LAST week it was revealed that the amount of anti-Catholic sectarian graffiti in Glasgow had almost doubled in 2016 compared to the previous year. There were 188 instances of anti-Catholic graffiti that year, and a further 56 in just the first three months of 2017. The bigots are out, and they’re spreading their message of hatred with their spray cans, telling members of a community which has been established in Scotland for hundreds of years that they’re not welcome here.

I’m the world’s worst Catholic. I was dragged up in the church by Catholic parents who were appalled that despite their best efforts it didn’t take. Possibly because I was born without the shame gene. The “I’m not going to Mass any more” fight that I had with my parents back in the 1970s was way bigger than the “I’m gay” fight that came a few years later. I’ve not been to Mass for many years, and don’t regard myself as a Catholic, but I’ll always be a Catholic in the eyes of some.

I don’t believe in the Transub-stantiation or the Apostolic Succession. I certainly don’t believe in the Virgin Birth and if Jesus did exist he wasn’t the son of any god except in a metaphorical sense. We’re born here on this planet in this life, and we all have a moral duty to try and leave it a wee bit better than how we found it. If a deity wants to condemn you to eternal torment because you decided not to believe in the truth of some religious text or other, or because you happened to have been born into the wrong religious tradition, then that’s a deity with a lot less compassion than a mere frail mortal is capable of demonstrating. If you asked me what my religion was I’d tell you I was apatheistic. It’s not that I don’t believe in God exactly, although I tend to lean in that direction, it’s just that I don’t care enough in order to have a strong opinion. This is decidedly not Catholicism.

But according to some of the polyester uniformed big drum-banging brigade, I’m always going to be a Catholic. Being Catholic in Scotland isn’t really about a person’s private religious beliefs. It’s about your family background and your ancestry. I’m of Irish Catholic descent, and therefore will forever be a Catholic in the eyes of some, even if I shave my head, don yellow robes, adopt a Tibetan name, and wander up and down Duke Street in Glasgow chanting Om outside those bars that are festooned with Union Flags because the people who drink there hate nationalism. That means that when we talk about sectarianism in Scotland, we’re not really talking about religion at all. How can it be when you can still be subject to it irrespective of your own religious beliefs? Religion is just one of the tags used to distinguish the out-group. We’re really talking about anti-Irish racism.

There are those who argue that the way to tackle sectarianism is to abolish Catholic schools. I attended a Catholic school, and am no great fan of them. However I’m not entirely clear how abolishing Catholic schools is going to prevent anti-Catholic bigotry amongst people who don’t attend Catholic schools. That’s like claiming homophobia is caused by gay bars. Catholic schools were established by the Catholic community in the 19th century to protect themselves from the rampant sectarianism prevalent in Scotland at that time. Equally sectarianism is not about football. Football is just one of the ways in which underlying bigotries manifest themselves. These things are symptoms of sectarianism, not its cause.

Let’s not bother with the false moral equivalences here. It’s very easy to respond to the challenges of sectarianism with a plague on all their houses, but Scottish sectarianism does not affect everyone equally. Those who bear the brunt of it are Scottish people of Irish Catholic descent. Religious hate crime figures collated by the police show that although Catholics make up just 16 per cent of the Scottish population, 57 per cent of all religiously motivated hate crimes in Scotland target Catholics or Catholicism. There were 673 charges of religiously motivated hate crimes recorded by police in Scotland over the year 2016-17, which represents a rise of 14 per cent on the previous year. This is the highest number for the past four years. If you are a member of Scotland’s “Catholic” community, and the quotation marks are deliberate, then you are many times more likely to be a victim of a religiously motivated hate crime than a member of the majority community.

As someone who can remember the sectarianism of the 1960s, when your employment opportunities and life chances were heavily determined by whit fit ye kicked wi, I’d be the first to proclaim that the sectarianism of modern Scotland is but a shadow of its former self. That is an enormous testament to the goodwill and common sense of the great majority of the people of this country. But the recent rise in hate crime statistics proves that we can’t rest on our laurels.

The rise in anti-Catholic sectarian graffiti in Glasgow is not unconnected to the 150 per cent rise in homophobic assaults recorded in England and Wales, and the rise in hate crimes against members of ethnic and racial minorities which was also recorded by police forces in England and Wales. All of these have come about because Brexit – with its message of xenophobia, of Britain going it alone, of isolationism – has emboldened the bigots.

The blame for the recent rise in public expressions of anti-Catholic bigotry lies squarely with those who have stoked the fires of sectarianism for political ends, and who have blown the dog-whistle of bigotry in order to advance their own agendas. It’s the fault of a political party that attracts individuals who have a history of expressing support for extreme right-wing organisations and the Orange Order and rewarding them with council candidacies. It’s all very well claiming that these individuals have been sent on equality training, but most of us don’t need equality training to know that bigotry is wrong.

Sectarianism in Scotland is a disease of British nationalism, and it’s time British nationalist politicians in this country looked to their own misdeeds instead of constantly blaming independence supporters for all this country’s ills.