Forget the stats: we're not thugs

IT'S official . . . Glasgow is more violent than New York. Who says? A report from the Reform Scotland think-tank that assembles the statistics regarding the numbers of violent attacks over the past year. According to Reform's figures, last year saw 731 violent attacks per thousand Glaswegians as compared to New York's 631. Am I shocked, surprised, ashamed that a Scottish city finds itself, statistically-speaking, described in the same fearful terms as New York? Well, no.

If Glasgow is as frighteningly violent as this report claims, and if Edinburgh isn't all that different from Glasgow, statistically-speaking, then how do we explain the real-life experience, not statistical calculation, of the American students who year-on-year work as interns in Holyrood? These young Americans have told me how much safer they feel in our smaller, friendlier, version of the great cities many of them call home, and in which there might be de facto no-go areas for police and other groups.

I just don't believe any Scottish city compares with the lawlessness of the gang culture, ethnic ghettoes and organised crime networks in a number of American cities. The incident that shocked Scotland, a child killed by the criminally-careless discharge of an airgun, would have merited scarcely a mention on the local TV station's news bulletin had it happened in New York, Chicago or other big cities.

Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill has been pulling out all the stops to persuade Westminster to ban such guns. On the other side of the Atlantic, the National Rifle Association has been reminding its fellow Americans, and the candidates for the White House, of the constitutional right of every American to bear arms.

That's not to say behaviour in some parts of Glasgow after some residents have tanked up and tooled up is as responsible and disciplined as we'd like. But nor is it to say the Dear Green Place has gone to Hell in a handbasket over the last decade, as the Reform report's statistics are designed to show. It's doubtful if the second city of the Empire, as was, ever attained the gentility of English cities like Bath or even York. There's no doubt that for the last six decades at least, Glasgow has been a violent city . . . even before Frankie Vaughn, the crooner who tried to rid Glasgow of its gangs by visiting Easterhouse, getting down and dirty with the knife-carriers and setting in train the first "social inclusion initiative".

And guess what? In exhibiting the social traits Weegies and other Scots do to a greater or lesser degree, and that we all wish we didn't, we're not alone . . . our Celtic cousins in the Republic of Ireland are currently beating themselves up as we do. In a survey published in Ireland's Sunday Independent, the breast-beating harmonised with our own admissions of guilt about being Europe's worst boozers, fattest and least-fit adults and children, most prolific pill-poppers and puffers of any mind-altering substances we can lay our hands on. The citizens of the republic, statistically-speaking, are scared to leave their homes at night because of the fear engendered by loud groups of "young people" or gangs, hanging around, tanked up and ready to go, or just standing around, being young . . . in much the same way my pals and I used to do.

Shouldn't we therefore question the assumptions about our national scumminess and lack of community and personal discipline? If the Irish are grappling with the same selfish and antisocial behaviour as the Scots observe in their young people, does that not suggest that we're not as singularly debauched and drunk, violent and threatening as we've come to believe? If we're not all that different from Ireland, for example, when we look at real-life and not statistics, maybe we're not all doomed?

Not fit for purpose
NOW that the Holyrood government has dumped the phoney target of two hours' PE per week, per pupil, it has the chance to get real and admit that the present curriculum doesn't produce enough time and our higher education system doesn't produce enough qualified PE teachers.

I've written to the current crop of education ministers pressing for the same PE provision I suggested to the last lot, without success. Until we have the required number of teachers, the objective should be to have every pupil undertake some form of daily physical activity, for fifteen minutes, if that's all that's possible, and, on a weekly basis, two or three classes taught by a specialist teacher. I've also resurrected the idea of having health, nutrition, sexual health taught along with PE. For that we'll need more health education and nutrition specialists, and may require to modify traditional home economics teacher training.

Revolting students
TO date, my office in parliament has received well over 2000 e-mails from students complaining that local councils plan to limit the number of properties in multiple occupancy in areas chosen by them . . . presumably because owner-occupiers or tenants complain to the councils that their part of Marchmont or Morningside, for example, is having its character changed by the spread of HMOs.

A word of advice for students – cut the e-mails. They're time-consuming and a waste of public money, and I'm no better informed on HMOs than I was when I suggested modifications years ago.