Oh dear. The National is renowned for neither grace nor charm and Saturday’s front page was no exception. Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper sparked outrage this weekend after it splashed a rather, er, creative cartoon across its cover a day ahead of the Euros final. When the Jocks failed to progress through the tournament – instead claiming the record for the most consecutive eliminations from the group stage – the august journal that is the National turned its attention to anglo-baiting instead. Quelle surprise…
The day before England played Spain in the finals, the Nat-obsessed journal decided to depict a rather large red-faced, bare-chested, tattooed England fan as a football being launched into the air by Spanish midfielder Rodri. ‘Time for revenge!’ the cover screamed, ‘Our message to Spain: Save us from an England win (or we’ll never hear the end of it!)’. Crikey. Talk about fun and games…
Weirdly, there was no article or spread in the paper that the cover linked to. But in smaller text at the top right, there was a rather insidious message that ruffled feathers both north and south of the border. ‘Every summer, they fill up your beaches,’ it warned, continuing:
They drink all your beer. They make a mess of your plaza. They eat fried breakfasts all day instead of your wonderful food. They retire in your towns, and sponge off your public services. ¡Ni siquiera se molestan en aprender el idioma! [They don’t even bother to learn the language.]
Far from appealing to Scotland’s nationalists, the paper appears to have put many of them off – including its own columnists. ‘No. I really don’t like this at all,’ wrote ex-SNP MP Joanna Cherry about the cover, while her former colleague Stewart McDonald nodded towards the paper’s ‘bad day’ and Westminster group leader Stephen Flynn tweeted: ‘Lazy stereotypes, xenophobia and a dose of snobbery is not what rivalry, nor football, should be about.’ Scottish lawyer Aamer Anwar and Humza Yousaf ally blasted the front page as ‘gutter xenophobic jingoism’ while journalists from the Courier and Daily Record slammed the splash as ‘tedious‘ and ‘embarrassing‘ respectively, as the editor of the Sunday Mail questioned: ‘Where the bloody hell are the grown ups at this paper?’ Ouch.
The backlash seems to have got to the top dogs. Now the National‘s editor has taken to Twitter to apologise for the mess, in a statement that claims the cringe-making comic only wanted to make a ‘light-hearted joke’. In a rare bout of self-awareness, the pro-indy paper admitted that ‘the front page didn’t deliver what we set out to do’, adding: ‘We leaned into lazy stereotypes and we shouldn’t have.’ Talk about a volte face…
Some would argue that a public U-turn is hardly the best way of burying the issue – but when your circulation sits at 3,000 and your columnists are threatening to desert you, desperate times call for desperate measures…
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