Alex Massie looks in the mirror and thinks he sees the true Scotland staring back at him

Alex Massie's basic problem is that he doesn't just disapprove of the Scottish Government and want it changed. He also disapproves of the Scottish voters and wants them changed. "The problem with Scotland is that it's full of Scots."

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) May 3, 2026

The context of this was a tweet from Massie in which he predicted that Scottish voters would choose the SNP on Thursday, and added that this would mean they had got it wrong - as if he was an exasperated teacher marking some very bad homework.   I actually have a pet theory about why he's so perpetually disappointed in his fellow Scots.  Something he said in one of his columns a few years ago has always stuck in my mind, and I think it was highly revealing - he said that most people in Scotland would agree that the country closest to us culturally is England, and that the next closest is Wales, and that the third closest is Ireland.

I would be so bold as to say that he's almost certainly wrong about that.  OK, being a Catholic, about two-thirds of my own pre-1850 ancestry is Irish, so that may be distorting my thinking, but I really have very little doubt that if a survey was conducted on the subject, most people in Scotland would say that Ireland is the country most similar to our own, with our more distant Celtic cousins Wales in second place, and England in third.  I mean, even if you were a hardcore Rangers supporter, who would you say in the UK is most similar to you, if you were being totally honest?  It would surely be loyalists in Northern Ireland.  For everyone else, the case is even more straightforward:

* As a cultural and ethnic group, the Scots supposedly came from Ireland in the first place (specifically Antrim).

* That, in combination with population movements back and forwards over the centuries, means that people in central Scotland and the north of Ireland are almost indistinguishable genetically.  I gather that some ancestry services don't even try to make the distinction, and just have a single "Central Scotland and Northern Ireland" group.

* For centuries, Scotland was a predominantly Gaelic-speaking nation, and at that time Gaelic was even closer to Irish than it is in the modern day - and indeed the written form of the language was actually identical to Irish.

* Scottish traditional music is so similar to Irish traditional music that I'm not sure a visitor from far-flung parts would be able to spot much difference between the two.

* Apparently part of the reason that a disproportionate number of Irish people settled in Scotland during and after the famine was because they felt it was culturally much more familiar than England.

And yet I can totally understand that things would look very different from the vantage point of someone with Massie's privileged background.  He went to insanely expensive private schools, one of which was in the Borders, and to him it must seem totally obvious that the Scotland he knows is more similar to England than to any other country.  And while the Scotland he knows is perfectly real, it's only a small and unrepresentative part of the whole.  Basically he looks in the mirror and thinks he sees Scotland staring back at him, but instead all he sees is himself and the people from his own milieu.  No wonder the way Scotland actually votes is so befuddling to him.

Although I'm not a regular follower of his and Bernard Ponsonby's podcast, I was intrigued to watch their ranking of the seven First Ministers to date.  (Massie's ranking was mostly ridiculous, although he did make one technically valid point, which was that Ponsonby had Donald Dewar too high because the assessment was based mainly on things Dewar had done as Secretary of State for Scotland rather than as First Minister.)  At the end of that show, Massie said that John Swinney was more typical of "average Scotland" (or some such jargon like that) than any other First Minister in the past.  Now I mustn't be churlish, because that was intended as a compliment to the leader of my own party...and yet objectively I do think it was another very odd and revealing comment.  All I really know about Mr Swinney's family background is that his uncle was awarded the Victoria Cross during World War II, but if his accent is anything to go by, he may have grown up in a reasonably 'good area', and he's certainly better educated than the average Scot - he has a degree from Edinburgh University.  He's also active in the Church of Scotland, which in this day and age puts him in the minority.  I think only really someone like Massie could look at all of that and think it represents some sort of centre of gravity for the nation as a whole.  But then I would imagine Massie thought Nicola Sturgeon belonged to the servant classes.

His father Allan Massie, who sadly died very recently, was one of this country's finest journalists, but he had a very similar blind spot.  I remember reading a column from him back in the day in which he celebrated the triumph of Thatcherite politics in New Zealand, which he bizarrely regarded as proof that Scots are actually Thatcherites because New Zealand is an ethnically "Scottish country" (a vast over-simplification, of course, although I believe there was a heavy concentration of Scottish immigrants in the south of New Zealand).  But for some baffling reason, Scots in the mother country kept voting against their true Tory nature, and he was just so terribly disappointed in us and wanted us to do better.  Alex continues to feel much the same way.

(To go back to the point about Ireland, the huge irony about Alex Massie is that he actually got his degree at Trinity College Dublin after he was rejected by Cambridge.  Presumably he must have either hated it for some reason, or surrounded himself with upper-crust Brits for the whole time he was there.)

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