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Hugh MacDiarmid (real name Christopher Grieve) was Scotland's greatest poet since Burns. He was also a man of unusual politics--a supporter of Scottish independence all his life, he was expelled from the SNP for communism--and then joined the Communist party, from which he would be expelled for Scottish nationalism. He was also in his (relative) youth a sympathizer with Fascism. Incidentally, he rejoined the Communist party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 (which he justified, as he did the invasion of Czechoslovakia twelve years later) just as other intellectuals were leaving it in droves...
Anyway, if there was one consistent thread in MacDiarmid's politics, it was his hatred of England. (In answer to a questionnaire, he once listed "Anglophobia" as his hobby. In a late poem, he wrote that he did not want to be called "British" because it was too much like "brutish.") His politics led him to make many statements for which he was criticized, but the one probably most often singled out as reprehensible was one made in the 1970's during the Troubles in Northern Ireland: