HE believes he will be the lone Scot in the room but, when Charlie Raeburn makes his presentation at a conference in Denmark over the next few days, he will ask what we should consider a chilling question.

"Community Sport in Scotland: a misunderstood lost cause?" is what Raeburn will urge 300 delegates from all over Europe to consider. He stresses that the title of his paper, at the biennial Play the Game gathering, ends with a question mark. Yet, the fact that this lifelong campaigner for the need to maximise access to all sports for all youngsters is choosing to raise it in this forum, is an expression both of the depth of his concern and some frustration at the failure to generate relevant debate in this country.

While, in Denmark, sports journalists have driven these issues, in Scotland there is hardly any such public debate, as vast space is devoted to interminable discussions of annual league reconstructions and boardroom manoeuvrings.

All the while, of course, we lament the inferiority of Scottish football to the English game, as opposed to doing a few sums and calculating whether, as should be the case in population terms, 10 English teams are as good as, or better than, Celtic, and 90 as good as, or better than, St Mirren.

That is not to criticise or cast aspersion per se, since populism is, of course, an essential part of journalism as we consider the immediate issues of the day and it can be hard to find an easy way of sensationalising weightier matters.

Yet there really is a need to analyse cause and effect, and the corollary of that very basic, population-based arithmetical analysis is to ask whether the Danes, with their more cerebral approach to such matters, are performing better or worse than we Scots with a population of almost identical size?

The top sport in both countries is, of course, football, in which Denmark have won the European Championship and reached the quarter-finals of the World Cup.

Beyond that, I am not necessarily suggesting Denmark is any more successful as a sporting nation than Scotland is as a British sporting province. There is probably also scope to debate the benefits to the overall comparative health of a nation of claims that some 25% of its population are members of clubs participating in the country's 10 most popular sports: football, golf, aquatics, handball, gymnastics, badminton, equestrianism, tennis, sailing and shooting.

Having emerged from an international media seminar on sports politics hosted in 1997 by the Danish Gymnastics and Sports Associations, the Play the Game initiative was established in 2004 as an independent institution, with the backing of all major domestic sports organisations and the Danish Ministry of Culture. Its aim is to strengthen sport's ethical foundation and promote democracy, transparency and freedom of expression in sport and has been described as a "watchdog that values integrity in both sport and the journalists that cover it".

The belief of its organisers is that they discuss the big issues such as doping or sports corruption, before they emerge in the public domain through scandals.

Raeburn is consequently seeking to seize the moment of Scotland's independence debate and the major sporting events taking place here within the next year to invite examination of its sporting health by Europe's sporting cognoscenti. Among his claims is that "in particular, much of community sport is now only for those in the country who have the financial resources to participate".

He also asserts, based on Audit Scotland figures, that "targets for young people's participation are not being met, while adult participation is declining".

A member of the International Schoolsport Federation Executive, who has been on a wide array of bodies including chairing the Scottish Schoolsport Federation and sitting on both the Scottish Executive PE Review and the Scottish Parliament Cross Party Group on Sport, Raeburn also questions how these matters are assessed.

"There have been two Scottish Parliamentary Inquiries into Community Sport over recent years," he reports. "In my view these have been lacking in any real substance: the remits, the evidence offered, the visits and the Reports themselves have been limited in their commitment to change and improve. Rather these reports appear designed to simply support the Scottish government polices and practices."

These are, of course, merely soundbites from within a substantial paper and, inevitably, slightly isolated from context to maximise impact, while how much note will be taken of his words at an event where he can be characterised by Scottish sports administrators as a voice in the wilderness remains to be seen.

However, as a year in which politicians will doubtless see sport as a vehicle for promoting their various views on the way forward for Scotland, the recommendations he plans to discuss with our European neighbours this weekend surely merit some domestic consideration.

They are that measures be taken to do the following:

l Clarify the purposes of community sport and school sport to reflect community development and the whole school curriculum;

l Measure and investigate participation and governance of sport in the community and school sport through hard evidence gathered by truly independent research organisations; and with more investigative journalism targeted at local community sport;

l Bring down the costs of participation in sport for young people;

l Consistently develop and support the social capital of sport, the volunteers who make it tick; and

l Establish a community sport think tank.

Discuss ... Please.