Battling the bigots

Published on 03/10/2004 00:14

SCOTS have long regarded themselves as an inclusive, welcoming people, happy to take people as they are in the knowledge that "a man’s a man for a’ that". It’s a self-image that has been reinforced by the relative lack of racist incidents north of the Border compared with racial hotspots and occasional conflagrations in England. It’s a comforting thought. It’s also wrong.

The main reason that we suffer few racist attacks is that we are not a particularly cosmopolitan country. And anyway, Scotland does have an intolerance problem; it is called sectarianism. It is not that we are blighted by overt religious hatred between Catholics and Protestants, but it does exist. Usually it is limited to mindless threats through archaic songs and obscene gestures during Old Firm games, but sometimes it goes further: the police reported 262 crimes involving religious hatred between June last year and February this year. Even using a conservative classification of the crime, there have been 11 sectarian deaths in 18 years in Scotland.

The Scottish Executive is right to regard this as a problem that must be tackled, and if Jack McConnell sees attempts at a solution as a much-needed big idea for his administration, that is a step forward. But the pilot schemes for ‘tolerance classes’ for children as young as three will need to be closely monitored. Infants are ‘colour blind’, and the relatively small differences between two branches of the one Christian faith are a mystery to them. There is a danger that introducing such concepts will merely open them up to bigotry at a tragically young age.

We must also do more about the real problem - educating the bigoted minority of adult Scots who are sectarian or racist, and who perpetuate intolerance through the minds of their children at home.