YOU can always trust a Glaswegian to tell it to you straight, right?

If you want the unvarnished truth, then Glasgow is where you’ll find it. That’s what we tell ourselves in this city, isn’t it? We’re an honest, fair-dealing bunch.

So, it’s curious to watch the hysterical reaction from some denizens of Glasgow to the thoughts of one of the city’s most successful scions, James McAvoy, when it comes to his hometown.

The actor told us straight, gave us the unvarnished truth, was honest and fair-dealing. McAvoy was “shocked and dismayed”, he said, by the racist and sexist abuse his co-stars received during a theatre run in the city. “Most of the women of colour in the cast got racially abused pretty much on a daily basis,” he said. “We were delighted to get to Brooklyn and leave Glasgow. It was horrible.”

Cue furious online backlash. “To say Scotland is racist denigrates the fabric of our country and I, for one, don’t believe it’s true,” frothed an idiot. McAvoy was – of course – “jumping on the woke wagon”. When you see the word ‘woke’ used like that, run – danger is afoot. McAvoy was “talking nonsense … looking for a bit of a profile”. Yes, I’m sure one of Hollywood’s most successful actors needs a profile bump, what with all the hit movies.

Glasgow, the culture warriors screamed, isn’t “a reflection on the rest of the country”. Really? We’ll come to that later.

The Germans surely have a word for a sense of ‘amused but slightly saddened weariness’. They’ve a word for everything else, after all. But that’s the only suitable response to the pitiful exceptionalism which greeted McAvoy’s comments.

Scottish exceptionalism, assuredly, isn’t just an online phenomenon. It’s time we got past the notion that the online and physical worlds are somehow different: the same people with the same views inhabit both.

Exceptionalism litters Scottish society – you hear it from media commentators, politicians, the folk beside you on the bus or at the next table in a bar. It’s a toe-curling mix of ‘wha’s like us’ jingoist denial, and a wilfully blind and deaf refusal to accept that when it comes to matters like racism, sexism and homophobia Scotland must improve.

You get it from left, right, nationalist and unionist. It’s a symptom of the Scottish cringe – and it’s the curse of this country. Scotland is so thin-skinned it cannot see, or amend, its faults. Perhaps, that’s due to being overshadowed by a larger neighbour.

A canny McAvoy obviously saw the reaction coming. “The narrative that Scottish people and the Scottish media want to hear”, he said, is that the country is “fantastic. I’m chuffed to be here and there’s no crowd like a Scottish crowd.” The reverse was true, though. When McAvoy came home, he felt, “I don’t want us to be here”.

Suck it up, Glasgow. Suck it up, Scotland. Because what McAvoy says of the city is true of the country. The more ethnically diverse somewhere is, the less racism you’ll find. It’s a matter of fact. And Scotland is lily white. The more people you know of different ethnicities, the more accepting you’ll be. The whiter an area, the more racist. The closet bigots can cry about this all they want, but tough, it’s true. Northern Ireland is the whitest part of Britain, it’s also been dubbed the ‘race hate capital of Europe’. Areas of low migration tend to be more anti-migrant – analysis of Brexit voting proved that.

Scotland does a fine job of compartmentalising its sicknesses. When there’s outrage about sectarianism – well, that’s a ‘Glasgow problem’. What other country finds it impossible to see that the problems which affect its biggest city, are quite clearly also problems of the nation? Or do Aberdeen, Dundee and Edinburgh occupy a separate universe?

Scotland is incapable of confronting its past – unlike England. England, evidently, has long debated its bitter legacy of Empire. In Scotland, the laughable position of vast swathes of the population breaks down like this: many nationalists pretend Scotland was a victim – a colony, rather than England’s co-conspirator in colonisation; while many unionists pretend Empire was just dandy, thank you very much.

It’s easy for Scotland to fantasise that there’s no racist problem – we’re about 95% white. If Glasgow, the most ethnically diverse city has a problem, then you can bet the inheritance of all Jock Tamson’s bairns that every other part of Scotland does too.

A solution? Get more woke, Scotland. When I say ‘woke’ I don’t mean whatever garbage definition rests in the minds of right-wing culture warriors and most media commentators. I mean ‘woke’ as defined this week by Neil Basu, the outgoing assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and the highest-ranking British officer from an ethnic minority background.

Basu was asked if he was turned down for promotion because the Conservative government saw him as “woke”. Basu replied: “I’ll go with the Oxford University Dictionary definition of the word ‘woke’ … that definition is ‘are you alert to issues of racial and social justice’. Yes I am. If that’s the definition of ‘woke’, I’ll wear it as a bumper sticker every day of the week.”

Snap. Me too. In Scotland, as in the rest of Britain, a lie has festered. Those who don’t want this society to improve have chosen to beat those who do with a stick called ‘woke’. Back in the 1970s, the stick was called ‘do-gooder’, in the 1980s and 1990s it was ‘politically correct’.

It’s a sulphurous little exercise in reversal, in turning up into down, and right into wrong: where the intolerant sexist or racist gets to define those who want to see a more harmonious and fair society as ‘intolerant’. It’s sheer intolerance, you see, in the minds of many with a loud voice and public platform, if they’re called out for racist, sexist or homophobic behaviour these days. This madness redefines ‘tolerance’ as simply allowing any old bigot to spout any old bigotry without calling them to account.

Neil Basu wants every cop to be woke. James McAvoy warns Scotland it’s blind to its own bigotry. Do you see the connection? Scotland: get more woke.

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