Does My Bomb Look Big in This?

TO THE PEOPLE who wear it, it is a badge of national pride and cultural identity. But to others it is seen as a barrier to communication, a frightening and alien phenomenon that breeds deep mistrust and suspicion.
Its wearers are fiercely proud of their history and passionate about their beliefs. But some say they are a bunch of relics living in the past and it is time for them to wake up and join the 21st century.
But most of all, say its critics, it looks really naff.
So should the kilt be banned? And are Scots, with their readiness to take offence at the merest hint of a slur upon their country, history or national dress, becoming almost as big a bunch of whingers as the flag-burning, goggle-eyed Islamists who regularly pepper news bulletins?
Scotland’s many failings as a supposedly modern, civilised nation have been well chronicled(See How This Man Is Turning Scotland into the Laughing Stock of the World here), and yet still Scots are desperately clinging on to the coat-tails of history and chanting the mantra Bannockburn! William Wallace! Tunnocks Teacakes! while sticking their fingers in their ears and stamping their feet on the ground. The merest whiff of criticism of anything about their country will have them bristling with indignation. And I’m not just referring to the Scottish Nationalist Party which genuinely thinks Scotland, already a veritable wreckage of appalling health care, spiralling crime and crumbling infrastructure despite England’s massive subsidies, can do better as an independent nation living off its North Sea oil revenue and shortbread biscuit sales. Nor am I referring exclusively to Scottish football supporters, whose public persona as a bunch of loveable, kilt-wearing Tartan Army members is belied by the stone-hearted bigots drowning in bile and bitterness in the shadows of Ibrox, Celtic Park, Tynecastle and Pittodrie. (A supposedly intelligent Celtic supporter once told me that a tabloid scoop about a couple of his favourite players getting drunk at their Christmas do was as bad as the Sun’s infamous front page criticising Liverpool supporters after Hillsborough. This imbecile was unmoved by my protestation that 96 innocents had died at Hillsborough, while the only casualties of the Celtic story were the egos of a couple of selfish, spoiled players).

OLD BIDDY

No, never mind the SNP zealots and the football bigots, it’s the shopkeepers who raises an eyebrow at my English accent, or the thousands of people who marched through the streets of Edinburgh last month demanding independence(what happens when their oil money runs out, because there isn’t a trace of any other long-term, viable industry in the country?), or the thousands who have lobbied the Scottish Parliament to make St. Andrew’s Day a national holiday(because let’s face it, an extra day off work to play golf or get pissed on Tennent’s Extra Strong is much more important than beating crime or fixing hospitals). It’s the stupid old biddy who called a BBC Radio Scotland phone-in last Monday after the national football team’s spectacular defeat of France to declare, apropos of absolutely nothing, that: “I lived in the States for a bit, and have a brother who lives in South Africa, and people just love the Scots. They love the way we talk, the bagpipes, everything.”
I’ve got news for you, missus. I don’t love you. I love my Scottish girlfriend and her Scottish sister and kids, and the Scottish village I live in, but I can’t fucking stand Ewan McGregor or square sausage. Their Scottishness has nothing to do with it. I love my girlfriend because she’s thoughtful, kind, clever and gorgeous. I think Ewan McGregor’s a twat because he’s a posh boy who can’t act. And square sausage just isn’t right. Why is nationality such a big deal for Scots? Isn’t that, erm, racism? Hate me because of my opinions or film star good looks by all means, but don’t hate me because I’m English. Am I living in a country of racists? I’ve never seen nor heard a non-Scottish presenter or reporter on Scottish TV or radio(with the brief exception of the human car-crash that was Scotsport’s Sarah ‘O’, from Dublin), whereas the English broadcast media is full of Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Australian and Asian faces and voices.
Back on that BBC Radio Scotland phone-in show, another Scot took time out from tending his herd of highland cattle or deep-frying Mars Bars to explain the football team’s success thus: “It’s because we have a Scotsman in charge of the team. And with a Scotsman in charge of the country, we can be great again.” Actually, maybe he wasn’t tending cattle after all. Maybe he was wearing a big pointy hat and erecting a gallows.
The average Scot is turning their country into one big parody, even more successfully and effortlessly than Borat is currently doing with Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan wants to be taken seriously on the world stage so is furious at comedian Sacha Baron Cohen taking the piss out of its rustic ways and folklore. Scotland wants to be taken seriously too, so regularly arranges for its leading lights – including First Minister Jack McConnell and that senile old git who loves the country so much he lives in the Bahamas, Sean Connery – to be pictured wearing gaudily-coloured skirts, puffing into a pigskin bag and addressing a sheep’s intestine.

MORRIS DANCERS

I have nothing against a country’s traditions. I just don’t like having them rammed down my throat every time a country wants to prove how great it is. They should be confined to postcards. Imagine what state my own home country would be in if the government wheeled out David Beckham wearing a Morris dancer’s costume every time a foreign head of state came to visit. Or what Spaniards would think of Prime Minister Zapatero hosting a summit wearing a matador’s costume and brandishing a red cape.
Right up until that radio phone-in show – another comment was “It would be great to see the players wearing kilts when they come out to inspect the pitch” – I’d planned to devote this week’s column to the subject of Muslim fanatics. Not the ones who strap several pounds of explosive to their bodies before walking into a crowded shopping centre – they’re Muslim murderers - but the ones who are on the news nearly every night getting hysterical over some perceived slight, whether it be the Pope quoting some medieval emperor or Jack Straw writing about the niqab. Why don’t they protest over something important, something that affects the welfare of people who share their faith, like the genocide in Darfur, or human rights violations in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and just about every other Middle Eastern country? Why are they always burning flags and issuing fatwas just because a newspaper has published cartoons of Mohammad? OK, it’s offensive to their beliefs and proscribed by the Koran, but has it killed anyone? No. So why do they go off burning down churches and attacking embassies when a more reasoned protest might get them more sympathy? Why don’t they protest about the hundreds of fellow Muslims languishing in Egyptian, Saudi and Syrian jails because they dared criticise the government? Why don’t they protest about the abuse of Muslim women’s rights in countries like Malaysia, where a judge ruled it was perfectly acceptable for a Muslim to divorce his wife by sending a text message?(Read here).
But listening to that radio phone-in show reminded me there is a bunch of bigoted, defensive and insular fundamentalists much closer to home. Not just the SNP supporters, not just the football fans, but also the average Scot in the street who has never been able to forgive and forget King Edward I, the Duke of Cumberland, Margaret Thatcher or the “fixed” 1979 referendum on devolution(The majority – 32 per cent - of Scots voted in favour of devolution, but an amendment to the Scotland Act meant that a ‘yes’ vote of at least 40 per cent was required. What most Scots choose not to remember, however, is that the amendment that cost them their “dream” was the work of a Scottish Labour backbencher, George Cunningham. As a direct result, the Labour government lost a vote of confidence a month later and the Tories and Thatcher swept to power soon afterwards). To them, the English are to blame for everything. Just like Islamists blame America for everything.

ELVIS PRESLEY

A lot of it is to do with Scotland’s sorry excuse for a media, which considers the “Scottishness” of a story paramount to everything else(In the past, various Scottish publications have “traced” Elvis Presley’s roots to an Aberdeenshire village). Consider this: Scotland’s national TV, radio and press serve a population half the size of that of London, and smaller than that of the North West of England. Therefore, there’s often a shortage of news. My nightly STV bulletin, which covers an area about half the size of England, regularly leads on job losses at the local fish factory. And the number of Z-list celebrities in Scotland is extremely finite. There’s only so much you can write about “sexy Radio Clyde presenter Suzy McGuire.” So the media has nothing left to fill its pages and airtime with other than its “Scottishness”. And occasionally, this “Scottishness” mutates into Anglophobia. Confined to the sports pages, I can put up with as much anti-English “humour” as the next Alan Rough-ridiculing Sassenach. But when it spills over into the rest of the news, I don’t find it so funny. When a person is gratuitously and derogatorily labelled “English” in the same way non-whites or non-Christians have been variously stigmatised throughout the ages, I stop laughing.
In an article in Media Guardian last month, “political commentator” and former BBC Scotland presenter Iain MacWhirter was only a whisker away from racism when he wrote: “The group has appointed Mike Gilson of the Portsmouth News as editor of The Scotsman – a local newspaper man who has no obvious familiarity with the Scottish political or media scene[….]his appointment was greeted with dismay among the Edinburgh chatteratti who fear The Scotsman is being turned into another local paper.” The implication being that Gilson won’t be any good because he’s not Scottish. (And why shouldn’t The Scotsman be considered as a local newspaper when it serves a smaller population than that of London or several regions of England?)
Elsewhere, the English editor of the Daily Record was made the scapegoat for dwindling sales and sacked. His replacement was a fat fucker from Falkirk who’s first declaration was: “I want to make the paper more Scottish.” Isn’t that a bit like the editor of the The Sun saying she wants to make her paper “more white”? Sales of the Record, incidentally, have continued to plummet, so maybe there is hope for Scotland after all.
Going back to The Scotsman – a “quality” paper, by the way - its “Fact of the Day” for yesterday was: Scottish patriotic heroes William Wallace and Andrew Moray wrote a letter to the mayors of Lubeck and Hamburg today in 1297 proclaiming that "the Kingdom of Scotland has, by God's Grace, recovered by battle from the power of the English.”
Who needs to worry about Islamist extremists when you’ve got a bunch of backward-looking, chip-on-the-shoulder, skirt-wearing, insecure xenophobes living next door?
NEXT WEEK: Why Dublin must be wiped off the map. (Just kidding.)
© Jack Havana 2006. No reproduction in part or whole without Jack’s permission.
Recommendations from Jack’s Scottish collection:
MUSIC: Scared to Dance, by The Skids(1979). Including punk’s finest three minutes and 16 seconds, Into the Valley. Listen here
FILM: Comfort and Joy(Bill Forsyth, 1984).
BOOK: The Man Who Walks, by Alan Warner. Tear-inducingly funny.
WHISKY: Laphroaig 15-yr-old Islay single malt. Easier to drink than order.