I know I link to Coffee House a lot, but Fraser Nelson’s post today on what he calls ‘Third Scotland’ really drills the point home incredibly effectively. I may have made some jokes about Glasgow in my time, but it is a great city in a truly wonderful country. I was born near Inverness and have always had a great affection for Scotland (indeed I wore a kilt on my wedding day, and had my honeymoon in Scotland), wishfully thinking of it as my spiritual home. My idea of a dream future is to go and live up in the highlands.

Fraser puts a name to the problem – the ‘mosaic nature’ of Glasgow (and other Scottish cities), with terribly poor and deprived areas sitting shoulder to shoulder with relatively affluent burghs, statistics just can’t show the real picture of Scotland in any meaningful way. He names these poor areas ‘Third Scotland’ and the richer areas ‘Prime Scotland’. He also beautifully illustrates the experience of arriving in Glasgow for the first time:

I finish my BBC film on the motorway which dissects Glasgow East and can in one hour take you from Edinburgh New Town to Glasgow’s West End. You can look at the high rises and shudder as you belt towards Byres Road, but that’s the closest you get to it. That motorway, I’ve always thought, is an allegory for both economic prosperity which has bypassed the constituency – and Labour’s policymakers who will only ever look at it from a distance.

I have such vivid memories, on my honeymoon no less, of gazing out of the train window on the way from Edinburgh to Glasgow watching the tower blocks so prominently (and terrifyingly) featured in the film Red Road go by, only to emerge from Queen Street station into a city centre worthy of the greatest praise. Of course, this slightly surreal experience is not uncommon in big cities – especially in America – but isn’t it time we did something about it?