BRUSSELS HAS AGREED to back down from classifying kilts as skirts, The Scotsman has reported. The move came after the EU's statistics agency agreed to list Scotland's national garment as menswear.
Well, good. The whole story, the first part of which Andrew Dodge has posted, is appalling. First you have some Eurocrat demanding that kilts be declared as skirts. Then Brussels said that if the good kilt-makers of Scotland were not to comply with this demand, they could face fines of up to 1000 pounds. The highest levels of Government had to be called in to have this problem solved.
Now, we here at The Rant are not experts on the matter. We are only partially Scots; perhaps one-third of our ancestry is such, at most. Further, we do note that the modern kilt was the invention of an English (!) industrialist in the 1700s. 'Struth!
That said, even we can tell it is very much still Scotland's national garment, and no whinging excitable Eurocrat should ever have dared to insult the good people of Scotland as such. Of course, there could be one bright side to this whole affair. Perhaps the Scots will start wondering why some foreign lan dhen cac bureaucrat can levy thousand-pound fines on their heads for not filling out a statistics form.
Posted by Benjamin Kepple at November 10, 2003 09:58 PM | TrackBack