Elitism Mr Cleese? Try

IWAS a bit upset last week when I discovered John Cleese had rumbled my plans, as a half-educated tenement Scot, to run the press in England.

So I guess it’s over to plan B, where I hope to spend the rest of my days swigging Buckfast and consuming fried food, eventually succumbing to the Glasgow Effect at an early age – because if we’re dealing in Scottish stereotypes, why not just go the whole hog?

In all seriousness, like most of Scottish Twitter, I was a bit devastated that an actor I’ve always liked exhibited such a poor attitude towards Scottish people.

The incident came about when Cleese took to Twitter in a rage against Spectator magazine editor Fraser Nelson, who’d written something that wasn’t to Cleese’s liking. But rather than address whatever the problem was, Cleese went off on a rant about “half-educated tenement Scots”. “Why do we let half-educated tenement Scots run our English press? Because their craving for social status makes them obedient retainers?” he tweeted, adding: “Seriously, I’d rather have educated, cultured and intelligent people in charge. Sorry for the elitism.” Naturally, Twitter reacted pretty severely. BBC journalist James Cook saw a clear problem with it, tweeting: “Replace the words ‘tenement Scots’ with, for example, ‘slum Pakistanis’ and see how this reads.” But others thought there was nothing in it. Journalist and commentator Kevin McKenna tweeted: “Am trying to be upset by John Cleese’s ‘halfeducated tenement Scots’ jibe: been called far worse by my own chinas; nothing in this at all.” While I agree with McKenna to some extent – I genuinely didn’t feel a deep sense of rage about it – I think we need to step outside the bubble of stereotypes we’re used to inhabiting and realise that this is not okay; it’s nowhere close to okay. It’s very telling that Cleese’s response was to go straight for iden-