Scotland Is A Nation That's Lost Its Nerve
A media ambush over the phrase 'born and bred' is a pathetic new low—and a perfect snapshot of a nation terrified of common sense.
There are some things so self-evidently true, so blindingly normal, that you can only be convinced they are wrong through a sustained campaign of psychological abuse. Saying where you are from is one of them.
This week, my Reform UK colleague, Councillor Claire Mackie-Brown, accepted, in good faith, an interview with STV News, supposedly to discuss local concerns in Falkirk. What followed was not a piece of journalism. It was a political re-education session, caught on camera.
The playbook was as cynical as it was predictable. The journalist, uninterested in substance, set a trap—contrasting a well-publicised local crime involving a migrant with an obscure case involving a local man, hoping to catch the councillor out. When this didn’t quite work, the real mission became clear: to police language.
Amidst this hostile questioning, Claire voiced her concern as “a local resident, somebody who was born and bred here.”
Bingo.
The journalist had her “gotcha” moment. The rest of the interview was dedicated to interrogating this phrase, framing this simple statement of fact as a heinous transgression. The implication was clear: to identify as a local, as someone native to your own town, is now an act of bigotry that requires an immediate, grovelling apology.
This shabby episode is a depressing snapshot of the state of modern Scotland, and indeed, modern Britain. A country that gave the world the Enlightenment—the intellectual furnace of Adam Smith and David Hume—has collapsed into a nation of frightened conformists. We are now governed by a media class that actively hunts for thought crimes, manufacturing outrage from the most innocuous of phrases.
The goal of this tactic is simple: to demoralise and silence the native population. It is the deliberate twisting of the normal. If you can make people feel ashamed of being from somewhere, if you can bully them into apologising for their very identity, you have won a significant victory in the culture war. You have made them strangers in their own home.
Well, we will not be strangers. We will not apologise.
Let me be unequivocal: Councillor Claire Mackie-Brown did nothing wrong. She said something that is factually true and entirely normal. The shame here belongs to STV News for orchestrating this pathetic, calculated ambush.
As her colleague, she has my full support. We in Reform UK will not be cowed by these intimidation tactics. We will continue to speak common-sense truths, and we will not ask for forgiveness for doing so. This madness only ends when we stop playing their game.
This is the kind of activist journalism we are up against. It is our duty to call it out, loudly and clearly, every single time.