by Christian Wright

The New Statesman have amended the Darling interview once again in an attempt to airbrush his equation of the SNP to the Nazi Party.

In the transcript, Darling comes across as a whinging, resentful, mendacious hypocrite. Nothing new there then.

I’m surprised though, by the britnat jingoism and intolerance of the otherwise middle-of-the-road journalist who conducted the interview, Jason Cowley.

At one point he waxes morbidly lyrical in quoting Simon Schama contemplating the dissolution of this union: “… a moment of incredulous sorrow at the loss of our common home, a catastrophe that somehow came about in our political sleep”. FFS.

There’s the sleep-walking-separation canard, complemented by his parroting of the threadbare characterisation of the UK as “… the most successful multinational partnership in modern history“.

Ah, ‘This is the most successful union ever’ – a line normally delivered as some Unionist pol opens another foodbank.

Why have an original thought when you can just cut’n’paste these hackneyed memes of NO?

 The most successful partnership . . . thingy? Are you sure? Tell that to the children of Glasgow, where there are areas of poverty so severe and so long ingrained, that they are born with an epigenetic predisposition to ill health and early death.

In the face of that reality, Cowley’s braying British Nationalism is obscene. When a’ wur a lad, growing up in Glasgow in the Fifties, it boasted the lowest life expectancy of any city in Western Europe.

Today, well over half a century later, in some part of it, the life expectancy for men is lower than that in Baghdad. Do we really need finger wagging homilies from Mr Cowley on the the break up of this moribund union that ill serves so many of its citizens?

Deliberately mischaracterising  a Scotsman article, Cowley opines: “As [Joyce] McMillan sees it, Scotland has for too long been oppressed by the English, exploited, condescended to, abused, neglected. Hers is the characteristic voice of liberal disaffection in Scotland, and one hears it everywhere” (the emphasis is mine)

So now we get to the nub of it – ‘the Scots are anti-English racists‘.

He continues: “A subtext to her influential Scotsman columns is a sense of assumed moral superiority: the Scots are an instinctively fairer people than the English, more socially democratic, more committed to equity. They have everything to gain by cutting the ropes that bind them to the nefarious English beast.” Joyce McMillan is (politically) influential? She’s a theatre critic, FFS.

This is yet a third meme the britnats have being trying to peddle – ‘the Scots think they’re better than us English‘

Then he contrasts this Scottish racism with Schama again: “Yet compare McMillan, the voice of educated Scottish resentment, with the civic nationalism of Simon Schama, who writes rapturously of a multinational British state … ‘ whose glory over the centuries [is that it] has been … made up of many peoples … all jumbled together within the expansive, inclusive British home‘.” FFS.

So, the narrative is complete – there are the chippy racist Scots and the sweet egalitarian, multicultural, inclusive, wonderful British. Soil and blood and all that is OK, so long as it’s British.

Scots aren’t British? Not according to Cowley. Certainly not those who believe they should be masters in their own house.

Sometimes the eye sees not itself but by reflection, and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that his charges of Scottish racism are simply a projection of his own barely concealed bigotry.

It occurs to me that Darling and Cowley should spend more time together, for they are certainly deserving, one of the other.

I mean, FFS.