A celebration of Scotland? It’s a sanctimonious pile of SNP mince

As new VisitScotland advert causes a stir...

ACHEERFUL, upbeat VisitScotland video in celebration of our country for St Andrew’s Day? Surely one yawning, open goal. Our glorious scenery, the charms of Edinburgh, the vast tracts of unspoiled countryside. Our vibrant traditional music, our lofty mountains, our abundant wildlife, our pawky humour and – when we make the effort – our delicious food.

But not under Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP administration. The ‘Celebrate St Andrew’s Day’ commercial flung upon a defenceless world is a piece of slick, self-regarding political correctness.

So cultish it could have been directed by the Moonies, it is scripted entirely in verse – though one must use the term loosely – that could have been lifted from the 1980s school magazine of any painfully selfregarding comprehensive.

Slimy

‘Scotland’s a country of riches, worth far more than pounds and pence,’ carols our hostess, a young woman of mid-M8 drawl.

‘Here we value kindness: without it, nothing else makes sense – ’cause we are a place of equals, and we’re creating things anew.

‘It may not be easy, but that is what we do. If you share these feelings too, Scotland’s waiting. And open to you…’

She launches this homily with a backdrop of smiley people standing on broad steps, and in a carefully selected blend of sex, age and colour.

The movie segues through a faintly menacing flourish of BE KIND placards in various shades of pink and ends with our lass preening on some mountain-top cairn within virtue-signalling range of Crianlarich.

There is no skirl of pipes, no gurgle of accordion, no spine-tingling stream of Gaelic song. No Forth Bridges, no Edinburgh Castle, not a second of drone-camera footage of the Waverley slicing the Kyles of Bute.

Eilean Donan Castle was evidently having a day off, we glimpse not a thing to eat, not one Highland cow a-paddle in some shady lochan.

And the electric piano accompaniment is of such vapidity it might as well be whale song.

It is not, to be charitable, the typical inviting puff piece of the Scottish Tourist Board of yore, or any tourist board, these days, anywhere.

What it does immediately remind you of, with the gloopy music and chanted cant, is a party political broadcast by the Scottish National Party.

Because, with its heavy nudge at an administration ‘creating things anew’, and the slimy suggestion that ‘here’ we value kindness, quality and openness – in unspoken contrast to the ‘there’ we can readily guess – that is exactly what this total mince is.

And the little film exemplifies two strands that have become central to the SNP psyche since the Nationalists first gained devolved power in May 2007.

One is what, years ago, I first identified as ‘Scottish exceptionalism’. The nation most famous for defining itself not as a country, but as some sort of noble ideal for everyone else on the globe to aspire to, is of course the USA.

Americans, though, may be excused such preening as they have no sense of irony. For Scots, who abound in it, there is no excuse if we fail to howl down the suggestion that we are kinder, more equal and more open than – as the film insinuates – the land and people of England.

The other oddity, of which this VisitScotland film reeks, is how Scottish nationalism is, these days, and to all intents and purposes, a religion.

We have the incessant ‘othering’ of the ungodly, be they ‘yoons’, the ‘55 per cent’, the ‘Little Brits’ or whatever offensive moniker is seized upon.

We have the Yes marches, the mass gatherings of the faithful. We have the cast-out and the unpersoned: nowhere, anywhere, on the SNP website, even in the history section, will you find the name of Alex Salmond. And we even – such as the occasion, last year, when Miss Sturgeon unleashed her Twitter mob on broadcaster Sarah Smith – see the odd stoning.

At times it borders on the delusional, like that pro-independence rally in Glasgow, early in November 2019, when the First Minister orated that ‘Scotland is opening, welcoming, diverse and inclusive… and no Tory is ever going to be allowed to change that’ – her features, at that instant, utterly contorted by hate.

But let us look at the specific claims in the VisitScotland flick.

Does Scotland particularly value kindness? One rather doubts Miss Smith would agree. Or Joanna Cherry.

Or Nigel Farage – invariably threatened by mobs when ever he sets foot this side of the Border. Or J K Rowling, or sometime Nationalist MSP Joan McAlpine, or anyone else who has refused to toe the party line that someone physically and genetically male is, actually, a woman, just because he says he is.

Poverty

‘Kindness’ has not been the general experience, over the centuries and at Lowland hands, of the Gael. It was not the experience of immigrants from Ireland after the Great War. It is not, even today, the experience of some Catholics in parts of central Scotland.

Nor has it been the experience of too many folk who have settled here from England.

One does not see many Nationalist blogs, football-fan forums or any point-andshriek Twitterstorm where Scots rhetoric is notable for temperate phrasing, courteous reasoned argument and Sunday school language.

Rather, the general tenor is vicious, personal and potty-mouthed.

Nor is Scotland a land of equals. There is poverty and exclusion here just as dreadful as anything in Liverpool, Swansea or Belfast.

Indeed – one thinks at once of the proximity, for instance, of Colinton to Wester Hailes, in western Edinburgh – you can walk within minutes from streets of wealth and privilege into schemes of hopelessness, desperation and fear.

Nor is it evident that the SNP administration is, in fact, ‘creating things anew’. Newly elected in 2007, for instance, the Nationalists had promised to abolish council tax.

Preening

Well, we still have council tax. The SNP promised to reduce poverty, then engulfing 17 per cent of the population. Today, it is 20 per cent.

There were to be smaller class sizes. Instead they have grown. They were going to scrap student debt: today, it is 42 per cent bigger.

In education, standards have plummeted like mercury in the Arctic. We have the lowest Pisa scores in maths and science since first taking part in that international assessment programme 20 years ago.

Since 2007, Scotland has gone from 11th to 24th in maths and from 11th to 23rd in reading; 30 per cent of pupils now leave primary school below the expected literacy level.

We have the worst drugs death rate in Europe – threeand-a-half times that of England and Wales – and A&E services in such disarray that, when my mother broke her arm in May, it was ten hours before an ambulance arrived.

And that is before we even start on the state of our Clyde and West Highland ferries.

So spare us the preening. Spare us the sanctimony. And, above all, spare us the self-righteousness.