If you’ve got 17 minutes to spare I urge you to watch this video (currently being circulated on Twitter).
And if you haven’t got 17 minutes to spare, then make some spare. It will infuriate, enlighten, delight and terrify you all at the same time.
It’s an interview given by the great English cricketer Ian Botham to a bunch of Scottish schoolkids in 1986 for a BBC TV programme called Open To Question.
Here they are, teenage kids, with a rare opportunity to ask a genuine sporting legend any question they want.
But all they want to do is harangue him earnestly about his male chauvinist attitudes to domestic chores and his apparently unhealthy love of “blood” sports like shooting and deer-stalking and his support of Margaret Thatcher.
An Eighties-permed missy opens the batting by asking:
“You only do the clean jobs when bringing up a baby. Changing the nappy – why not?”
Then comes the next question:
“If it’s only you that doesn’t change nappies why do you classify this as women’s work?”
Then the next:
“Is your wife satisfied with your attitude to child-rearing or do you think she resents your apparent immersion in your own sport?”
and, later:
“Do you not think it would be so much better if Mrs Thatcher would put some of the money she uses in defence into research and therefore help us out before she destroys the world?”
The assault never stops. It’s like Children of the Corn meets the Korean War. The questioning has the relentlessness and doctrinaire zeal of Red Army soldiers swarming across the Imjin River.
What has happened to these children? How have they become so brainwashed, so steeped in left-wing activism, and so joyless that they can only see the world through the grey filter of doctrinaire politics.
“I think people ought to have a bit more a sense of humour in this life”, says Botham, after being quizzed by a particularly earnest girl of (presumably) Pakistani extraction who professes offence taken at his suggestion that the food he has encountered on tour in Pakistan is so bad he wouldn’t even send his mother-in-law there.
The video goes some way to answering why Scotland has become such an oppressively politically correct place. These kids – a kind of PC Hitler Youth – will have grown up to become ardent supporters of Nicola Sturgeon and the Scottish National Party or, in the case of at least one of them, presenter John Nicholson, an SNP MP.
If anyone can explain to me how Scotland got this bad this early I’d be very interested to hear. They can’t have got this nonsense from their parents, I’m guessing, so it must have come from the schools. When did the takeover begin and how?
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