Labour's warring factions dares to suggest that this moment of constitutional breakdown demands a constitutional revolution; instead the party is constrained by the bad logic of adjectival manoeuvre - hard, soft, chaotic, no deal, Tory, people’s – around an all-consuming and unstoppable noun. 

When experience strips away these rhetorical qualifiers, Labour will be dangerously complicit in what remains.

Neal Ascherson, who stood for the Liberal Democrats in the 1999 Holyrood elections, is one of my favourite writers. And I remember reading The Enchanted Glass: Britain and Its Monarchy by Tom Nairn back in the 1980s, when it was widely reviewed.