I think it’s fair to say that Alfie at Waking Hereward was not impressed with the opening of Scot Andrew Marr’s Radio Four series Unmasking The English.
(I thought it pretty poor stuff as well. Eighty years ago another Scottish media type wrote about the English rather more successfully. Archibald Gordon Macdonell found fame with his first novel, the autobiographical England, Their England. It’s still in print. The visit to the avant-garde theatre production is my favourite part – you can just imagine the respectful Front Row review.)
I discovered this novel recently, quite by chance.
I was expecting some kind of dour depression-era novel along the lines of Little Man, What Now?, or Love on the Dole. Instead, I found a brilliantly funny – yet very affectionate – satire on the English. The style hovers somewhere between Sellers & Yeatman (1066 And all That) and something else that now escapes me. Whatever, it has a very modernist feel, which really hasn’t dated at all.
My favourite episode is the village cricket match.
I haven’t heard the Marr programme, but I expect that Wanking Hereward’s view of the programme would have been the same whatever its content, simply because Marr is a Scot.
It’s depressing that ignorant bigots like Wanking Hereward should spend so much time focusing their bigotry on the Scots and Scotland, and it’s depressing that he’s been given the time of day here.
Most of these anti-Scots bigots with bees in their bonnets about the Labour government are under the illusion that we have a Labour government because of Scottish Labour MPs. This is simply untrue, though such ignorance is widespread*.
Here are the figures from 2005 for the 529 MPs elected in England alone:
286 Labour
194 Conservative
47 LibDem and
2 independents
…giving Labour a clear majority in England of 43 MPs (by contrast, Scotland has 59 MPs in total) – so it is clear that England has a Labour government because England voted for it, at least under our current electoral system (rather than because of Tartan clad stormtroopers annexing England when no one was looking).
Some malcontents point out that the Conservatives got 60,000 more votes in total than Labour in England, but that is completely irrelevant under our electoral system – we don’t have proportional representation, and if we did, the Conservatives would have had even fewer MPs (and no chance of swinging the balance their way in the future).
There are indeed things that need to be sorted out constitutionally, but the Labour government’s failure to tidy things up is NOT the fault of the Scots or Scotland – so anti-Scots bigotry on this basis seems to me to be entirely unmerited, ignorant and unthought out (as most bigotry is).
If and when the people of England are fed up of the way they are governed it is very easy for them to remedy the matter, having 529 MPs out of the ~650 or so at Westminster.
Apologies for straying off-topic, but if we’re going to link to ignorant bigots like Wanking Hereward we should alert people to the facts that reveal the full ignorance of his bigotry too.
* Even on EU Referendum earlier this year, a blog that I normally have a great deal of time for. Richard did correct his incorrect assertion, though sadly in a disingenuous manner.