Nigel Farage's rant about the native languages of Glasgow school pupils reveals Reform UK to be a FAR-RIGHT party

Today's video commentary below is in two parts.  Firstly, I look at how Nigel Farage's complaint that almost one-third of Glasgow school pupils do not speak English as a native language marks out Reform UK, as never before, as an out-and-out far-right party, rather than merely as "right-wing populist" or as "radical right".  The point is that there is absolutely nothing anyone can do to change their native language - Farage is therefore objecting to something intrinsic and immutable about the people themselves, rather than about a failure to learn English or to integrate.  His unspoken implication is that the only "solution" to the "problem" is to deport these people, or to just barely tolerate their presence as less worthy people who should never have been here in the first place - which is pretty much indistinguishable from the Nazis' initial attitude to German Jews in 1933/34.

I also point out the irony that if Reform UK had been a far-right party rooted in Scottish nationalism, it would probably have regarded a declining number of school pupils who speak English as a first language as a good thing, because it would regard Scots rather than English as the indigenous language of Glasgow.  So unwittingly Reform have not only identified themselves as far-right, but as a far-right party of another country trying to impose a "Greater English" culture on our own nation.  

That gives me the convenient opportunity to respond to a video I stumbled across in the summer from the YouTube channel Metatron's Academy - a channel which features many videos comparing closely related Romance languages and showing how they have a high level of mutual intelligibility, while firmly stressing they are indeed different languages.  But curiously, when the channel covers the speech of Scottish people and finds there is sometimes a greater barrier of intelligibility than there is between, say, Spanish and Portuguese speakers, it fails to join up the dots and recognise that this barrier means that the speech constitutes something other than the English language, rather than being just English in "a very hard accent to understand".

   

The Metatron's Academy video that I mention can be found HERE, while my 2021 interview with Len Pennie about the Scots language is HERE.  

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