A WELL-KNOWN English historian is facing strong criticism for comparing the Scottish National Party to the Nazis, but he’s refusing to apologise.
In an interview with The Sunday Times, David Starkey suggested that the SNP blame the English for social problems in a similar way to how the Nazis blamed Jewish people.
“What are the points of comparison?,” he told the newspaper.
Well, 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.
He also went on to compare the SNP’s use of the saltire to the Nazis use of the swastika and even joked that supporters like to “expose their knees”. An apparent comparison between kilts an lederhosen.
Starkey, a professor with the Royal Historical Society, has been criticised for his comments with SNP MP John Nicholson telling BBC’s Andrew Marr show his comparison of the saltire and swastika is “offensive to Christians, to Jews and obviously Scots.”
“He seems not quite to understand the origins of he calls it the ‘twisted cross’ rather than the cross that St Andrew was crucified on out of respect for the original cross,” Nicholson said according to the Independent.
But Starkey is standing by his comments and is insisting that he was not insulting Scotland, but rather comparing the strategy of the parties.
“We have this awful idiotic PC politics. What we’ve got to recognise, I said nothing about Scotland, I said a great deal about the SNP,” he told Sky News this morning.
“The SNP is a virulently nationalist party, of a type that we have not had in Britian. It models itself on the continental extreme nationalist movement in the 1930s, that’s where it’s founded.”
“I’m not saying they’re about to set up concentration camps, I’m not saying that were going to see a Kristallnacht of English businesses in Edinburgh. Of course we’re not, but the resemblances are striking and are worrying. We spent years worrying in Britain about completely minor fringe things like the BNP or whatever. They are nothing compared with the Scottish Nationalist Party which seized control of an entire country.”
Pushed about that final comment, it was put to Starkey that the SNP were democratically elected.
So was Hitler he tentatively responded:
“Lots of people have voted for very unpleasant leaders, I shan’t mention the name Hitler, democracy doesn’t always get it right.”
He also defended his comparison of the two flags, saying he is aware of the history behind the Scottish flag but insisted that he has an issue with how it is used.
“The saltire is of course a national symbol, it’s the flag of St Andrew. I do know these things, but it has been appropriated by the SNP in a very particular way,” he said.
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