Scotland — the ‘most violent country in the developed world’
By Irvine Welsh
LONDON: Several years back, I attended an event that was to resonate strongly with me. I was sitting in a crematorium with a sobbing family, mourning another youth who went to town on a night out and didn’t come back. The boy in question had called into a party on his way home and got involved in a drunken brawl with another young guy over some vague, trivial grievance neither could probably remember much about. One died in the hospital, the other was to spend the best years of his life behind bars.
It forcibly struck me then just how many times I had been through different versions of this scene before; witnessing a family’s lives wrecked because one of its members was a victim or perpetrator of the kind of violence so interwoven into the fabric of Scottish social life as to be almost mundane.
This murderous violence happens out of view of tourists and the urban-dwelling professional classes; often it’s deemed not to occur at all.
This culture is seen largely as a thing of the past, out of step with Scotland’s new view of itself. After all, the Tartan Army who follow the Scottish national football team have morphed from the thugs who terrorized London in the 70s into cuddly, if drunken, teddy bears who only want to hug the world. Strathclyde police’s Operation Blade of the late 90s — our own little decommissioning programme — was seen as a massive success as youths handed in tons of knives, swords and machetes. Now, supposedly, we are a forward-looking country with its own parliament, making decisions like grown-ups do, perhaps — whisper it — even taking tentative steps towards nationhood.
Occasionally, though, the ugly spotlight of reality is thrown in our faces, and what’s illuminated makes this upbeat establishment view seem a little like wishful thinking. When Scotland’s artists and writers have the temerity to depict the darkness that too often lies at the heart of our collective psyche, they are easily dismissed. Two new reports on the Scottish murder rate, however, are harder to brush aside. One was published recently by the World Health Organization (WHO), the other is forthcoming from the University of California, and they serve to cast a dark shadow over our more complacent pretensions.
The University of California claims that Scotland’s murder rate now exceeds the United States’ and Israel’s. The WHO study says that you’re three times more likely to meet violent death north of the border than you are in England and Wales. Furthermore, a separate United Nations report has described Scotland as ‘the most violent country in the developed world’, with more than 2,000 people subjected to serious assault every week.
What’s going on here? It’s almost as if the Glasgow City of Culture reinvention and Edinburgh’s continued status as international festival city are a mirage and nothing substantial has happened since the 70s when Scotland and Finland regularly went head-to-head on the major indicators of social instability: murder, suicide and alcoholism.
In fact, quite a lot has happened. The city centres have been cleaned up. They now boast more housing for wealthier professionals, more tourist accommodation, and more leisure and recreation facilities. Central zones now enjoy better policing and saturation CCTV camera coverage. The postwar process of rehousing has led to the disappearance of traditional city-centre working-class areas. Large sections of Edinburgh’s Tollcross district, for example, have been demolished to make way for conferencing and business facilities. And here’s the rub: social problems have been removed from the city centre to the peripheries, out of sight and mind of tourists and professionals.
In the Victorian era, Disraeli, that great Tory paternalist, talked about the two nations. In our modern urban life, we have two cities. Glasgow is Hillhead or Easterhouse, Edinburgh Merchiston or Muirhouse. And you stand a far better chance of being murdered in one than in the other.
But why should there be three times as many murders in Scotland than in England? We are not, and never have been, a nation of violent psychopaths. It’s surely a little trite to say that heavy drinking is the sole reason, as bingeing is now ubiquitous in the UK. More likely it’s the peculiar drinking habits and the urban environment of the most disadvantaged Scots.
The density of housing and the lack of money and mobility in many large local authority or former local authority housing areas led to people being pushed together; forced to share each others obsessions and social space in a way that would be unthinkable even to many lower-middle-class people.
In these crowded, yet isolated areas, gangs of bored youths converge in underpasses, or on the edge of industrial estates, out of reach of the CCTV cameras. In such a marginalized environment and in a culture where the individual rather than the community has primacy, people require compelling drama in order to give life meaning. The scheme — the housing estate — becomes the world. Violence and scamming become the principal means of winning status.
Throughout the years there has been a decline in the sporting, educational and cultural activities that were once an alternate source of affirmation. These have not been deemed market-friendly investments in peripheral housing areas. Meanwhile, binge drinking often takes on a different, and more dangerous, form than that practised in England, land of lager, high street and punch-up culture.
Another big difference north of the border is in the knife/weapon culture. It’s still a widespread assumption, particularly in parts of Glasgow, that carrying a knife is acceptable behaviour. This has more recent roots in the ‘tools’ culture of the city’s industrial past. Thankfully, Scotland’s gun problem has not yet reached the same scale as London, Manchester or Dublin. It would be truly terrifying to think what might happen if this came to pass. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service
