HE has been slated as a Weinstein of his day for his treatment of women. Now First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has added to the debate surrounding Robert Burns by suggesting a rewrite of one of his most famous works, A Man’s a Man for A’ That.

“Maybe if he had been writing it today it wouldn’t have been a ‘A Man’s a Man’, it might have been ‘A Person’s a Person’ or something like that,” she notes lightheartedly in a new documentary on the poet.

Interviewed for Robert Burns: No Holds Bard, showing on Sky Arts tonight, Ms Sturgeon says his views of women “weren’t very positive”.

Although the First Minister hails Burns as a genius and says he makes her proud to be Scottish, her comments add to growing criticism of the Bard for past attitudes and actions, particularly towards women.

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Singer KT Tunstall, who last night performed at the Janey Godley-hosted Big Burns Supper on YouTube, said the poet would be “100% cancelled”, or boycotted, if he was around today.

“His treatment of women of his own class was terrible,” says Liz Lochhead, who presents the hour-long film.

The playwright and former Makar also notes that Burns got a job as a plantation overseer in Jamaica, and had gone as far as booking his passage when he found literary success.

That this was the same Burns who wrote The Slave’s Lament was “quite a contradiction”. Poverty and desperation may not have given the ploughman poet much choice, she concedes.

Lochhead has previously called Burns a “sex pest” and said his treatment of the heavily pregnant Jean Armour, boasted of in a notorious letter of 1788, “very, very Weinsteinian”.

Burns meets with criticism elsewhere in the programme, made by STV Productions for Sky, though not for his personal life. Jeremy Paxman doubles down on his previous condemnation of Burns as “the king of sentimental doggerel”.

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“His poetry is completely unsophisticated. It doesn’t express anything other than very easy, familiar ideas; it doesn’t deal with anything complex … I find him trite, banal and his observations are not in the slightest bit original or indeed honest.”

The former Newsnight presenter does, however, admit to admiring the man if not his poetry. “He had a hard life and he made compromises of the kind all of us make.”

The novelist Andrew O'Hagan says Burns often behaved badly. “Whether that’s relevant or not to the work he created, that’s in the eye of the beholder.”

O’Hagan chose Tam o’ Shanter as his favourite work. Ms Sturgeon opted for the song-poem A Man’s a Man.

She first encountered Burns in primary school when the class had to learn To a Mouse. “I was immediately captivated. Robert Burns, if this doesn’t sound overly sentimental, makes me really proud to be Scottish.”

The poem has stayed with her, as could be seen on Sunday when she likened Boris Johnson to a “wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie” for his refusal to agree to a second independence referendum.

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The First Minister, from Ayrshire, recalled growing up in Burns country, where the route to her grandparents’ house took her past his cottage.

A Man’s a Man was “quintessentially Scottish” in its attitude, she says. “It’s about equality and egalitarianism. It doesn’t matter your background or where you come from, it’s your value as a human being that matters.”

Burns died in 1796. He was 37-years-old.

The First Minister concludes: “We should enjoy him and appreciate him with all of his flaws and imperfections. He was a flawed genius. But first and foremost he was a genius.”

4pm, Sunday, January 31, Sky Arts, free to view