British - Politician | January 3, 1973 -
I found that Scottishness and Englishness are actually strong, instinctive things, whatever the historical reasons. Even the accent changes - just two inches across the border.
Rory Stewart
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It was a bit of a surprise when I became a Tory MP. My friends said it was a stupid idea.
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I think one of the odd things about public life, coming from the outside, is that people seem to be paranoid. Maybe they were quite frank initially, but then they did one thing which went wrong.
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Politics feels, on what I have seen of it, like joining a tribe, and a lot of it is about unspoken ways of behaving.
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I like connecting to places by foot, and I'm interested in experiencing how somewhere like Crieff connects to somewhere like London.
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I don't know much about Britain. I've been working overseas for most of my adult life. So I'd like to see what sort of problems there really are here. It's a question of asking, 'Where are we going, how purposeful are we?' And see if there's anything that can be done to find possibilities for change.
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The thing that interests me most about Scotland is how we differ from our neighbours. How do our ambitions differ? What kind of society are we? What can we learn from the mistakes of the past, and how do we position ourselves in the world?
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The Taliban, broadly speaking, are Afghans - farmers, subsistence farmers. As I say, most of those people can't find the United States on the map. Al Qaeda, traditionally, are much more educated, middle-class people, often from Egypt, from Saudi Arabia, North Africa.
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