Alan Cumming and acting out inner emotions

For my Daily Record column

Actors, don’t you love them? I do, actually. Their craft of exposing the emotions we, the audience, keep hidden from ourselves takes as much courage as bearing arms.

But never leave an actor without their primary weapon - lines to read. Left to their own devices, thesps invariably get it wrong.

Look at Alan Cumming, dahling of the SNP, who has just gone and blamed Brexit on the English.

He said: “I was appalled when I heard the result and I have three words to sum it up. Stupid. English. People.”

Cut! Hold it there, didn’t anyone send Cumming a copy of the script?

Stoking resentment of the “other” is an essential element of any nationalism, but the SNP has long ago excised open hatred of the English.

Under civic nationalism it is impolite to mention the English.

When the SNP talks of embracing the EU everyone knows that means the other 27 - Muslim-baiting Slovakia and Nazi-resurgent Austria among them - not the closest neighbour we do two-thirds of our trade with.

It takes an actor’s boldness to break the rules and say the unsayable. 

“How many times do we have to be slapped in the face by Westminster?” asked Cumming in an interview not subject to self-censorship.

At least he had read that cue. “Westminster” is the correct nationalist euphemism for all things English.   

Having dropped the E-bomb Cumming apologised, rather halfheartedly.

“I guess I’m just a daft jock who assumes people still find humour amusing,” he tweeted.

Well, the first half of the apology sounds sincere. Most of the regret will be for the damage he has done the cause.

Anyway, who is he accusing of being stupid? Was it the four out of ten SNP members who voted for Brexit? The hundreds of thousands of other Scots who voted the same way? Or was it the people of Wales, the most anti-EU nation in the Union?

Does he neglect how London, for example, voted to Remain? The last time I looked London was still a part of England and is not going anywhere.

Even people like Angus Robertson, an SNP statesman not a clown, can play into this grievance agenda with loose talk about Brexit being a vote by England to ”leave the European Union and declare independence from the rest of the United Kingdom”.

Maybe Robertson, facing a challenge for the deputy leader post, feels the need to connect with the SNP base but he’s bigger politician than that. He does not need to stoop to conquer.

Anti-English bigotry is not up there with full blown racism but it is felt by plenty people in Scotland with English accents.

Inevitably, after Cumming’s rant some will feel more pressure to fit in with the orthodoxy of nationalism, to keep their voices low and their friends close.

Others, I suspect, will have had revealed to them in the thespian’s courage one of the inner emotions of nationalism.

Stupid, bloody actor they must have thought in Bute House.