Scottish As Fuck Mate!

“It’s a fact of life that where you come from is important.” – Sir Alex Ferguson, The world’s greatest ever football manager, also a Belter.

I once worked as a carer for two severely disabled men in a working-class Glasgow suburb, where "independent living" was more of a polite fiction than a reality. My job? Dishing out medication, cooking meals, handling personal care—keeping the wheels turning in a life that didn’t move. Their home was warm, functional, a place designed for comfort they never had the capacity to request. A television hung on the wall, glowing uselessly. One of them had no interest, the other no cognition to follow along. Didn’t matter. Reality itself was spectacle enough in that house.

The walls pulsed with the small, repetitive sounds of their existence—the shuffle of a chair, the mechanical sigh of a hoist, the low hum of medical equipment. Outside, Glasgow droned on, indifferent. Their house sat in a forgotten welfare scheme, a place where hope had long since packed its bags and legged it. Boarded-up shops, graffiti-splattered bus stops, gardens overrun with weeds—it was a landscape that reeked of stagnation. But for these men, the city beyond might as well have been a distant galaxy. Their world was four walls thick, their days dictated by the rigid metronome of routine. And me? I was there to keep the machine running. Day in, day out, the same rhythm—steady as the Glasgow rain. Relentless, grey, and drowning in its own repetition.

But within that quiet, unremarkable space, there was dignity in the details—fresh clothes, a hot meal, a warm bed. The essentials of life, stripped down to their barest form, yet carrying an unspoken weight. Sometimes, in the middle of an ordinary shift, it hit me how much we take for granted. The ability to walk, to talk, to argue about the football, to change the channel, to roll our eyes at the news. These men had none of that. Their world was structured, static, small. But within that routine, there was care, stability—maybe even something resembling peace. And in a life where choice was a luxury, perhaps that was enough.

There would be one carer to each man, so the shift was shared between myself and another colleague. The other carer that day was a wrinkly skelf of a Glasgow wummin, the kind you’d find sitting in a Greggs baker at 10AM, nursing a cardboard cup of tea and a lifetime of grievances. Her skin, battered by decades of sunbeds and cigarette smoke, had the rich, unnatural hue of ‘sunbed teak’—if B&Q had the audacity to market such a colour. Her cropped pixie-style hair, once platinum, was now stained yellow with nicotine, and it only highlighted the deep-set lines of a face that had seen too much and cared too little.

Though slight in size, she carried herself with the weight of a woman who had survived it all. Her voice, a wreckage of decades of smoking and shouting over pub jukeboxes, had the gravelly resonance of a cement mixer on its last legs. She had that peculiar Glaswegian ability to be both brutally cynical and oddly maternal, a paradox wrapped in a polyester cardigan.

She was in her sixties but could have passed for seventies; a life of hard graft and harder living had left its marks. But there was a knowing look in her eye, a hint of resilience that made her less a tragic figure and more an icon of working-class endurance. A walking, talking relic of a Scotland that wasn’t dead yet—just wheezing, dragging itself through another shift, and lighting up another ciggie for the road.

Her ambitions were carved from the predictable cycles of working-class survival—yearly holidays to Benidorm, a fresh pram every couple of years for the ever-expanding tribe of grandweans, a five-yearly pilgrimage to DFS for a new leather sofa, and a ten-year funeral plan paid in monthly instalments. Life was about routine, predictable comforts, and the quiet satisfaction of small luxuries hard-earned. Her worldview was straightforward, her chat blunt, but there was something in her—a fleeting warmth beneath the callouses of cynicism.

Her entertainment choices? A horror show of sentimental pish—romantic films so sugary they could put a diabetic in a coma, or the mind-numbing sludge of daytime TV, where washed-up celebrities pretended to care about mundane problems. But it was on one of these shows that I first became truly aware of how Scottishness was perceived, and more importantly, how it was reduced to caricature.

A gardening-themed chat show hosted by Alan Titchmarsh, a man whose entire persona seemed carefully constructed to comfort the elderly and unthreateningly charm the middle classes.

Alan, dressed in his usual selection of wholesome knitwear, flashed his unsettlingly cheerful smile and declared, with all the self-satisfaction of a man unveiling a toaster on The Price is Right, that he had ‘a special treat for all our Scottish viewers today’—because it was St. Andrew’s Day.

My mind wandered. What could it be? Had he cultivated a Saltire-shaped flower bed out of bluebells and white lilies in the BBC garden? Had he staged a ritual where Gary Lineker was ceremonially drowned in a vat of Irn-Bru? Maybe he had unearthed Thatcher’s skeleton and commissioned an artist to engrave a lion rampant on her skull? That would have been a fitting tribute.

But no. Nothing so poetic.

The big reveal arrived, and Alan, giddy as a toddler on Christmas morning, kicked his chino-clad legs into the air with an enthusiasm that bordered on the deranged. The camera panned, and in marched the spectacle: a lone piper, resplendent in full Highland dress, blaring out Scotland the Brave with the forced sincerity of a man fulfilling a contractual obligation to embody national identity.

That was it. That was the BBC’s idea of celebrating Scotland—nothing subversive, nothing fresh. Just a stock-image piper, the human equivalent of a shortbread tin. No satirical takedown of the English football establishment. No wild political statement. Not even a single bluebell in sight.

It was the moment I realised Scotland wasn’t just being acknowledged—it was being packaged, presented, and neatly othered, wrapped up in tartan and reduced to a quaint, marketable cliché. And the thing is, this wasn’t new. This wasn’t just Alan Titchmarsh having a patronising moment. This was something deeper, something older. Scotland has been othered for centuries—turned into an eccentric neighbour, a rugged backdrop, a curiosity to be romanticised but never truly understood. We were a nation rewritten by those who needed us to be something simpler, something smaller, something easier to digest. Othering is what happens when the in-crowd decides you’re just a mascot—when your entire culture gets boiled down to a handful of clichés that fit neatly into an Englishman’s idea of Scotland. You’re no longer a people; you’re a product, wrapped in tartan and sold back to you. Bagpipes, Braveheart, misty glens, and a fucking piper on Titchmarsh’s stage. It’s not about celebrating Scotland—it’s about keeping us in a box, palatable and predictable, a novelty to be wheeled out when needed. The lived reality of Scotland—the struggles, the complexity, the humour, the grit—gets erased, replaced by a marketing campaign. And the worst part? We’ve let them do it for centuries and we've played along.

And by the way, it's a very middle-class section of BBC-type English that happens to 'other' even their own people. They do it with the Northerners, the Irish, the Welsh, the working class—basically, anyone who isn't a middle-class English twat.

So Titchmarsh is practically vibrating with excitement as the bagpipes drone on, and I turn to my workmate and I go,

‘This twat, is this what he thinks Scottish folk are?’

She barely looks up from her phone, exhales a plume of smoke, and goes,

‘Nae cunt knows who we ur, son.’

And she was dead fucking right. Who the fuck are we if we aint that fuckin piper?

The Question of Scotland

So the overarching question of these set of essays entitled Bampot to Belter is: how can Scotland be better?

But to answer that, we first need to ask: what is Scotland? and what is better?

Better is simple. Healthier, happier, smarter, safer, stronger, kinder, and more productive. But who is Scotland?

Scotland is a land formed by geology, defined by history, and stratified by class. The rock beneath us, the wars fought above it, the industries built upon it, and the people who toiled through it all. From the coal mines of Fife and Ayrshire to the shipyards of the Clyde, from the oil rigs of Aberdeen to the tech hubs of Edinburgh, Scotland has always been an engine of labour.

But identity? That’s messier.

This country is a wild, whiskey-fueled dream wrapped in drizzle and sold with a tartan bow. A nation built by stubborn bastards who carved a life from rock and salt, who thrived on spite and grew strong on misfortune. Scotland is not just a place, it is a drug, a madness, a mythology still being written in the alleyways of Glasgow and the heather-stained Highlands. And the bastard truth of it all? Most of us barely know what it means to be Scottish anymore, but we can smell it when it walks into the room, soaked in Buckfast and ready to argue politics with a bin.

And that’s the thing—this isn’t just a media problem, a pop culture problem, or even a political problem. It’s a historical one. If we want to talk about Scottish identity, if we want to understand what we actually are beyond the clichés, we need to dig deeper. We need to go beyond the surface-level stereotypes and ask a bigger question: where did this version of Scotland come from, and who decided it? But where exactly do we start? What arbitrary date in the timeline of this nation has had the biggest impact upon the collective psyche, of the people, the national identity of those who call modern day Scotland home? What the fuck is national identity anyway? To answer this our first lesson could be more accurately framed as one of the evolution of culture.

CULTURE

Culture is complex. But it really is nothing more than survival instincts passed down until they become habits, then laws, then traditions. It starts with the basics—where to find food, how to build shelter, what will kill you if you touch it. But then it grows legs. Behaviours turn into beliefs, beliefs turn into rules, and before you know it, you've got a nation. A collective identity, built brick by brick, passed down generation after generation, whether we like it or not.

Scotland is no exception. We began as scattered bands of hunter-gatherers, scraping a life from the land, before settling into agricultural clans. Then came the tribal identities of the Picts, Gaels, and Scots, mingled with waves of Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Normans, and Vikings. By around 880 AD, what we now recognise as Scotland—Alba—took shape, but this was not a land of a single people. The Scots, like most so-called distinct groups, were a cocktail of different bloodlines, unified more by proximity and necessity than by any grand, unbroken lineage.

This might come as a disappointment to some, but the genetics of the Scot are nearly identical to those of the Briton. A jawbone found in Dorset dating back 12,000 years shares the same genetic markers as the oldest remains found in Scotland. And today, around 85% of us still carry that same DNA. The Romans, Vikings, Normans, and Saxons made little impact on our genetic code. We are Scottish not by blood, but by the land beneath our feet, by the history that shaped us, and by the collective story we choose to tell.

Scotland’s identity wasn’t something we chose—it was slapped on us by the ruling class and left to set like cement. A book called The Chronicle of the Kings of Alba, now gathering dust in Paris, holds the oldest known mention of our land as Scotland, dating back to the 10th century. But here’s the thing—most 'Scots' at the time couldn’t read, wouldn’t read, and had no idea they were part of some grand national project. They were just folk. Living, dying, farming, fucking, fighting and surviving. Scotland wasn’t a patriotic concept; it was a place where you worked yourself into the grave and hoped the next harvest wouldn’t kill you. The idea of Scotland was written by men who needed a nation to govern, not by the people who actually lived it.

It is impossible to ignore the religious overtones in our history and how they continue to shape our collective psyche. For centuries, the literate monks and priests were the gatekeepers of knowledge, transmitting not just faith but governance, morality, and identity to an illiterate population. They were the narrators of history, the architects of belief, and, in many ways, the creators of the Scottish self-image. The concept of Scotland, as with much of Western identity, was shaped by the hand of God—or at least by those who claimed to speak on His behalf. And no, I don’t mean Diego Maradona.

Whether we acknowledge it or not, religion has been at the core of our national consciousness. Even as faith itself wanes, its fingerprints remain all over our institutions, our traditions, and the way we see ourselves as a people.

Kings and Queens have come and gone in their droves, each using the church as a vessel to unite the people under a collective identity—one that would rally behind the idea of Scotland, often in war, often to die. Why? Because God said so. And whether you are a person of science or faith, this has been the reality of history.

Theoretical and empirical research suggests that culture—society shaped by the church and other social structures—has influenced human evolution, driving both our brains and bodies along paths unavailable to less cultural species. If you believe in a divine creator, then God has sculpted us over time, shaping our adaptability. If you lean toward the Darwinian model, then our development is simply the inevitable result of human interaction, the expansion of ideas, and the refinement of survival strategies.

Either way, the key question remains: how do we evolve from Bampot to Belter? That part, mate, is entirely up to you—but we’ll get to that.

The Land

Scotland wasn’t just built—it was forged. Torn from the Earth’s crust, crushed by glaciers, and battered by the Atlantic until it hardened into something unbreakable. The land itself dictated what we became. Rugged mountains, deep glens, and brutal coastlines weren’t just scenery—they were the training ground for survival. And survival breeds resilience. The very ground beneath our feet—formed some 425 million years ago during the Caledonian Orogeny—gave rise to the rugged mountains and deep glens we hold so dear. But it’s not just the landscape that sets Scotland apart; it’s what lies beneath it. Fossilised remains of ancient worlds turned to mineral, then fuel—energy sources that powered industry and, in turn, built the backbone of Scottish society.

Beneath the ancient hills and storm-lashed shores, Scotland’s skeleton held power. The coal mines of Fife and Ayrshire, the iron deposits that built our cities, and the crude oil lurking under the North Sea turned a nation of fighters into a nation of workers. This wasn’t just industry—it was identity. Scotland wasn’t just a place; it was a machine, grinding and burning and pushing forward, fuelled by the very bones of the land. Industry meant work, and work meant people—families sustained by labour, communities forged in the heat of factories, shipyards, and mines. Wealth came for some, but for the working class, industry provided more than just wages; it offered purpose, skill, and a sense of belonging.

Scotland, as we know it today, wasn’t sculpted by kings or conquerors—it was carved by the brute force of nature. It made us hard, made us sharp, made us take what we could from rock and sea because there was no other choice. The land gave us our trade, our industry, and our stubborn defiance. We are not a people born of comfort—we are a people born of endurance. The land shaped us, dictated our industries, and, in doing so, influenced the very psyche of the Scottish people.

At the turn of the 19th century, as the Industrial Revolution took hold, Scotland became the Empire’s toolbox—an unforgiving, smoke-choked powerhouse of industry, where steel, sweat, and soot defined the landscape as much as the mountains and lochs ever did. Glasgow, perched on the wide mouth of the Clyde and facing west towards the Americas, was perfectly positioned to become a powerhouse of trade and industry, cementing its place at the heart of Britain’s global empire.

Glasgow’s industrial might became a defining part of Scottish identity. People from across the country flooded to the city, drawn by the promise of work in shipyards, factories, and docks. Trading vessels carried whisky, coal, weapons, and machinery west, while tobacco, cotton, and coffee made their way back east. And aye, slaves of all colours and creeds were harmed in the making of this city but aye, slaves were harmed in the making of every city, in every country ever built. 

As Glasgow grew into Britain’s third-largest city, it became a melting pot of cultures. Scots, Irish, English, Welsh, and waves of Eastern Europeans arrived in search of work. This influx of labour continued well into the 20th century, with shipbuilding in Strathclyde and steelworks in Lanarkshire providing employment for thousands. Meanwhile, in rural Scotland, agricultural workers transitioned into the booming coal mines of Ayrshire and Fife, forming new communities where once there was only barren land.

Aberdeen, too, saw radical change. Since the North Sea oil boom of the 1970s, the city has tripled in size, attracting a global workforce to its rigs and refineries. Meanwhile, Edinburgh maintained its role as a political and academic hub, shaping the minds and policies that would steer the nation’s future.

Scotland’s industrial past has left an undeniable mark on its people. The legacy of labour, resilience, and ingenuity remains deeply ingrained in the national psyche, a testament to the industries that built the country from the ground up.

Society

So far, tracing the scars left by our energy and industry has helped map out how the working and ruling classes carved their places in Scottish society. But for most of us, our roots stretch no further than the past half-century. That’s why I’ve chosen to bypass the myths of Picts and Gaels and the oft-romanticised tales of Wallace and The Bruce. Not because they lack importance, but because they are so far removed from modern Scotland that they offer little insight into who we are today.

Moreover, attempting to stitch our nation’s ancient history into the present only fuels a misplaced mystique—a fantasy of Scotland as an eternally oppressed, freedom-fighting underdog, shackled by its neighbours and forever striving for independence. While this sentiment persists in the minds of some, there’s little evidence to suggest that such historical grievances actively shape our personalities today. If you see yourself as free, then you are. If you see yourself as oppressed, you accept your oppression and remain shackled by it. This is the essence of the victim mentality—a mindset that the journey from Bampot to Belter demands we abandon.

Besides, as we discussed, the history of those bygone eras was written by the church, the crown, and the empire—by kings and queens, for kings and queens. It tells us nothing of the working people who truly built this nation. Instead, the history that shapes us most is the one we’ve lived—the one our parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, colleagues, and friends have experienced firsthand. It may be anecdotal, but within it lies a shared identity, a common humour, an unspoken understanding that runs through Scottish society like iron through its rock.

From the 1960s onward, as Scotland was torn open for coal, oil, and whatever else we could dig up, our class system shifted alongside it. The rich industrialists spread their wealth into cushy public and private sector roles, cementing a firm upper-middle class. Meanwhile, the kids of working men and women clawed their way into the lower-middle class, swapping the pits for offices, the shipyards for universities. The old working-class battlegrounds shrank, but the class divide? That never went anywhere—it just put on a suit.

The Labour governments of the 1960s rolled out welfare reforms that were meant to be a safety net but, for some, became a hammock. A distinct welfare class emerged—some genuinely in need, others milking the system dry. Then came the Bampot class—the ones who took a different route, swapping wages for schemes, opportunity for exploitation. These weren’t just folk getting by; these were the chancers, the grafters of the grey economy, the ones who could flash more cash than a surgeon but hadn’t worked a legal day in their lives. I know these people well—too well.

Through this sociological lens, it’s more accurate to view Scottish identity as Scottish identities—plural. Consider my wee pal from earlier in the chapter, lets call her Iris. She’s a carer in her sixties, living in a council flat in a scheme like any other scheme in Scotland, spending her Saturdays at the bingo and her Sundays in church. She is as Scottish as my friend Gregor, a consultant oncologist at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital who spends his weekends stalking deer on his family’s Highland estate.

Aside from their nationality, the two of them have little in common, so how can they be compared? If you know someone like Iris—or if you are someone like Iris—you might already have a perception of her. Perhaps you see a woman who, despite having little, has worked tirelessly, raising decent, law-abiding children. She has lived her life with pride and honour, always doing her part for her community—ergo, a Belter.

Alternatively, Iris might be a serial gambler, squandering her meagre wage on fags, bingo, and scratch cards, sinking deeper into debt and leaning on her children to bail her out—Bampot. If you come from the same social class as either version of Iris, you might view Gregor as an entitled white man, born into privilege, with a wealthy family. You see him stalking deer and immediately label him elite, a snob who only reached his position through birthright rather than merit. This is because we instinctively look at inequality in one direction—upward—rarely pausing to consider where we ourselves might hold an advantage over others.

We fail to acknowledge the years of relentless study, sacrifice, and dedication required to become a consultant oncologist. We overlook the life-saving expertise Gregory brings to the world, the countless hours spent battling death in the hospital wards of our beloved NHS. We don’t see that he has turned away from an easy life of inheritance, choosing instead to stand at the frontline of medicine, armed with knowledge and skill, confronting mortality itself.

The point I am making here is that class is not indicative of Bampot or Belter, conduct is.

The stratification of Scottish society continues to evolve as people become more entrepreneurial, and career opportunities extend beyond the horizons once defined by oil rigs and the dark, soot-filled mines where men carved away at the geological flesh of Caledonia. The docks of the Clyde no longer launch ships built from scratch; instead, they are lined with coffee shops and vegan restaurants, catering to a city swelling with tech workers and insurance salespeople.

Thus, our vocation does not define our true identity. While our contributions to society may be a source of pride and help distinguish Belters from Bampots, they offer only a glimpse into what it truly means to be Scottish.

The Belter Code

We Scots, we love to self-deprecate. Our humour is sharp enough to wound, but it kept us sane through shipyards, mines, and rigs. Now, in a world of digital possibility, we have a choice: we can let our cynicism hold us back, or we can turn it into motivation.

The key to a better Scotland? Fuck the negativity. Fuck the bampots. Build the Belter.

Belterhood is a state of mind. It is waking up with a hangover, staring into the void, and deciding to go for a run instead of crawling back under the covers. It is understanding that nothing worth having ever came easy, and if it did, it was probably stolen by a Tory. It is looking reality in the face, laughing inappropriately, and then doing something about it.

To become a Belter is not to be perfect, nor is it to abandon our past. It is to take the best parts of our culture—the grit, the intelligence, the humour—and wield them as tools, not weapons. It is to demand more of ourselves and our communities, to lift each other up instead of cutting each other down.

It means knowing when the slagging stops and the encouragement begins. It means recognising when banter becomes poison, when the jokes stop being funny and start becoming chains. It means pushing past the barriers of expectation, beyond the narrow definitions of success that have been imposed upon us.

The Belter lies beyond a locked door, waiting to be unleashed. And here’s the key: The Belter Code. The same way Scotland has been shaped by resilience, defiance, and reinvention, so too must you forge your own identity—not as a relic of the past, but as a force of progress. The road from Bampot to Belter isn’t walked alone; it’s paved by those who reject stagnation and embrace the fight to be something more. So, pick up the key, turn the lock, and step forward.

The next article i'll tell you a tale of a Bampot who is now a Belter But for now, let this be the first lesson: You are not just a product of Scotland. Scotland is a product of you. Shape it well.

[To be continued...]

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