Scotland and Everybody

Scotland is one of the most remarkable places on Earth, so long as you're an outdoors type who understands what a raincoat is. I'm amazed by how many people don't seem to grasp this basic item of clothing. You put your arms through the sleeves, zip it up, and pull the hood over your head. Then, as if by magic, you can comfortably walk around in wet weather.

And what scenery you'll see. The Scottish mountains are like nothing else. They're weather-beaten to the point that almost all of them start at sea-level and rise like enormous burial mounds. Nowhere near as high as the Alps, and lacking their jagged drama, Scotland's mountains look ravaged by time. And they're hopping with frogs and toads, and swarming with biting insects (that can't get you through a raincoat!), and the mist can roll in faster than you'd believe. Scotland has the best “arduously rewarding” hikes.

I'm tempted to talk about the warmth of the people, too. But, here's the thing — I look and sound like the dad from a Christmas advert, and people are usually warm to me. I mean, it takes a particular kind of meat-head to be rude to a personified woollen jumper with reindeer embroidered on the front.

Others aren't so lucky. Being fairly well-to-do, and living in the orbit of hyper-internationalized London, I meet lots of other fairly well-to-do people from all over the world. It really puts my hackles up when some of them mention the culture shock of moving to London and having to do their own cooking and cleaning, and even look after their own children due to financial constraints. "Everybody has help back in my country" is such a depressingly common thing to hear.

I always ask if the cleaners have cleaners, and if the cooks have cooks, and if the childminders have childminders, etc. I usually draw bemusement. "Everybody" only seems to include people in one's own socio-economic bracket. Those lower down are implicitly dehumanized.

It's the same among South East England’s natives, of course. People who can afford household staff look at themselves as "everybody" and vaguely dehumanize the rest of us. It's just that being "fairly well-to-do" doesn't cut the monetary mustard here — you have to be really effing rich to have a live-in nanny. Consequently, those of us who are doctors, accountants, architects, and whatever the hell a data scientist means, can consider ourselves "ordinary people" by virtue of having to load our own dishwashers.

And we can pretend we're in solidarity with the homeless, mentally ill, disabled, and addiction-afflicted who we've barely, if ever, spoken to. Had we, then we might realize how many are falling through our society's increasingly inadequate safety nets. I'm as guilty as anyone.

There is a café in Britain called Pret a Manger that makes a greater effort than most to project a bit of good into the world. Some years ago, it got into trouble for handing out free coffee and food to customers who "looked right". The idea was to attract customers whose presence would make the cafés look good through their massive glass walls. It was more about professional respectability and family friendliness than chiselled jaws, so looking like the dad from a Christmas advert, I got a lot of free stuff. I could have abused this to claim sandwiches, pastries and cakes, and handed them to the homeless outside the cafés at zero cost. Not once did it occur to me to do so.

I wonder how empty-headed the liberal left in the Scottish National Party and Scottish Greens are feeling? Last week, they voted against legislation that would have given every Scottish drug user a legal right to addiction treatment.

Scotland has, by some margin, the highest rate of drug deaths in Europe, almost twice that of the next highest, and almost three times higher than England's. People will tell you that there are complex and dynamic reasons for this. I'll suggest something simple — whatever party, or persuasion, a politician adheres to, that politician isn't falling asleep in a back-alley with a needle in their arm. Instead, they're me in a café, being offered free croissants they don't want and failing to realize they could hand them to somebody hungry.

Rory Sutherland wrote an article last year, or the one before (sadly paywalled) in which he called for the British House of Lords to be replaced with a body of randomly selected citizens. I'm for it. True random selection would include the homeless, those with drug issues, the medically unwell, people with learning difficulties, former prisoners, and so on.

I understand that this will make parliamentary debates more challenging than the snooze fests they currently are. But when such a body says "everybody", it might actually mean everybody.