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BRITAIN’S Got Talent didn’t hold auditions in Scotland this year in case the judges got “lynched” again.

For the first time since it started in 2007, the ITV talent show didn’t come north of the Border, going to Belfast instead.

Scotland was snubbed despite the fact we produced the series’ biggest success story, Susan Boyle – who was discovered at the Glasgow auditions in 2009 – and 2011 winner Jai McDowall.

And show supremo Simon Cowell this week claimed it was all fellow judge David Walliams’s fault.

Asked at the Britain’s Got Talent press conference why they missed out Scotland, he said: “That’s a good question.

“I wanted to but David didn’t want to – he doesn’t like Scottish people.”

David added: “We nearly got lynched last time.”

They may have been joking but when they were in Glasgow last January the pair and fellow judges Amanda Holden and Alesha Dixon got booed when they left fans waiting in gales and downpours outside the Clyde Auditorium.

Simon has always had a love-hate relationship with Scotland.

Despite often slagging off acts such as The MacDonald Brothers, he claims not to have an anti-Scots bias and loves to remind people that he’s a quarter Scottish.

He first made the claim on The X Factor – then changed the percentage to half Scots the next week, before his mum Julie, whose maiden name was Dalglish, confirmed he was only 25 per cent Scots.

However, Cowell was back at his old tricks at Wednesday’s launch when he said he was “half Scottish anyway” as he tried to wriggle out of why his show snubbed the country.

Fans north of the Border complained on social media about being left out, with some suggesting it makes the show’s name misleading.

But Cowell, who recently backed the No campaign saying he wanted the UK to be “a big, happy family”, tried to defuse the row by claiming that there will be Scots on the show.

He said: “We’ve got to be fair, we get calls from all the cities now – we’ve got Scottish people, we just didn’t go to Scotland.”

David added: “And we went to Belfast, which we didn’t do last year.”

Britain’s Got Talent is on ITV at 7.15pm tomorrow.