BROWN WORLD

Newspapers have character. The Sunday Post is your cheery Granny. The Sunday Herald tries to be all metropolitan and cool, and you know you're going to get loads of boobies in your Sport.

But what exactly is the Sunday Times – Scotland for?

It’s like slightly better designed version of the Scotsman, only MORE right-wing. Okay it provides a home for the likes of Michael Fry (the thinking mans David Irving) and the downright bonkers ramblings of Allan Massie. And who else would give a national platform for the views of Allan Brown to vent his (not inconsiderable) spleen? Brown’s as bitter and twisted as, well as your average Ibrox acolyte.

Never heard of him? Here’s a users guide to Scotland’s Man of Letters:

First up you can expect regular updates from his (slightly affected) nights at the local pub quiz, even more regular doses of barely disguised cultural self-hatred (railing against Scots, Gaelic, Doric or indeed anything that lies outwith his concept of British identity), frequent dalliances with literature (“Anyway, Orwell wrote only parts of Nineteen Eighty-Four on Jura; it was started, finished and revised in London”), and the occasional insight into his lifestyle (think fine wines and chin-stroking): “The menu is broad but narrow, essentially an omnibus of the many interesting things to be done with mussels, salmon and oysters.”

Clearly Brown makes proper lolly for his trade. Recently he’s taken to chastising Bloggers. You can read his rubbish here. He says: “Testifying, perhaps, to the proliferation of telecottaging, there are at least 10 bloggers in the Highlands and Islands, a surprising number given that most people are still suspiciously sniffing mobile phones up there.”

There’s a whiff of what’s to come here with a sort of sneering contempt he has for anyone north of the Campsies…but the astonishing thing is he seems to have completely missed the point that blogging is a direct response to the sort of fetted posturing journalism that Brown represents. He’s overlooked (for example) that it was bloggers who unveiled the "Jeff Gannon" story (presumably while all the proper hacks like Brown were guzzling bourbon with the neocons).

But it’s for language itself that Mr Brown really focuses his anger, ironic given that this is how he affords his oyster platters. Only the Queens English is permissible in Brown World. Here he is on Doric: “Even to the meanest intelligence it’s clear that Doric, the “traditional” tongue of northeast Scotland, isn’t a language. It’s the phonetic transcription of a slovenly, antique dialect.”

On Gaelic: “…the black art of the gael; sodden in whisky, puffed with self-righteousness, oblivious to his comic tweeness, the Gael has a fathomless thirst for taxpayers’ cash and is barely accountable for the nebulous benefits the spending of it achieves…Gaelic is a zombie language.”

Can you imagine a 'Journalist of the Year' writing in such a way about the Pakistani community in Scotland?

He goes on (and on): “Prince Charles arrives in Skye tomorrow to visit the Sabhal Mor Ostaig Gaelic College. Being a sensitive soul, the prince is "very concerned" that fewer and fewer people wish to speak a language that makes them sound like drunken owls and therefore is considering including a message in Gaelic on his official website.”

At one point he denied that Scots is a language at all - though it was later pointed out to him that this was strange given that it is recognised as such by the European Charter of Regional Languages. So it’s a language in Brussels but not in Bearsden?

His own linguistic confidence looked on more shakey ground as he referred constantly to Rob Fairnie (who he was complaining about) as “Haining”, got completely confused about how the Scottish Parliament works and generally ended up making a complete tit of himself.

But then I got it, the Sunday Times – Scotland is for all those other poor sods so brow-beaten by their own cultural inferiority that they’ve had to not just sup from the masters table, but jump up and leap about to entertain him. It’s for those who yearn to be anglicised, the cultural equivalent of a botox injection to the soul, installing a baleful and bland Britishness onto the Scottish psyche.

What a sad man.

You can monitor Mr Brown’s racist ramblings here...