Are Scots born with grievances or do we acquire them on life’s carousel, eternally vigilant for people who might be looking at us the wrong way?
Do English people, bred on a diet of chippy and sullen Scots popping up in their television crime dramas and soaps, tremble at the thought of their first visit north of the border? When Hollywood directors seek to portray disdainful wickedness they always reach for a cut-glass English accent. In the UK, they choose from among a familiar troupe of Scots character actors when they wish to convey a sense of bleak unpredictability. Their personal relationships are often chaotic and they drink and swear a lot.
There is nothing like a profanity delivered in a Glasgow accent to shift the atmosphere in a scene from benign indifference to malevolent intent. We Clydesiders are both blessed and cursed by our elocution. Our kind will not be featuring in the BBC’s next Jane Austen adaptation. You will not see us in gentle English sitcoms ordering peppermint tea with our alfalfa crepes in an artisan cafe in Shoreditch.
But if the script calls for the peace to be shattered by a violent robbery taking place next door and the cornered vagabonds to be forced to take hostages, then there is a good chance the accent underneath the chief balaclava will be pure Possil with a hint of edgy Barmulloch. A messy relationship, followed by a problematic employment history will have propelled him down a desperado’s path. A sense of grievance will have consumed him.
I’d be reluctant to condemn this as racist or in any way indicative of wretched stereotyping. Very often, we Scots will use these grim caricatures to our advantage. The brilliant Glaswegian comedian Kevin Bridges has a routine in which a Scot visiting England is bashfully proud of his city’s reputation for breeding hard men and gangsters.
Many of us like to trace the perception of Scots as dark and irascible characters to PG Wodehouse’s observation that “it is never difficult to tell between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine”. But it goes much further back than that. The great 18th-century English writer Samuel Johnson gently besmirched us when he said: “The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England!”
A combination of ugly weather and the commonly held perception of old Presbyterianism as a joyless and austere creed controlling all aspects of Scottish culture contributed to the distortion. This gave birth to my all-time favourite Scottish joke: why do the Wee Frees hate having sex standing up? Because it might lead to dancing.
Only a few years have elapsed since Gordon Brown was lampooned as a latterday embodiment of the dreich Scotsman labouring under his own personal rain cloud.
In my family, a tale has been passed down of a much-loved uncle who travelled to Lisbon in 1967 to watch Celtic become the first British club to lift the mighty European Cup. Amid the euphoria that greeted this, my uncle was heard to say: “Aye, but I still think John Hughes should have been in the team.” In the Lowland Scotland of my childhood, it seemed that every family had an uncle like that, sitting in the corner like Tam o’ Shanter’s wife “nursing her wrath to keep it warm”.
A few years ago, I saw the main speaker at an Edinburgh convention for the GlobalScot group of entrepreneurs chide his compatriots for too often failing to look on the bright side of life. He felt that we were gloomy or noncommittal, even when we had cause to celebrate. In answer to:“How are things going?”, too many of us, he felt, were inclined to answer” “Aye, no’ bad”, even when life couldn’t be sweeter. One well-known academic has built a career telling us that we have confidence issues and that sardonic Scottish wit encountered in the playground has bred a nation of emotionally fragile snowflakes destined never to fulfil their potential.
It’s all nonsense and fails to grasp that traditional Scottish rectitude and caution are prized assets in the worlds of finance, business and politics. We were never meant to wear baseball caps back to front or do high-fives and fill the pockets of mendicant motivational speakers by loosening our emotions on firewalks at midnight.
Thus, there was surprise last week at the results of a UK-wide BBC survey measuring attitudes about identity. It found that more Scots felt the country’s best days were in the future (36%) than in the past (29%). In old Albion, meanwhile, optimism has taken a dip. Almost half the number of respondents said England was better in the past and only 17% expressed hope about the future. This is what happens when a cast of privileged old Etonians channelling Nelson, Wellington and Churchill lead England on a crusade out of Europe, proclaiming isolation, suspicion and fear.
In Scotland, we haven’t changed that much. Our essential characteristics, which have always been valued in England and across the world, will remain. It’s not that we refuse to regard a glass as being half full – it’s simply that we will always want to know how it came to be so. Five years ago, as England began to turn in on itself, in Scotland we let the genie out of the bottle during the referendum on independence. Multitudes of people, accustomed to being patronised and dismissed, found their voices and discovered that they were as wise and eloquent as those in the political classes. Everything is up for grabs again and anything is possible.
• Kevin McKenna is an Observer columnist
