The usually estimable David Maddox has a very strange post up at the Scotsman’s politics blog complaining that Alex Salmond wants to exploit the 700th anniversary of Bannockburn. Apparently:
While Bannockburn is a battle which Scots should take historic pride in, seeing off an invading English army which had numerical superiority, it nevertheless is symbolic of anti-English feeling which are rife with the SNP and nationalist movement as a whole.
So much for the “positive nationalism” which Mr Salmond claims to espouse.
This is, alas, piffle. True, there is an anti-English element within the SNP but any reasonable or fair-minded evaluation of the movement might conclude that as nationalist parties go the SNP is pretty short on the kind of blood, soil and thunder that tends to be a big part of such movements elsewhere.It is difficult to escape the feeling that this will be a year long “hate the English” festival in the run-up to a double election in 2015.
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