A bridie also sometimes is the name for a home knit womans sweater.
Posted on 03/31/2007 8:56:20 PM PDT by GMMAC
Will auld acquaintance be forgot as Scots go it alone?
30 years ago Gordon Brown was the toast of student radicals in Edinburgh. Now he is seen as part of the Establishment — and out of touch with the Scotland’s new direction.
Martin Fletcher
timesonline.co.uk
March 31, 2007
In 1974 Gordon Brown was Rector of Edinburgh University, elected after a campaign that featured the “Brown Sugars” — girls sporting miniskirts and T-shirts emblazoned “Gordon for Me”.
I was a first-year student, and remember him as a striking figure with long black hair and trenchcoat, surrounded by acolytes. He was intense and ambitious, but he also lived with Princess Margarita of Romania, threw celebrated parties and enjoyed an almost glamorous reputation.
As editor of Student, besides filling the pages with bare flesh, his great scoop was to catch the university lying about its investments in apartheid South Africa. He used the rectorship — traditionally a ceremonial post — to flay a fusty university establishment. When Sir Michael Swann, the principal, sought to stop him chairing meetings of the University Court, the Duke of Edinburgh, the university’s chancellor, intervened: Princess Margarita was the Duke’s goddaughter.
While the young firebrand was shaking up Edinburgh, another movement was shaking up Scotland. Buoyed by the discovery of North Sea oil, the Scottish Nationalist Party won 11 Westminster seats that October, and forced Harold Wilson’s weak and panicky Labour Government to concede a referendum on devolution in 1979 that only narrowly failed.
Three decades on, Mr Brown will shortly become my prime minister, not rector, and the SNP is surging again. A poll for The Times this week suggested that the party was heading for a victory in the Scottish Parliament elections on May 3, paving the way for a referendum on independence by 2010. But today it is Mr Brown who represents an unpopular Establishment in distant London, Mr Brown who looks out of step with Scottish public opinion, and Mr Brown who faces the prospect — albeit remote — of finding himself prime minister of a foreign country. How the wheel has turned.
Back in the 1970s Edinburgh was an austere place that even the Bay City Rollers struggled to enliven. Pubs shut at 10pm and never opened on Sundays. Staid life assurance companies pottered along in genteel Charlotte Square. The economy was wretched. The city felt cut off from the world. It was an uncomfortable place to be an English student. The Scottish nationalism of those days was angry, confrontational and fiercely antiEnglish, as summed up by the SNP slogan: “It’s Scotland’s oil”.
The theatrical sensation of 1974 was John McGrath’s play The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, which charted the exploitation of Scotland from the 19th-century Highland clearances to the plundering of North Sea oil. English students were resented, and regularly told that we were taking Scottish students’ places.
Today, behind its immutable granite face, Edinburgh is a city transformed. It is cosmopolitan and fun. Dismal bars and corner shops selling that peculiarly disgusting Scottish invention, the bridie, have been replaced by fancy pubs and classy alfresco restaurants. The Grassmarket, Seventies refuge of down-and-outs, is now hip. The breweries, whose sickly smell blanketed the city, have gone. You hear foreign accents everywhere, and can fly directly to Europe and America without changing in London.
Edinburgh has become Europe’s fifth biggest financial centre, employing 135,000 people. The Royal Bank of Scotland is a world top-ten bank with a market capitalisation larger than Coca-Cola. Elegant New Town houses sell for a million or two.
Gavin Don, a Scot who returned from London to set up a corporate finance business in 1994, says that as an Edinburgh student in the 1970s he used to play Porsche-spotting. “You could go a whole year and not see one. Now they are two a penny. Bentleys are pretty commonplace, and Rolls-Royces are not unheard of.” There is a cultural revival, too. The Scottish executive is pouring money into the arts. The bestselling authors Iain Rankin, Iain Banks, Alexander McCall Smith, Irvine Welsh and J.K. Rowling all live in or near the city. Its once-proud publishing industry is booming again.
Where Edinburgh leads, the rest of Scotland is slowly following. The country still has pockets of intense poverty, but its unemployment rate has fallen below the UK average, its per capita GDP is higher than most English regions, and two decades of steady population decline have been reversed.
As self-confidence has risen so the nature of Scottish nationalism has changed. It is more positive, less Anglophobic. It emphasises future potential, not past grievances. It asks merely for Scotland to be liberated so it can prosper within the European Union like a dozen other countries as small or smaller. Indeed, the EU allows Scotland to break away from England without condemning itself to isolation on Europe’s northern fringe.
Alex Salmond, the SNP’s wily leader, is still demanding the repatriation of North Sea oil revenues and the removal of nuclear missiles from the Clyde. But as he seeks to portray his party as mainstream, not extreme, he emphasises a desire for cooperation not confrontation with Westminster, and avoids overt England-bashing. He says an independent Scotland would keep the Queen and the pound.
In St Andrew Square I asked a dozen Scots to sum up the English in one word. The answers were not flattering — “pompous”, “egotistical”, “smug”, “arrogant”, “loud”, “pig-headed”. But they were given with smiles, and for all the tales of Scots backing Trinidad and Tobago against England in the football World Cup their antipathy to sassenachs appears more muted. Indeed, Flower of Scotland, the unofficial national anthem, which was written for The Corries in 1967 and celebrates England’s defeat at Bannockburn, seems a little out of tune with the times. “People are a tad embarrassed by it,” one veteran Scottish journalist said.
What has undoubtedly weakened, however, is the Scots’ sense of Britishness. Three hundred years after the Act of Union England and Scotland no longer have a common enemy in France. The British Empire, on which Scotland’s 19th-century prosperity was built, has gone. Memories of Scottish soldiers fighting alongside the English in two world wars have faded. Scottish industries such as shipbuilding and coal that depended on London subsidies have been privatised or closed. Margaret Thatcher’s use of socialist Scotland as a test-bed for hated policies such as the poll tax fuelled Scottish disenchantment with Westminster.
A recent British Social Attitudes Survey found four fifths of Scots consider themselves Scottish first and British second. The Scottish Saltire, flown only by a few wild-eyed radicals in the 1970s, is everywhere in Edinburgh, and the Union Jack has largely disappeared. It does fly outside The Scotsman newspaper — but only at the insistence of Andrew Neil, its former editor-in-chief.
At the same time the much-derided Scottish Parliament, which the Scot George Robertson, a former Defence Secretary, said would kill separatism “stone dead”, appears merely to have fostered a sense of Scottishness. It receives more coverage than Westminster in the Scottish media and The Times poll this week showed 52 per cent of Scots want it to have more power, only 7 per cent less.
The other great change since the 1970s is England’s attitude to Scottish independence. Polls suggest that an idea unthinkable then is today quite popular.
Many English resent Scots receiving £1,500 more per capita in public spending each year, and that the Government requires the support of Scottish MPs to ram through controversial legislation such as university top-up fees and foundation hospitals that do not apply north of the border. They are offended by Scotland’s perceived Anglophobia. The English have yet to back Roger Federer against Andy Murray, but my equally unscientific survey of a dozen English colleagues produced adjectives about the Scots just as unflattering — “difficult”, “chippy”, “aggressive”, “ungrateful”, “angry”, “brooding”.
Few minded if Scotland broke away. As the Saltire flies in Scotland, so the flag of St George has become increasingly common in England. It is as if the Union Jack, like the UK, is breaking down into its constituent parts.
All this leaves Mr Brown in a hole. As a Scot preparing to move into No 10 he needs to reassure the English, and has delivered no fewer than ten speeches or statements on the importance of Britishness since late 2004. He opposes further devolution. The Raith Rovers fan even cited Paul Gascoigne’s goal against Scotland in Euro 96 as a favourite football moment.
But the more Mr Brown champions Britishness, the more out of touch he looks in Scotland — and the more he fuels his compatriots’ disaffection with Labour before next month’s elections.
Scots dislike Tony Blair, whom they consider neo-Thatcherite. They hate his war in Iraq. Today’s equivalent of The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil is The Black Watch, which tells of Scottish soldiers going to fight a pointless war foisted on them by an English Prime Minister. Mr Brown is widely seen in Scotland as the Iraq war’s paymaster.
In Edinburgh in the Seventies, Mr Brown wrote his doctoral thesis on how Labour established itself as the alternative to the Conservatives in Scotland in the early 20th century. Its battle now is to prevent itself being usurped by the SNP.
The stakes are enormous. Were Scotland to gain independence Labour — shorn of its 39 Scottish MPs — would never win power in England again.
Nationalists head for power
–– A Populus poll for The Times this week put the SNP ahead of Labour in both the first-past-the-post and proportional-representation sections
–– The Nationalists are on track to win 50 seats in the 129-seat Scottish Parliament, seven more than Labour. The Lib Dems would have 18 MSPs, the Conservatives 17 and the Greens one
–– A majority of Scots (52 per cent) are in favour of more devolved powers for their Parliament. Just over one in four (27 per cent) backed full independence
–– On the constituency or first-past-the-post vote, the SNP is on 38 per cent; Labour 28; Lib Dems 15; Tories 14; others 6 In the proportional representation section, the SNP is on 35 per cent; Labour 30; Lib Dems 14; Tories 14
Source: www.populuslimited.com
I am not self-proclaimed anything. I am Scottish and you are not. You are not merely indifferent to Scotland you seem to hate it.
And you are right, considering you don’t even know the basics of what Scotland and Britain are I am beginning to see what you are.
Let me remind you - you said that Brits are trying to stamp out Scots culture. Now if you had said English instead of Brits, you would be laughably wrong, but at least you would have some understanding. It’s as hilariously wrong as to suggest that Americans are trying to stamp out the culture of Kansas/Arizona/Florida/California etc. LOL
BTW, here is a little video of the passion real Scots feel for their country - similiar to Americans at the Olympics or other international event.
You will never understand what it is to be Scottish. To sing that national anthem with such pride. Pretending is not the same. The pity is, if you weren’t such an enemy to the people of Scotland you could share in it. Like the Irish-Americans who left in the same context but who (unlike you) help modern Ireland.
I think your ancestors would be ashamed of your hatred of their land, and your laughable idea that they are somehow genetically superior to their literal brothers, sisters and parents they left behind.
We don’t need to like one another, but why not start with dialogue instead of silly slogans?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiixc4GFBVo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QNMmBpYB98&mode=related&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fGCsItMlq4
“In the last referendum, Quebeckers voted some 49% for independence.”
Actually, they voted 49% in favour of a question that asked whether the government of Quebec should enter into negotiations with that of Canada seeking “sovereignty”, and so on. The question was not at all a clear question of whether or not Quebec should fully and properly separate from Canada to become its own country. The general opinion is that if the question had been a clear one like that, support would have been no more than 20%-30%. True separation scares the pants off most Quebecers.
Elle court...elle court...
la maladie d’amour
dans les coeurs des enfants
de sept a soixante-dix-sept ans.
Elle chante...elle chante...
cette riviere insolente,
qui unit dans son lit les cheveux blonds, les cheveux gris!
Feel the burnin’ electronic love!
If there is a north american predujice against scotland, I think it must have something to do with the lockerbee(sp?) thing. It was the terrorists that requested trial in scotland, no? That makes americans suspicious of scotland.
Or do I have my facts all mixed up? I have been known to do that.
BTW, I believe it is true that scottish canadians are more scottish than the scottish are. I’ve read similar statements about the french canadians and the irish canadians. The french canadians beleive that european french language has become to americanized. The irish canadians speak forms of gaelic that are extinct in ireland. I believe I read both of these things in the national geographic.
However, I suppose these beliefs could be chaulked up to that arrogant english blood that flows in north american’s veins...we are better than the english we despised, and our non english british descendents are better than their british counterparts as well!...hehe. Perhaps in some ways we have become the english that we detested.
Let me remind you - you said that Brits are trying to stamp out Scots culture. Now if you had said English instead of Brits, you would be laughably wrong, but at least you would have some understanding. It’s as hilariously wrong as to suggest that Americans are trying to stamp out the culture of Kansas/Arizona/Florida/California etc. LOL
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
He meant the government, not the people.
You have a point in there.
The people who came to America were, in a very real sense, Europe’s, and Africa’s and Asia’s - even Latin America’s - rejects.
Who came from England? There were always a few powerful bigwigs to rule everyone else, but Virginia was originally populated primarily with transported prisoners. Women were originally procured by rounding up English whores and forcing them off to the Americas. Before the English Civil War broke out, the detested Puritans fled into the American wilds. Once the Puritans won and Cromwell was established, the broken Cavaliers fled to Virginia. Maryland was founded as a place to dump off unwanted English Catholics. Georgia, of course, was a penal colony. The Enclosure Acts kept a steady population of the unlanded poor flowing into America. The Navigation Acts and Tarrifs and other rules broke the Ulster textile industries and began the 18th Century mass immigrations of the “Scotch-Irish” into the American wilds. The Catholic Irish, of course, who came over were the ones who were otherwise facing death in the Potato Famine or, later, were unemployed.
Which of the Scandinavians came? Not the landed and established? The surplus populations of the unemployed.
Among the Germans, first it was the unwanted Anabaptists and Brethren, hated for their religious beliefs. Then, later, it was the poor and unemployed.
The French experience was a little different, in that it was usually higher classes of people who moved to Protestant America. But they did so, again, because they were rejected in France: the Huguenots, then the nobility, especially the nobility of the Empire. French-Canada, of course, was actually populated by hand-picked colonists of good Catholic character, which explains the very different early experience of the Quebec colony.
And into this welter were injected the black slaves, the defeated of Africa’s tribal struggles.
And later, the Chinese and Japanese coolies, workers who had nothing in overpopulated China and Japan.
Today, it is not the well-establish landed class of Mexico that immigrates. It’s the poor laborers and Indians.
America has gotten the rejects, the dregs, of every continent. But the stones that the builders rejected have become the cornerstones of a greater nation than any of those left behind.
It is only natural that Americans should harbor a degree of rejection, a degree of contempt and a degree of scorn for Europe. After all, Americans are descended of people who were driven - oftentimes violently - from their homelands as rejects. America filled up with people Europe treated like crap. European states showed no loyalty or love for the debris of their society they offloaded in America. These people, and their children and grandchildren, built a civilization that is more advanced than Europe scientifically in every field of endeavor, that is wealthier than Europe and is more sophisticated financially as well, that is militarily superior to every armed force in Europe on an equipment level and on a unit-by-unit level. And they built an America which has successively destroyed 6 European Empires: the French (in the Americas), the British (in the Americas), the Spanish, the German, the Italian and the Soviet Russian.
There is no love lost between America and Europe, and Americans have no historical reason to treat Europe with respect. Americans’ ancestors were driven from Europe as “the wretched refuse from a teeming shore”. No thanks to Europe, at all, they built the greatest civilization the world has ever known in North America, and then reached out and ended European world domination, establishing their own.
Some of us still have strong ties to Europe, but not very many. For most there is a sense of an emotional tie to some distant “Homeland”, be it in Africa, in Asia, or in Europe. However, closer acquaintance with any of the ancestral homelands causes most Americans to thank their lucky stars that their ancestors were badly beaten up by these ancient lands, such that they left, dregs all, and made a better world in the New.
It is unsurprising that Europe and America do not really get along well, and never have. America is in a literal sense a rejection of Europe.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
with silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
- Inscription on the Statue of Liberty, New York harbor, USA.
(By the way, it is not as though all Europeans are oblivious to this. ‘Twas France that was inspired to give the Statue of Liberty to America, apres tout.)
Maybe he meant “The British Empire, alone”.
In a sense that’s true, when it comes to organized government. Of course, there was a French government in exile, and a Polish government in exile, and a Dutch government in exile, and the French and Polish and Dutch and other resistance movements began immediately. They were not very strong, but they were in the field fighting.
Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Indians, etc. were all in the field, under the grand banner of the British Empire.
China was in the field too, of course, but that was on a different front.
If we said that the only organized major national fighting force in the field in Europe still fighting Hitler in 1940 after the Fall of France were the forces of the British Empire, that would be true. Canadians would be included prominently in that.
To say that the British, qua British, were the only folks facing Hitler alone during that time period would be false. But I wonder if the intent was to ignore the others, or it was just an oversight.
Up thread, for example, I called the Scots and English “English”, but that’s not really what I meant. What I meant was that they’re both Anglo-Saxons, and THAT is true. So are the Irish, in that sense. And the Americans. If by “British forces” we mean “British Empire forces”, it’s a different case.
By the way, I have a question. Perhaps someone can answer me. Back in 1940, could the Americans trade directly with India or British Africa, or were there all sorts of trade restrictions in American access to those markets sown up by British Imperialism? And if the latter, what was the strong American interest in fighting for the British Empire (other than that the bad guys were bad)?
It's obvious that you are new here, and it is becoming increasingly apparent that you might not be here too much longer.
It is an accepted practice at FR to look up the posting history of people.
It's one of ways we judge a FReepers credibility and intent.
It's a good way to identify trolls.
Ummm...what’s a bridie?
It’s a fair cop.
Anyway, he appears to have retreated.
“When danger reared its ugly head,
Sir Robin turned his tail and fled,
Brave, brave, brave, brave Sir Robin...” - Monty Python
“Elle court...Elle court.......”.
“Laizzez les bon temp rouler” back atcha! And thanks for Lafayette!
“Ummm...what’s a bridie?”
I don’t know either. But being as it is a darkly-named food from the British Isles, you can rest assured that, whatever it is, it is ghastly.
"Make 'em dry," he wrote, "Make 'em rubbery. If you have to keep 'em fresh, do it by scrubbing them once a week."
A bridie also sometimes is the name for a home knit womans sweater.
However, I will admit to some very guilty pleasures, but I must keep this hush-hush and NEVER be heard to admit it:
The British make a thing called “Mint Lamb”, and it is delicious. It is roast leg of lamb, with mint in it, and mint jelly on it. Very good.
Also, the staple fare of Shepherd’s Pie is good in England.
The large English breakfast of eggs, toast, bacon, beans and tomatoes is good (granted, it’s hard to screw up an egg).
Greasy fish and chips are a staple, and the fish part, anyway, is good (if definitely not good for you).
An English stew, or an Irish stew, is really nothing other than a pot-au-feu. The only difference is in the seasoning, but I have had English stews in England that were properly seasoned and good.
Yorkshire pudding is not bad.
The English cook beef as well as anyone, when they roast it. Boiling good beef is unfortunate, but I have had good roast beef in England.
And finally (my citizenship could be revoked for this admission), I actually like steak and kidney pie. I never would have tried it but for being in a place where there was nothing open but a pub, nothing to eat in the pub but steak and kidney pie (it was a holiday) or bags of crisps. So I gagged and ordered the pie.
It was good.
Actually, it is very, very good. Very filling and savoury.
The name is appalling. The appearance is unpleasant: a dull thick crust under which body parts are strewn. The steam coming off it has that faint aroma of urine which hot kidneys do. But it was nevertheless delicious to the taste.
And the English make good ales. I like English ales.
We must not get carried away. I have had haggis at the Printemps Celt celebration had in spring in Paris. Haggis looks horrid. It doesn’t taste horrid, really, but it’s definitely a food you try to try, but don’t go looking for when you go back. Similarly English deserts. Creme-puffs are actually nice. Jiggling jello is alarming, especially when it is meat jelly. This is the part of the canned product which is normally discarded in other countries. However, whenever I find myself in England, I do tend to prefer English breakfasts, and I always make a point of going to a likely looking pub and having a steak and kidney pie. But whenever I do it, I look around very carefully, and make sure that I go alone. Steak and kidney pie is my guilty English food pleasure.
I will not say that the English get a “bad rap” for their food. I will say, rather, that I have an appetite for certain foods which most people might consider bad.
But steak and kidney pie is my guilty English pleasure.
I like it.
This is a disgrace to my race.
It also appears to strongly resemble a Cornish pastie.
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