What Keir Starmer’s got wrong

I see that Cricket Scotland is an appalling institution riven with racism. It has just been subjected to ‘the most devastating verdict to be delivered on any sporting institution in the UK’, having treated a whole bunch of players of Asian heritage to prejudice, discrimination and racial abuse. As a consequence there will be inquiries into the governing bodies of all the other sports Scottish people play with great enthusiasm but a marked shortage of talent. I daresay they will find similar nastiness within these McKu Klux Klanneries, a vicious and festering spite borne of inferiority complexes and facilitated by the fact that the governance of the entire country is built upon racism.

Nationalism in the end teeters into racial hatred. If you live in a country where every possible ill that befalls your nation is blamed on the awful people living just to the south of you, and have been subjected to a poisonous narrative about imperialism and persecution, then racism across the board will come very easily to you. One moment you’re standing on the A69 at the border, waving a claymore and screaming Pictish oaths at diseased English folk daring to visit your heavily subsidised, mountainous, morphine-soaked satrapy, the next you’re shouting at some poor Asian spin bowler. Sigmund Freud would have been greatly interested in the Scottish National party; I think its visceral hatred of the English is rooted in an oedipal ambivalence (in the psychoanalytical sense) towards the father figure.

We English undoubtedly have our own psychological problems, but it is hard to argue that an inferiority complex is one of them. For sure we believe, perhaps wrongly, that we are better than every other people on Earth, but we don’t hold this against our inferiors. Instead we try to encourage them, and give them money.