David Starkey, the noted telly-historian, think a-sexual Cumbrian Lily Savage sans wig, and you're not far off the mark, has wheeled out yet another diatribe about 'feeble little Scotland'. Fear not, he's allowed to insult Scotland because he spent piss soaked holidays here as a nipper.
http://www.totalpolitics.com/magazine_detail.php?id=573
Here's the latest diatribe. Keep up the good work Dave, you'll soon be free of this feeble little nation and our parasitic ways...
You also sparked controversy with your remarks on Question Time about Scotland being a "feeble little nation".
It was a joke! The question was did I think the English should treat St George's Day the same way the Scots and all the rest of them treat their saints' days - St Andrew, St Patrick and my answer was no. That would mean we would become a feeble little nation like them and we're showing every sign of doing just that. H.G. Wells has this wonderful phrase - "the English are the only nation without national dress". It is a glory that we don't have such a thing. If you want to be academic about it, there are two completely different patterns of nationalism in the British Isles - the Celtic nationalism of Scotland, Wales, Ireland, which is entirely typical nineteenth century European nationalism, an invention based on folklore, supposed authentic peasant cultures which are entirely fictional, national dress, national music and some goddamn awful national poet like Burns. English nationalism went through that phase under Henry VIII.
But if you do really want me to go back to being abusive - I would say that Scotland's decisions with the Libyan bomber confi rms everything I said about them. If you want to see what happens when a country becomes 'little' - when you have a government that wouldn't make county councillors in England, and a Minister of Justice that is an underemployed solicitor - that's what you get. And I am not anti-Scottish, I love Scotland - my childhood holidays were there - apart from that fact it pissed with rain all the time. But Scotland's greatness took place not in medieval history when it was a catastrophe of a place, but in its long, long association with England and Britain. The transformation of Scotland from this deeply backward Presbyterian horror of the early 17th century - where you still hang a lad in the 1690s for denying the existence of the Devil - to this extraordinary 'Athens of the North' of the Scottish enlightenment, the amazing products of Glasgow University in the 18th century, is when Scotland looks out as part of a greater whole. What's happened of course is that Scotland is now looking in. It has become exactly like medieval Scotland - the clannishness, the introversion, chucking money at the Edinburgh Festival to make it 'more Scottish', that awful Parliament, the dreadful Parliament building. The self-indulgence of the whole thing, the complete sense of in-growing toenail; I mean Edinburgh has turned into a city where you can see its toes growing in.
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13 comments:
He'll be glad to see the back of us then?
To the tune of `Charlie is ma darlin'
Altogether now:
"Starkey is an ersehole,
An ersehole,
An ersehole,
Ooooh, Starkey is an ersehooooooooooooole-
-The auld English queer"
I think he'd like to see the backside of us scunnert...
So we're agreed then. He's a cahunt.
I'd love to get him pissed out of his head, dress him in a knitted gimp suit (Fair Isle) and then abandon him in the East end of Glasgow and see how long he lasted, before somebody used him as a speed bump.
MB,
That is hilarious! Could sit and slag the twat off but let's face it he know's he's a cunt and the only way is to keep diggin, should have left the keys to the JCB at home Starkey.
CD
The very dab.
http://www.unknownhighway.com/images/uploads/wool_fetish.jpg
Conan, thank you, my vast lexicon of perversions is now complete.
Madame Burton enquires as to where she can find a pattern?
Whilst I agree he is a gin soaked old queer historically he does make some reasonable points. There is no doubt that Scotland flourished after 1707. We Scots are good at seizing opportunities which is what we did when presented with the enlarged trading opportunity that the British Empire gave us. However that was 300 years ago and the situation has now changed completely with England now dependent on Scotland's oil to prop up the British economy. So now is the time to say thanks, but we're for the off!
Economically Scotland did well out of the Union. However, prior to the 1707 they were victims of Englands protectionist mercantilism. Look at the growth of the tobacco, and cotton barons after 1707. These weren't people who had been simple peasants one day and then wealthy merchants the next, they were not allowed to encroach on England's 'empire' of trade. Yet in earlier days we were major players in the Hanseatic League, further back look at Wallace's letter of Lubeck announcing that Scotland was open for trade.
Starkey is symptomatic of a certain English historian who can see no further than the end of his nose...and as a Cumbrian, has a deep set need to show himself as more English than his southern counterparts.
Why does everything this twit talks about come back to Henry VIII? Is that all he knows anything about? Doubtless the history of the microwave oven dates back to Henry VIII who invented it personally on his laptop computer.
I suppose Bannock Burn and the Declaration of Arbroath don’t count as flourishing before 1707? Is he also forgetting that from 1603 the Scottish King was also King of his beloved England because England’s own Royal houses had died out? And that it was one of those said Stewarts Queen Anne who was on the throne when his blessed Union came into being.
There is no doubt pre 1707 we were held back by English economic superiority and protectionism. It was after all the failure of the Darien Scheme and the practical bankrupting of the country which brought on the economic possibilities of Union with England.
Yeh Monty, but it wouldn't have been the wee bit we colonised.
In my deeply considered opinion, Starkey is a spunkbucket.
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