I’M a huge fan of Alan Cumming. He’s theatrical talent and showbiz sparkle made flesh. Elegant, witty, clever, cool. He’s captivating on stage. There should be more of him on TV and the big screen. But nobody’s perfect.

A few days ago, he had a pop at the English for sneering at the Scots. Scottish folk face “insidious and subliminal racism” in London, he said. “I went to New York and suddenly I thought, ‘oh, I’m being celebrated for my voice, my spirit – all these things that were sort of seen as negatives in London’.”

He also felt “assumptions are made about your intelligence, your background, your education, in London, because of how you sound as a Scottish person”.

Now partly, Cumming is bang on the money. But there’s a problem. Speaking to The Herald four years ago, Cumming said this about Brexit: “I was appalled when I heard the result. And I have three words to sum it up: Stupid. English. People.”

You can’t very well bleat about English people being nasty to Scots, when you’re a Scot being nasty about the English. But here – in the chic, sassy shape of one of Scotland’s greatest stars – we’ve a living metaphor for the endlessly daft animosity between the two nations.

Now, I’m not saying for a moment that Scots – and Irish and Welsh – don’t have to put up with idiotic, insulting nonsense sometimes in England. It doesn’t happen all the time, but it does happen – to say otherwise is a lie.

I’ve got plenty of my own experiences to prove the point. My work in the media has taken me to London and the rest of England more times than I can count. At one point, getting the early London flight was basically my morning commuter trip. Most of my visits to England are utterly delightful – but my travels have been marred by idiots on some occasions. And those idiots didn’t conform to the image of the xenophobic English bigot some might imagine.

My most explicit experience of English bigotry came at a dinner I shared with two darlings of London’s liberal media – doyens of progressive journalism, gods to the Islington set; envisioned by acolytes as the very antithesis of bigotry or petty xenophobia.

However, over a fancy-schmantzy dinner the topic of Northern Ireland came up. I’m from Northern Ireland and my two dinner companions had both covered the Troubles. I mentioned a general lack of interest in Northern Ireland affairs in Britain, to which liberal media darling Number One replied: “You’re not another chippy f**king Paddy are you, Neil?”.

I was flabbergasted – not because I’m unused to such crass insults, but because I’m the type of leftie-liberal who couldn’t imagine this champion of progressive values being such a downright arse. A Scottish friend had accompanied me to the dinner. I stayed calm and polite but firmly rebuked the liberal media darling, pointing out that insulting someone’s nationality wasn’t really a sign of intelligence or decency. My Scottish friend said they couldn’t believe someone with such a reputation would behave so childishly. To which, liberal darling Number Two said: “Oh, here come the whingeing Jocks.”

To cut a long story short, the dinner ended with me telling the pair to try and perform an act of airborne self-procreation – and a four way split on the bill.

But let’s be honest, we’ve all heard just as many nasty things said about the English in Scotland. I’ve lived here 25 years, and in well-heeled bars and industries where supposedly intelligent people work, I’ve heard the English routinely derided – even seen a friend called an “English c**t” to their face. It’s not unusual for the word ‘English' to be accompanied by a lip-curl of contempt.

I’ve also, though, seen plenty of anti-Irish bigotry here in Scotland too. My wife, who’s from Ireland as well, had the insult ‘tattie-picker’ thrown at her. She wouldn’t have been quite so furious and bewildered, though, if the attempted put-down had shown a bit more creativity. I’ve had my fair share of similar, mostly in Glasgow.

I should point out that we Irish are equally bad. My mother is English. When she moved to Ireland with my Irish dad she routinely suffered anti-English insults. And if you’re a Scot in Ireland you will be laughed at and called ‘haggis’ at some point.

And let’s share a moment of sympathy with the poor Welsh – a nicer bunch of people you’ll never meet – who get it from everyone.

This them-and-us stuff goes deep, and strange, in all four nations. Absurdly, we don’t just see our neighbours as outsiders, we even see outsiders within our own national groups. In England, there’s the north-south slagging match. When I first heard the word ‘teuchter’ here, it took a while to work out it was an insult for highlanders.

Look at most countries and they don’t just slag off their nearest neighbours, they have a taste for internecine contempt too. Madrid and Barcelona. Montreal and Toronto. Paris … and the rest of France. Even within individual cities there’s mockery and insult. The west end of Glasgow and the south side of the city enjoy slagging each other – hipster phonies v suburban dullards.

Look, some of this is just silly fun – like the west end v south side stuff which hurts nobody. And some of this reflects a real disparity in the UK where too much power is stored up in the south-east of England leading to frustrations, resentment and arrogance.

But in this time of abject global misery, such juvenilia does underscore that a lot of us should try and start realising that we’re all pretty much the same people under the skin. Just because my accent is funny to you, and your accent is funny to me, it doesn’t amount to a hill of metaphoric beans.

However, given that we live in a Britain that’s 86% white, let’s put this all into some perspective – I did just use the phrase ‘under the skin’ after all. If Alan Cummings feels put upon in London, or English people get called ‘c**ts’ in Scotland, imagine what it must be like if it’s your skin that sets you apart, not your voice.

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