Sectarianism is Still Rife Within Scotland

There has been a suggestion from some quarters that Scotland as a nation has recently become less bigoted and in some way there is less sectarianism around.

What about the events of the last 15 years?

Events like the Monklands bi-election on June 30th 1994, the speech made by James McMillan at the Edinburgh International Festival in August 1999 and the cancelled visit of Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern on the 8th of February 2001 show otherwise. And what about the continuing violence and arrests due to Old Firm fixtures and the raging debate over the separate Catholic school systems? These seem to suggest that sectarianism is not on the wane but is in fact very much alive and well.

There have, over the years, been many dramatic changes within Scotland which, in some part, have helped to put an end to sectarian discrimination but unfortunately there are still prejudices in existence that are much more difficult to root out.
One thing that could be said to have helped decrease the sectarian tension is the recent decline in people going to church and the fact that there are more mixed neighbourhoods now than there has ever been.
Also, there has been the decline of the manufacturing industry which has meant the increase of the middle class and the increase in foreign ownership of companies in this country, which makes them less likely to care about religion in the same way as home grown companies have done in the past.
There is also the fact that Catholics now hold positions of power in Scotland and are extremely well represented across the board in terms of employment, mix that with the fact that there is a greater number of mixed marriages between people of different religious persuasions than there has ever been, and it all adds up to the reason why there has been a noticeable decrease, but at the moment the problem still exists.

One of the main reasons and factors which could be said to not help the problem is the separate Catholic school system.
Any type of segregation can only ever cause more suspicion and bad feeling than is perhaps necessary.
There is also the continuing, intense Old Firm rivalry in football which has resulted in regular sectarian beatings and killings and there is also the persistent popularity of movements such as the Orange order, which are anti-Catholic.

Although we can obviously observe socio-economic changes which would tend to encourage a decline in sectarianism, it still exists in modern Scotland.
Though, at this point, it should be noted that the religious tension between Catholic and Protestant people is a problem that can be found in the majority, in the west central region of Scotland.
There has, however, been a worrying trend to ignore the problem in the hope that it will go away.
But with each new story or scandal about sectarianism, the entire debate seems to be kicked off again.

When Jack McConnell was the First Minister of Scotland he stated that he wanted to help stop bigotry.
Talk is cheap and lies are expensive and if he really wanted to stop it something needed to be done.
After an Old Firm game, McConnell stated that the players had to recognise that they were inciting the ugly scenes that spilled out on to the street and that clubs had a duty to act more responsibly.
By putting himself in the front seat in the fight against bigotry, McConnell found himself being driven into policy areas that he found rather uncomfortable.
If he wanted to act against religious division, why defend separate schools?
If he was so against bigotry, why attend the Open Championship at Troon, a golf club that discriminates against women?
Jack McConnell may have introduced the smoking ban to Scotland but as with the fight against smokers (and with neds), he saw the Old Firm as a target that would not answer back.

Way back in 2003, Glasgow City Council set their stall out.
Under new street traders licensing conditions, the sales of items containing any ‘design, insignia or words which have a political, racial, religious or sectarian content’ will be banned.
The ban gave Strathclyde police the powers to decide what is and what is not ‘political, racial, religious or sectarian’.
In one of the ‘exclusion zones’ outside Celtic Park, flags and scarves proclaiming support for Irish republicanism could be bought and such items were included in the ban.
However, scarves calling on Scotland to ‘rise up and be a nation again’ were not banned from Hampden Park, the national stadium AND neither were slogans of British Imperialism such as ‘Rule Britannia’ from Ibrox.
Will there come a time when the music of John Lennon or the Clash, or magazines such as the Economist and Private Eye be taken off the shelves due to their ‘political content’?
And that raises a very strong point.
Where is the line between sectarian issues and ones that are not?
And who decides where that line lies?
Something can easily be deemed offensive by someone, that to another would not be offensive at all.
We see that kind of thing every day of the week.
It becomes all about what is and what is not acceptable in the eyes of the majority and over the years that can change through things becoming more sociably acceptable.
So the opposite must also be true.

It is high time that something was done about the bigotry and sectarian problem that exists in Scotland and in the West Central belt inparticular.
The only way it is going to happen is if enough people want to change it and want to do something about it.
One way this can be done is through education.
Tighter controls and bigger punishments for those caught acting in a certain way may cause them to stop doing it in public and influencing other people.
But that will in no way help to stop a bigoted person becoming non-bigoted which can only be achieved by truly educating them off it.
It is like an addiction, albeit, one that hides itself from being an addiction.
But it is one.

The bigoted people need to be shown that it is not socially acceptable, pretty much in the same way that smoking has now become since the ban on smoking in public places.
Then, and only then, will these people stop being as bigoted as they are no and that will be one more step to making this country one that is truly free from the harsh problem of sectarianism and bigotry.