It is having to be bailed out by the Scottish Government and The City of Edinburgh Council, more evidence of how this crass attempt to sell Scotland as a contemporary Brigadoon is a financial fiasco as well as a national embarrassment.

The whole Homecoming enterprise already looked shaky in January when the Scottish Government pumped an extra £500,000 into it over fears it was being ignored. That was in addition to its initial £5 million budget. And it keeps getting worse.

The forthcoming Homecoming Live concert which has been billed as the triumphal final fling for Homecoming year is shaping up to be a monumental flop. It was meant to fill two halls in the SECC in Glasgow, but sales for the event just over a month away have so far been pathetic.

Homecoming was never going to be anything other than a dull, hackneyed vanity project for the SNP. With its tired, old, unimaginative Scottish Tourist Board fixation on tartan, ancestry and that cliched dirge, Caledonia, it was meant to make us all feel more patriotic and thus more inclined to vote SNP, as well as making Scotland irresistible to visitors.

Now we are meant to be sanguine about pouring more public cash into the loss-making clan gathering because it supposedly attracted 47,000 people from at least 40 countries and is said to have generated more than £10m for the Scottish economy. But where does this £10m figure come from?

If you visit the capital nowadays at any time of the year, you cannot help but encounter huge numbers of tourists. Princes Street is rammed with people from France, Spain, Ireland, Italy, China, the Baltic States and Eastern Europe. These are our bread and butter tourists and they haven’t come for some fuddy duddy shortbread tin gala day featuring old white blokes from the New World striding around in newly purchased kilts. They are here because the weak pound and cheap air fares make us a cheap holiday destination. I’ll wager that for most of them, the prospect of a trip to Topshop is more of a lure than the poetry of Robert Burns or the skirl of the bagpipes.

For a 21st-century cultural event, Homecoming got off on the wrong foot. When Homecoming pundits started flinging around terms like “Scottish diaspora”, “heart Scots” and “blood Scots”, it was clear that they were addressing wealthy whites from the US, Canada and the Antipodes and ignoring Europeans along with all the people of colour with Scottish ties, even ancestry, in former colonial countries.

Bear in mind that there are more people with the surname Campbell in the Jamaican phone directory than there are in Glasgow, thanks to our forefathers’ enthusiastic participation in the infamous “triangular” (slave) trade. But somehow, Homecoming didn’t appear to be aimed at them. The initial marketing material for Homecoming featured an image of happy white-skinned men marching off to celebrate their Scottishness. After critics attacked its unrepresentative whiteness and its total exclusion of Scottish citizens of colour, a token Asian man was Photoshopped into the front row, but by then, the backwoodsman thinking behind Homecoming was exposed.

This race debacle was just one manifestation of how dated, derivative and drearily familiar the ideas that drive this Scottish Government project are. We have been flogging tartan, genealogy, golf and military parades for decades now. We all know that Sean Connery is the SNP’s poster boy and role model. Anyone who wants to get that last-century message has already done so. It’s time for new ideas.

When will the realisation ever dawn that initiatives to pull visitors to this country don’t have to be kitsch and stereotypically Scottish? When will the Scots stop confusing the celebration of our culture and history – an essentially inward-looking exercise – with a strategy for making our country an attractive place to visit? If I was to go to a foreign country which seemed to have an unhealthy obsession with tribes/clans, national costume and parading soldiers, one that was forever shouting about how great it was (all traits more readily associated with goose-stepping pariah states), I would be turned off, even slightly disturbed, by such mawkish chauvinism and insularity.

Think of the recent MOBO Awards held in Glasgow. The city’s connection to music of black origin is, at best, slight. We most certainly didn’t invent jazz or blues any more than we did hip-hop or R&B. This music doesn’t feature in any definition of Scottishness, yet the award ceremony was a sell-out, a phenomenal success. Its organisers praised Glasgow as “a world-class name”, and the event’s founder, Kanya King, promised to return to the city in years to come.

By way of putting Scotland on the international map as a happening, switched-on country and attracting younger people in particular, you can bet that the Mobos will be infinitely more effective than the forthcoming Homecoming Live, which has been slated as a line-up of “has beens” with the usual, predictable crew of ageing commercial Celtic rockers and Scottish bands that were famous decades ago.

That may be rather harsh. I am always up for seeing Lloyd Cole and the Commotions. But the balance of Homecoming Live is wrong. Like everything to do with the misguided Homecoming project, it encourages us to look backwards not forwards, to be unduly pleased with past achievements. It makes the mistake of thinking that Scottish people are only interested in things that are Scottish and assuming that visitors who come to Scotland need to be spoon-fed Scottishness, even if it’s fake.

All this is at odds with the best attributes of the Scots. On a good day we are an outward-looking group of people, internationalists who take an intelligent interest in everything the world has to offer. Homecoming makes hackneyed cardboard cut-outs of us all and sells

us short.