Scotland

Scottish teenagers received their exam results this week and, for the seventh consecutive year, the pass-rate for Highers increased. So did the pass-rates for all other exams: the Advanced Highers success rate marched past 82 per cent while a scarcely credible 98.9 per cent of all Standard Grade exams were passed. Cue the annual debate over grade inflation and dumbing down. Actually, the best academic evidence (compiled by Durham University researchers) suggests grade inflation, while real, is less of an issue in Scotland than it is in the rest of the United Kingdom. It also distracts attention from the real issue. Which remains that far too many children in far too many

There are many Scotlands and they’re all dreadful. That at any rate seems to be the message from the Scottish government’s anti-sectarianism ‘taskforce’. We’re all in denial about sectarianism and the shadow it casts over Scottish society. Of course it’s hardly surprising that those people who spend their lives ferreting for evidence of sectarian behaviour conclude that sectarianism is both more broadly found and more deeply ingrained in Scottish society than your own experience may suggest. What do you know anyway? Conveniently, of course, such conclusions also demand that more public money be spent educating the poor, bigoted, people of Scotland to change the way they think and act. Then

Dunblane yesterday evening and, an hour after Andy Murray has won the men’s singles title at Wimbledon, the streets are still thronged with cheerful revellers. Smiles and saltires abound. Locals and visitors cluster for photographs around the golden letterbox commemorating Murray’s Olympic triumph last year. Journalists have been despatched to pen colour pieces from Murray’s home town. On the Stirling road two young girls, one sporting a saltire as a kind of sari, hold up a poster of the local hero; every passing car honks its horn in celebratory salutation. The boy has done it. Not bad, not bad at all. This morning, acres of newsprint are devoted to Murray’s

Earlier this week, I was part of a panel on Newsnight Scotland discussing the latest – some would say, belated – efforts designed to improve Glasgow’s dismally underachieving state schools. That they need improvement is beyond doubt. In Scotland’s largest city, only 7% of state-educated pupils leave school with five good Higher passes. In Scotland as a whole a mere 220 children from the poorest 20% of neighbourhoods achieved three As at Higher (the minimum grades required for admission to leading universities such as St Andrews). As I said on the programme, this should be considered a national scandal. More than that, a disgrace. (Like Fraser, I wish more people

It is Selkirk Common Riding today. The biggest, most important, day in my home town’s year. A day lent extra significance in 2013 since this is the 500th anniversary of the catastrophe at Flodden Field, a battle still recalled in these parts with a mixture of pride and melancholy. If you listen with due attention you can still hear the hoofbeats of history here. King James IV was the last British monarch killed in battle. As many as 10,000 of his compatriots fell with him that bleak September day in Northumberland. Among them were a handful bishops and many sons of the aristocracy. Scarcely a family in the country was

I am trying very hard to understand why everyone is shocked — shocked! — by news that the US government helps itself to the massive data flows generated by Google, Facebook and Twitter. I have always assumed that something placed into an internet database is no more secret than something written in a letter. We all know that those pop-up advertisements — so amazingly compatible with what we searched for on Facebook ten minutes ago — aren’t there by accident. But if we aren’t bothered when ruthlessly efficient multinational corporations troll through our data in order to earn billions for their teenage CEOs, why are we bothered when the comparatively

The Macdonalds of Clanranald are one of the oldest families in the world. Their lineage comfortably predates the Scotland of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Descended from the Macdonald Lords of the Isles and sea kings of Dalriada, the Clanranalds emerge from the mists, myths and archaeology of the Dark Ages. But they were guilty of a misjudgment. Just as Robert the Bruce started life as an Anglo-Norman noble, the Macdonalds had to navigate the violent uncertainties of pre- and early medieval Scotland. They also had to reckon with the Vikings. (A Viking longship arrives at a beach, and the bosun divides the crew into three squads. ‘You lot, burning and slaughtering. You,

It is not unusual to hear dark warnings of what might happen if Scotland votes for independence. Big Business is flighty. It is rather more unusual to hear leading business figures suggest they might leave Scotland if the country does not vote for independence. But that’s what Jim McColl, the chief executive of Clyde Blowers Capital, has done. Scotland, he suggests, is held back by the fact that UK economic policy is dictated by the needs of the City of London and the south-east of England. I fancy there are plenty of folk in the north of England, Wales and Northern Ireland who might agree with that diagnosis. Independence is actually, I