anti-Scottish ranting – why?
Posted by ewancrawford on February 6, 2009
Gordon Brown and Jeremy Clarkson actually have a fair bit in common – they both for their own purposes like to wrap themselves firmly in the Union Jack.
Brown’s motivation is clearly political – a rather lame attempt to disguise his, well, Scottishness, and Clarkson’s is presumably commercial – there’s a market apparently in having a go at the French, Germans etc.
I don’t know if Clarkson is the kind of person the Prime Minister has in mind when he talks about the “British genius” but I’m guessing after today probably not.
On their own, I can’t actually take the The Top Gear’s latest moronic comments seriously - citing Brown’s disability and nationality and branding him an idiot (when no matter what you think of him he clearly is not) is just not worth bothering about.
But it’s interesting that it’s now ok to use Scottish and Scotland as terms of abuse. Read some of the comments on the above link and that’s clear.
Simon Heffer, in the Telegraph, has recently essentially compared Scots in public life to dogs that need training. We used know how to behave apparently, but sadly not now. I should let this kind of stuff go, but a serious newspaper should be ashamed to allow this bile to appear in print.
The remarkable thing of course is that no TV presenter in Scotland or serious political commentator here would ever describe the English in these terms. (If they did we would be subjected to acres of newspaper coverage beating ourselves up over our dreadful anti-Englishness.)
But the reality is that such ingorant prejudice just wouldn’t take place.
