ABSTRACT
For Tom Nairn, a middle class emerging unusually early was able to merge with an existing agrarian establishment to form a 'natural governing elite' and so withstand the later popular pressures of European revolutions, particularly using a deeply embedded 'civil service intelligentsia' to absorb any such Jacobin hankerings. Progressive, then, we assume on a British level to mean forward in a self-evidently civilised, fair way. But more fundamentally, in a state form stuck 'eternally' with Lockean natural law, it means forward through expanding the ground from which individual property can be created. Literary examples of this kind of glitchscape became especially visible in the decade before the Leave vote, in England as well as Scotland, and not merely from the realms we would expect of Leave voters. In Savage Messiah, the developmental destruction of public housing is moreover associated with the timeframe of the modern British state.
