There remains a stunning degree of ignorance and complacency amongst the British political class when it comes to Scottish independence and the future of the UK, as Gerry's post on Dinner with Portillo makes clear. But you'd be hard pushed to beat the following comments on Scotland by David Starkey for sheer arrogance and stupidity. Starkey - who long ago abandoned academia for a career as a pompous TV controversialist - argues for the Union in the most chauvinist ahistorical terms. This is what he had to say to Iain Dale:
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.
There's an entire interview of this stuff if you want more.
