But What's The Matter Wi' Glasgow?

We all know that the real objection to "faith schools" is that Catholic ones have been so good at, according to the old Christian Brothers' maxim, "taking the sons of dockers and turning them into doctors".

The professions, and thus the places where professional people live, now contain any number of people originally from Scotland, the North, the Midlands and the less salubrious parts of the South, with working-class grandparents or even parents, and with Irish great-grandparents. Where will it all end?

(In County Durham, where will it all start? All faith-based state secondary schools here are Catholic. But the plan to withdraw travel to them attracted no "national" attention whatever. Well, apart from a hilariously inept intervention by the "National" Secular Society. Oh, to be the latte-sipping laptop-wielders who can get their children into Cardinal Vaughan, but who cannot get themselves onto the Governing Body.)

Never mind that Catholic schools, and indeed the Catholic Church, now have barely any connection to the subculture around Celtic Football Club. As I have repeatedly been told, "There are two types of Catholic in the West of Scotland, the middle-class ones who go to Mass, and the working-class ones [if they can still be so described] who go to Celtic". Which lot do you think staffs the Catholic schools, ostensible centres of the teaching of football-related sectarianism?

And why does no one ever mention that around a quarter of Irish immigrants to the West of Scotland were Ulster Protestants, which is how there come to be Orange Lodges there? Although they do exist, there are far fewer in the much more Protestant East. And few, if any, in the ultra-Calvinist redoubts of the North.