Heffer Reprises His Liverpool Smears

When Boris Johnson carried the can for a Spectator editorial which had poured scorn on the people of Liverpool and talked of them “wallowing in victimhood”, it was widely believed that the actual author was not Bozza, but Simon “Enoch was right” Heffer, and today’s attack on the Scots by the Hefferlump will only reinforce that suspicion, such is the bile contained within it.

Behold the horrible Hefferlump

“Why the Scots MUST vote for independence! It'll save the rest of us a fortune” trumpets the headline, emphasising that Heffer is being “very provocative”, for which read “sitting in a comfortable office in West London while pontificating on places elsewhere in the UK that he has no intention of visiting, and knows sweet Jack about, not that he’s about to admit it”.

The independence debate, Heffer whines, “is increasingly a debate from which the English, who as taxpayers send a hefty subsidy to Scotland each year to keep that country afloat, are wilfully excluded”. And whose fault is that? Not the Scots: the terms of the independence issue have been agreed by the Westminster Government. And I wouldn’t be too sure about that “hefty subsidy”.

The thought does not initially enter with Heffer: “Many Scots don’t much like the English and appear ungrateful for everything that England does for them in showering them with money”. D’you know, I never have a problem with the Scots. Perhaps what the Hefferlump means is that most Scots don’t like pompous bigots like him. So they’re no different to most Brits.

But Heffer ultimately gets to the $64k question: oil and gas. First he says the reserves are in decline, which they are in the North Sea, then he gets picky about the boundary between the territorial waters of England and Scotland, before finally running out of ready excuses, as he admits there are potential new reserves around the Shetland Isles (also west thereof, but that’s too much for Heffer to take in).

How to explain this away? You’ll love this: “Much of the potential oil reserves lie in the territorial waters of the Shetland Islands, whose population would rather be part of Norway than of an independent Scotland”. Recent opinion poll? Secession movement? People talking foreign? None of the above? In that case, the Hefferlump earns himself an unequivocal f*** right off moment.

His rant is filled out with welfare dependency smears, suggestions that an independent Scotland would not be able to get back into the EU, and that its currency would be worthless (no doubt his predecessors said that about Ireland in the early 1920s). But this is really about a pundit desperate to sound useful, knowing that the next Daily Mail editor may decide that he isn’t.

And on the basis of this column, who else is going to employ him?