Tag Archives: andy williamson

Earlier this week, we published Jenni Lang’s Reply to the Toast to the lassies given at the Edinburgh South Burns Supper.  We said we’d put up Andy Wiliamson’s original toast to which she was replying when we got it. So here it is. Enjoy.

“Thank you everyone for such a wonderful evening. Thank you to Rebecca for organising and for the team working for providing such wonderful service. 

So it has fallen to me to give the Toast to the Lassies this evening. 

I have to start with a confession. I am actually from England. 

That’s not the confession. The confession is that this is my first ever Burns’ night dinner. 

And I confess that I am not an expert in Burns’ poetry. When I first moved to Scotland, I thought ‘mice and men’ were the two main ingredients in haggis. 

I cannot, either, confess to being an expert on women. 

When Rebecca asked me to give this toast, she said they were looking for someone who knew as much about Burns as they did about women, so in that respect, she picked absolutely the right person. 

I would like it also stated on the record, that getting asked to give this toast is something of a poisoned chalice. 

For anyone desiring a political career, it’s quite a tightrope to be asked to walk. To stand in a room full of political women and make jokes about gender differences, armed only with a book of quotes from an eighteenth century farmer. 

So the bar to success in this speech is to make jokes, talk about poetry, and avoid being cancelled. 

Still, in reading Burns, it’s very clear that many of his ideas about women are universal, as are his ideas on politics. Reading some of his poems, it was striking how the world he was describing is not much different from the world of 2025. In the Rights of Women, for example, he says: 

“While Europe’s eye is fix’d on mighty things,

The fate of empires and the fall of kings;

While quacks of State must each produce his plan,

And even children lisp the Rights of Man;

Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention,

The Rights of Woman merit some attention.” 

Burns understood – like the proto-Lib Dem that he was – that everything has to be in balance. However, he got a key detail wrong. The opposite of the Rights of Women isn’t the Rights of Man. 

I’m speaking from personal experience here as a married man with two small children. I can personally attest that on occasions I have tested the boundaries of what my wife will put up with. 

Whether it’s telling her that – after a long General election campaign, a Council by-election requires me almost immediately to be away from home in the evenings again. Or times when I’ve stayed in the pub a little later than I probably should have.   

In those instances, it’s very clear that the opposite of Women’s Rights is Men’s Wrongs.