The recent story in the Daily Mail about the Labour party bod who said "I don't speak Glaswegian" and was accused of racism, was laugheable.
Being half-Scot myself, I'm often hard put to it to understand my Glaswegian relatives. English speaking Welsh folk are perfectly clear to me, as are most English accents, but give me broad Norfolk and I'm lost.
But the Daily Mail article writer, Simon Walters, seems to want to use the article to soap box a little and a peculiar anti-English chip on the shoulder, a desire to malign and stereotype, creeps in:
"It is not the first time a prominent English figure has been accused of racism against another part of Britain. Tony Blair faced a police investigation after allegedly bawling ‘******* Welsh’ when Labour did badly in an election there."
Um, Tony Blair is SCOTTISH, born and bred in Scotland, and of mixed parentage. Here's Tony talking about his grandfather:
"If we were naughty," he said recently, "he'd come after us with that stick and say, 'Ah'll gie ye a richt skelpin.'"
Despite Tony's own attempts to blur his origins for political purposes at times, the fact remains that he was born in Scotland and that makes him Scottish. Unless, of course, his background doesn't stand up to ethnic purity tests in the eyes of Simon Walters? But then, surely, Scottish is a nationality, not a race? Any other assertion is racist.
But what really sticks in the crop about Simon Walters is the fact that he can write a load of inaccurate nonsense, but true examples of racism in the UK - including the Barnett Formula and West Lothian Question, both levelled against the English, don't seem to exist to him.
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