A song in my heart for Wales – but why no proper St Andrew’s Day celebration?

Yesterday was St Andrew’s Day – a day that came and went for most people without them really noticing – so I’ve been thinking a lot about pride and nationhood. While I was born in Scotland and have lived here my whole life, I’ve got some Welsh genes.

So of course, in the absence of a Scotland side, I was going to be supporting Wales in their recent make-or-break tie with England at the World Cup.

My granny was from Llanelli in Carmarthenshire and only left Wales to marry my grandfather, a Manx man, who was stationed at RM Condor in Arbroath after the Second World War.

I remember as a kid being taken by my dad to visit a school in Swansea to see kids who were ages with me being taught in Welsh.

I learned to respect the language and the pride that went with the culture and my heritage.

St Andrew’s Day falls flat in comparison. As I learned to love rugby as a child, I had one of the Five Nations tops that was half Welsh and half Scottish.

In the lead-up to the World Cup, I caught a clip of the actor Michael Sheen delivering a rousing speech to the Welsh football team and felt it in my bones.

And this week I have been watching clips of the Welsh folk singer Dafydd Iwan sing his song Yma o Hyd, which has become an accidental anthem of the Welsh football team.

You will probably have heard it booming out of the stadium if you watched them play at any point in the tournament so far.

Loosely translated it means “we’re still here,” a perfect message for a team who have defied all expectations.

But it’s also a deeply political song, written in response to Margaret Thatcher and the damage she did to the coal industry, which was the lifeblood of many Welsh – and Scottish – communities.

It’s a song of pride with a very modern message.

The Welsh celebrate St David’s Day, in song and by other means, on March 1.

And while it might be acknowledged and marked a little more than St Andrew’s Day, even it pales into comparison next to St Patrick’s Day, March 17, an event which has been widely commercialised by the hospitality sector.

But have these patrons’ days, well, had their day?

It sometimes seems that way with St Andrew’s Day.

Attempts were made a few years ago to make it a national holiday.

It is a bank holiday for most civil servants, but it’s one that they can roll into their overall holiday entitlement and take when they want.

Instead our national day feels more like Burns night. Whether you mark it or not, you know it’s happening.

And from actually attending a Burns supper to just having haggis, neeps and tatties, most of us make a token effort.

But it’s a nod to a bard, to a man rather than the country itself.

And somehow St Andrew’s Day lacks a focus that might make it a truly national celebration.

So what might a modern take on Scottish patriotism look like, or rather sound like?

Perhaps we should look to the songbook of the late Michael Marra.

His song Hermless is often touted as an alternative national anthem to Flower of Scotland – a song I’ll happily blast out from the stands of Murrayfield.

So perhaps if we want St Andrew’s Day to have greater resonance, to be an occasion we actively mark, we need a song to go with it.

One with modern resonance which reflects who we are and how far we’ve come.

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Labour is right on private school charity status.

The issue of whether private schools should have charitable status is front and centre of UK politics this week and at the heart of yesterday’s Prime Minister’s Questions.

That’s because UK Labour have just made a commitment to remove charitable status from schools like Eton should Labour win the next general election.

The Tories have been quick to attack this policy as “class war”. An idea they view as rooted in jealousy that achieves nothing other than diminishing the excellent education of private schools and who has access to them.

For me though it’s just a question of fairness, not an act of spite.

By most people’s reckoning Save the Children and Barnardo’s are charities, Dundee High and Kilgraston are not.

The rules around what you need to do as a private school in Scotland to keep your charitable status have tightened considerably in recent years.

It’s no longer enough to say you let the state school kids use your hockey pitches on a Saturday morning.

Questions remain though, particularly when private schools say the first thing they’ll cut if they lose their status is the bursaries and scholarships they offer poorer students.

Charities get tax breaks for good reason, but tax breaks that sustain the deep inequality of our country are not just.

Yma o Hyd is a song of pride with a very modern message

LOUD AND PROUD: St Andrew’s Day lacks a focus that might make it a truly national celebration, maybe we need a song to go with it.