Why Clarkson's cracks about Scotland make him a bloody idiot

The Herald Scotland

22-05-2025

The expression "word salad" is often linked to disordered discourse. Eliot Higgins, who runs the investigative journalism outfit Bellingcat, has been discussing it, and seems to be on to something.
We talk about living in the post-truth age. Indeed, we've transited through the post-truth age to the post-reality age where disparate groups share no common ground.
The death of any shared reality reveals itself in thoughts and ideas – discourse – which seem truly bizarre, or disordered.
We hear comments today that frankly would have seen you jeered from the public stage a decade ago.
The disorder is a two-way street afflicting both left and right. No group is immune as the very nature of being in a group today – a hard-delineated political subset fixed around identity – means estrangement from all other groups.
Estrangement causes derangement, perhaps. The left is guilty, certainly, though it's on the ascendant right where you'll find discourse that's truly disordered.
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Among the left, it's primarily on the swivel-eyed fringes where you'll hear people claim that songs like Walk Like An Egyptian by The Bangles are acts of cultural appropriation, or that The Tempest subjects audiences to colonial trauma (in fact, if you've studied the play, it's more accurately interpreted as Shakespeare's critique of colonialism).
On the right, though, grotesque exaggeration, thin-skinned fragility and wild demonisation of opponents is now commonplace.
Check any internet message board – even computer game forums, for pity's sake – if you're in doubt.
Both sides behave deleteriously towards democracy, but the greater danger lies firmly to the right.
Given we now live in a world that's more ridiculous than sublime, it's unsurprising to find Jeremy Clarkson emerging as the zeitgeisty exemplar of disordered discourse.
Clarkson, a newspaper commentator, chose to describe the SNP's scrapping of peak rail fares as 'communism'.
Clarkson regularly boasts about his terrible A-level results, so history and political science were clearly not his strengths.
In theory, communism heralds a workers' utopia. I struggle to see how tweaking train prices ushers in an era of universal brotherly love and income equality.
In practice, communism involves marching your opponents into the gulag and shooting them in the head for thought-crime. I'm pretty sure this hasn't happened in Scotland.
Evidently, blokey old Jeremy will say it's just the bantz. He's only having a larf, isn't he? Well, yes and no.
Firstly, Clarkson is a commentator not a comedian. He can say what he wants, but maybe stand-up suits his talents better than journalism.
Secondly, even Clarkson sometimes makes sensible points about sensible issues. So what he's doing with his absurd exaggerations is blurring the line between what's real and should be taken seriously and what's nonsense.
He's telling us it doesn't matter if you make stuff up as everything you read is just garbage.
At the risk of becoming a po-faced liberal misery, I'm not sure that's wise.
Clarkson plays his part in disintegrating intelligent debate. He also comes across as a bloody idiot, frankly.
I'm pretty old-fashioned in believing that language should be used in a way which at least attempts to reflect reality.
He could have called the rail issue a middle-class bribe, mocked the SNP for constantly changing tack, and said it was all the biggest load of cobblers since the Elves and the Shoemaker.
But communism? Surely, he just makes himself and his argument ridiculous? Disordered. And by doing so encourages his readers to be ridiculous and disordered.
The more we do this, the more commentary becomes meaningless, the more we carpet bomb ways of speaking to each other intelligently.
During the debate about short-term holiday lets in Scotland, an Airbnb host described licensing plans as a "pogrom". A pogrom is defined as the mass murder of Jews.
They debased their own argument; they debased the meaning of pogrom. It disintegrated shared reality.
Boris Johnson just called Keir Starmer the EU's 'orange ball-chewing gimp'. Funny? Yes. In the pub, I'd spit my pint out laughing.
But when an ex-Prime Minister says this he's telling us: don't care about truth, we need no shared way of debating.
Britain is a "police state", Johnson says. Why? Because a woman was jailed for inciting racial hatred after tweeting 'set fire to the hotels' following the Southport murders which sparked mass rioting.
Police state? Or justice you disagree with?
We hear the same in Scotland. The 'Gestapo' and 'Stasi' would arrest you in your home thanks to anti-smacking laws. Just say you want to beat your kids. Don't invoke totalitarianism.
The new Pope, who appears politically centrist, has been dubbed a 'woke Marxist' by leading MAGA commentators.
Boris Johnson, who said Britain is a police state (Image: PA)
But then MAGA owns the disordered discourse crown. Evidently, nothing comes close to telling the entire world Haitian immigrants were eating people's pets.
The same disordered thinking appears in extremist claims that all trans women are rapists, all refugees are economic con-artists, and any criticism of Israel is antisemitic. It's silencing.
British talk-show host Kevin Sullivan said after this week's new EU deal: 'I like standing in the non-EU passport lines! I'm proud not to join the Brussels-gang losers.'
I guess he means he hated the deal, but rather than say that he claims to like wasting his life in queues. Evidently, much of this is attention-seeking.
Much is also motivated by the playground mentality of "owning the libs". Thus you get people attacking the "be kind brigade". Since when was being kind bad? I guess if you're disordered it is.
This all creates a society incapable of intelligent conversation. In Scotland today every issue is a crisis. Remember when a bottle return scheme was going to bring the nation to its knees, even though other nations had the same scheme?
I'm not saying the legislation was right, I'm just saying we could rediscover an ordered way of expressing ourselves.
If you cannot talk to your neighbour, you will hate them, and that way hell lies.
Neil Mackay is The Herald's Writer at Large. He's a multi-award-winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, crime, social affairs, cultural commentary, and foreign and domestic politics.