SNP fury as TV historian Starkey likens the Saltire to the swastika
OUTSPOKEN television historian David Starkey yesterday outraged Scottish Nationalists by likening them to the Nazis and comparing the Saltire to the swastika.
The controversial 70-year-old was branded a ‘serial utterer of bile and bilge’ after he suggested the SNP was treating the English in the way Hitler persecuted the Jews.
Party leaders said his ‘unsavoury and absurd’ remarks were insulting both to Jewish people and to Scots.
In an interview with the Sunday Times over a restaurant meal which featured eight courses, each with a different glass of wine, Dr Starkey – once labelled the ‘ rudest man in Britain’ – claimed there were many ‘points of comparison’ between the Nazis and the Nats.
He said: ‘We have a political movement that has a single historic explanation for why your country is facing such terrible oppression; it’s either Versailles or the Treaty of the Union.
‘You have a particular group of people who are responsible for this; it is either the English or the Jews.
‘You have as a symbol the twisted cross: the saltire or the swastika.’
Dr Starkey, who has previously sparked controversy by describing Scotland as a ‘feeble little country’, claimed that those who sympathise with the SNP – particularly English voters attracted by the party’s ideas – were ‘incapable of recognising that this is national socialism’ and the nationalism was ‘much more important than the socialism’.
Nationalist MP Kirsten Oswald said: ‘David Starkey’s comments are irresponsible; deeply offensive to the Jewish community, the half of the Scottish electorate who voted SNP last month and 60 per cent who currently intend to vote SNP next year; and have absolutely no basis in reality.
‘He has become little more than a serial utterer of bile and bilge.’