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  • 3 days ago
GB News host Tom Harwood has criticised journalist Kevin Maguire for a "just wrong" tweet about St George's Day that claimed England's patron saint was Turkish.Maguire had posted: "Happy St George's Day when we celebrate a Turkish migrant worker who never came to England and were now probably be barred from entering."READ THE FULL STORY HERE
Transcript
00:00Of course, for hundreds of years, Wales was considered part of England.
00:03Now they're very much their own, aren't they?
00:05Yes. I mean, arguably, the only time that Wales has ever been one politically homogenous unit
00:11has been from 1998 onwards, because before it was sort of subsumed into England,
00:18it was lots of different Welsh kingdoms rather than one homogenous Welsh unit.
00:22You know how I feel about devolution. We won't get into that.
00:25But yes, some people, as you may have noticed, if you're social media users,
00:28like to point something out and appear very clever indeed, of course.
00:33Like political commentator Kevin Maguire, the political journalist,
00:37shall we have a little look about what he tweeted?
00:38He says,
00:39Tom, is Kevin as clever as he appears to think he is with that tweet?
00:51I don't know why he's saying he was Turkish.
00:54I mean, the Turks didn't get to Anatolia, what we now call modern-day Turkey,
01:00or at least the western half of it, until the 11th century.
01:05St George died in the mid-300s AD.
01:11So why on earth is Kevin Maguire saying this guy was Turkish when he wasn't part of a Turkish society?
01:18He was Greek. He served in the Roman army.
01:22He became a member of the Praetorian Guard in Rome under Diocletian.
01:26But he was put to death because he would not give up his Christian faith.
01:30Which is quite crucial, really, to why he is our patron saint.
01:34It's precisely why he was, because he became the guy that everyone venerated during the Crusades,
01:38because he was such a sort of venerated military martyr.
01:42And that's why we then adopted him through the Crusades
01:46as someone that represents what England was sort of establishing itself to be.
01:51But a certain type of Englishman or Englishwoman likes to point this out every single year.
01:56Why do they say he's Turkish?
01:57Try to make a political point out of it.
02:00And also, I didn't know, realise we barred the Turkish from our country anyway.
02:04But he's Greek. He's Greek.
02:06The Turks came from what we now consider to be perhaps Siberia or Mongolia.
02:11They didn't get to what we now call Turkey until about a thousand years after St George died.
02:17Why are you calling him Turkish? She's not blooming Turkish.
02:20I guess it's better than a certain Emily Thornberry's notorious tweet that we all remember.
02:26I think we've got that too.
02:28If we could just have a little look.
02:29Oh, yes. The Rochester by-election in 2014.
02:322014. This was the second by-election that UKIP won
02:36when Mark Reckless defected from the Conservatives.
02:40And in quite an honourable way, actually, he said,
02:42I'm not going to just defect from one party to another.
02:43I'm going to let my constituents vote on whether they accept me changing parties.
02:47But all the politicians from all over the land went down to campaign.
02:50And this was Emily Thornberry's contribution.
02:53Slightly sneering there. A white van and two England flags.
02:56I have no clue.
03:09I have no clue.
03:12I've got no clue.

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