It’s time that Scotland’s timid posh folk spoke out

I took part in a documentary about Scottishness a few weeks ago, and it wasn’t bad at all. I mused, mainly, on my own border-hopping, fretful-about-independence Scottish-Britishness, and a decent number of people got in touch afterwards to say I’d been speaking for them, too. Others were more cross, but interestingly so. One thing about the whole experience bugs me, though. That was the way they had me sit in a swanky Scottish restaurant in Belgravia and made out like I belonged there.

It’s not that you don’t get Scots in Belgravia. Most will probably own castles back in Scotland, too, though. When they move to Belgravia, they do so in a manner similar to the way that orthodox Jews move to Israel; to finally be among their own. This is not my world. I live opposite a mosque in Haringey and moved to London for the opposite reason — not to join my people, but to leave them. Raised in comfortable, middle-class Edinburgh (where the castle is lovely, but alas not mine), I wanted a life with a few more jagged edges.

I can see why producers went with the Belgravia thing, though. One great oddity of modern Scotland is the near-invisibility of the true middle class. By which, of course, I don’t really mean the people in the middle, like Ed Miliband would, but something more like the non-landed posh. The professionals. England’s equivalents are noisy, boisterous and sharp-elbowed; confident that they set the template of what everybody else should hope to be. Frankly, they act like they own the place.

Not so in Scotland. Here they skulk, despite being everywhere. Edinburgh is a city in which a staggering one in four children are educated in the independent sector. Honestly, look it up.