(from Daily Mail Online June 18, 2009.)
Gorbals Mick!?! Michael Martin was not born in the Gorbals, nor does he represent it at the Westminster parliament. The epitaph was coined by Quentin Letts who drew on the Gorbals’s ’70s run-down image of poverty, working-classness and violence.
Things have changed in the Gorbals since the ’70s. Wikipedia tells us that it “is now a mixture between working-class and middle-class people, with a rather cosmopolitan atmosphere”.
Reality permeates GB-wide consciousnesses much more slowly than stereotype changes. Quentin Letts, hardly known for his down-to-earth views on the Great British public (or is it the great British public?) and author of tellingly-named Bog-Standard Britain: How Mediocrity has Ruined this Great Nation, probably only has one unit of knowledge about Glasgow and poverty — summed up in the area known as the Gorbals. He has no intention of updating his knowledge, nor does he feel the need to. If for example, a Daily Mail writer tried to publish the following: “Boris Johnson, Mayor of Oop-North,. . . “, there’s no way that that would pass the edit. An inaccurate, out-of-date reference to a Scottish town goes unquestioned.
The media trope of the impoverished Scotsman gets reiterated daily. Irrespective of who coined the phrase, googling “Gorbals Mick” returns results from every many news organisations. I won’t even begin on the “Mick” part.
