JEREMY Clarkson has a long history of making grossly offensive comments and of behaving like a petulant man-child.
In 2015, he was suspended from the BBC while filming on location for an episode of Top Gear after assaulting one of the producers of the show, who happened to be Irish, and racially abusing him when the producer offered Clarkson soup and a cold meat platter, instead of the steak he wanted, because the hotel chef had gone home.
The producer declined to press criminal charges but the following February Clarkson made a formal apology and settled a civil suit the producer had taken out against him for £100,000.
In 2011, he wrote a column for The Sun in which he called for the Welsh language to be abolished. That same year, referring to striking public sector workers, he said: "I would take them outside and execute them in front of their families."
In another column for The Sun he said that if someone commits suicide by jumping in front of a train, he said that just the "big bits" of the body should be picked up, and the rest left for foxes and birds to eat.
These are just the edited low lights of Clarkson's appalling public comments, there are many more of them. Comments which are misogynistic, homophobic, racist, or which mock people with disabilities.
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What all these comments have in common is that they betoken a man steeped in right wing English nationalist exceptionalism who believes that the only real offensiveness is whatever happens to mildly inconvenience him personally or which challenges the privilege of middle-class, white heterosexual English men like him.
Yet despite this long history of public racism and offensiveness, Clarkson continues to be given a platform by the British media which excuses his abusiveness as just a bit of 'banter' even as it works itself into a paroxysm of pearl clutching when people like Clarkson are called 'gammons'. The double standards are galling.
Clarkson's latest exercise in offence came in yet another of his pieces in the Sun, in which he gleefully joins in the right wing pile on against Meghan Markle.
Clarkson not only described his hatred for Markle, calling for her to be paraded naked through the streets while the crowd yells "Shame!" and throws excrement at her. This came following her admission that her experience with the British royal family had caused her to have suicidal thoughts. It was a revolting appeal to incite violence and humiliation on a woman.
Clarkson, who was born in 1960, concluded, "Everyone who's my age thinks the same way." I am just two years younger than Clarkson, but I certainly don't think the same way. No one with a functioning moral compass or sense of proportion does.
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However, for good measure Clarkson also insulted the Scottish First Minister, saying that he hated her in the same way that he hated the serial killer Rose West - who together with her husband, tortured, sexually abused, and murdered at least nine young women, one of whom was a school classmate of a former work colleague of mine.
He went on to say that however much he hated Nicola Sturgeon and Rose West, he hated Meghan Markle even more. Apparently wanting Scottish independence or telling the unpleasant truth about the Windsor’s, quite possibly the only people in the United Kingdom with a greater sense of entitlement than Jeremy Clarkson, are worse crimes than actual rape and murder.
Nicola Sturgeon condemned Clarkson's comments about Meghan Markle, calling them vile and misogynistic. Clarkson has now issued an apology of sorts, dismissing his remark as a clumsy reference to Game of Thrones and promising to be more careful in future, just like the last time, and the time before that, and the time before that.
But Clarkson will not change, because the British media will continue to give him a platform and will continue to dismiss as just a bit of banter his bullying punching down from his position of privilege on everyone who is not a white middle-class, able bodied heterosexual English man.
This piece is an extract from today’s REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.
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