This one won’t take long. This is the front page lead on today’s Herald:

It’s a trope beloved of Unionists (and was a particular favourite of the paper’s departed columnist David Torrance) – how dare Scotland imagine that it’s special? – and the Herald bangs the drum extra-hard this morning, with Anas Sarwar given lots of room to talk Scotland down while insisting that he’s not talking Scotland down, claiming that the idea of Scotland being “less intolerant than our neighbours” is a myth.

So let’s just check the facts.

Race hate crime in Scotland is falling, is at a 15-year low (after a spike during the last Labour-Lib Dem government which ended as soon as the SNP came to power), and has in fact dropped by a very substantial and welcome 26% in the last five years.

How about England?

Oh, it’s increasing dramatically, not just since the Brexit vote but also in the longer term. But of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not still roughly the same as in Scotland – it might have started off a lot lower. So do we have actual numbers to compare? As it happens we do:

England’s population is almost exactly 10 times Scotland’s. If Scotland has 64 race-hate crimes a week, England should be in the ballpark of 640. But 62,685 divided by 52 weeks is 1,205 – remarkably close to TWICE as many per head of population.

(Something which alert readers could probably have deduced simply from the fact that notorious Tory brain-vacuum Annie Wells said the numbers were the same.)

All racism is bad and one race-hate crime is one too many, yada yada yada. But the point being claimed by the Herald is a direct comparison with another country, and the entirely non-mythical reality of that comparison is that one country’s problem is half the size and steadily falling, while the other’s is twice the size and persistently rising.

(And while stupid people will claim that that’s because Scotland has only about half the immigrant population of England, the truth is that racism is usually strongest where there are FEWEST immigrants. The more people are actually exposed to immigrants the less they tend to fear and hate them, as they discover that they’re just normal people. Scotland bucks that trend by having less immigration AND less racism, which suggests that hostility towards immigrants is less inherently present to start with.)

So yeah, just the same.