THERE was another one of those chocolate box surveys this week designed to make Scotland’s chest swell with pride. This one – something called ‘a quality of life’ – found that Scotland was ranked top as the most desirable of the UK countries in which to live. Apparently, we don’t go around murdering people and we have a tolerant attitude to homosexuals. We also have decent employment rates, health history and respect people’s “rights”.

Last month a different survey claimed that Orkney and Shetland were the best places in Europe to bring up families. Two years ago, I was commissioned to spend some time on Lewis and Harris to discover why a holiday company had decided to make it one of the world’s most desirable islands. It seems we are never more than a few weeks away from a survey/study/research showing that Glasgow offers the best shopping experience outside of London’s Bond Street or that Edinburgh has some of the UK’s most desirable residences and postcode areas.

Successive Scottish governments love these surveys because they seem to indicate that all those tales about the Son of God being a Palestinian from Bethlehem are misleading in the extreme: He was born in Scotland and, ever since, God has never stopped bestowing his mercy upon us. “You might think there’s loads of unemployment and poverty,” aver the government spin doctors, “but all these surveys can’t be wrong”.

Right now, The Almighty is causing his light specifically to fall on Fifers. For, according to a survey released in August of this year, people in Fife are the happiest chiels in Scotland. Actually, this survey wasn’t actually a “survey” at all; it was a Happiness Index and it was conducted by that great provider of happiness and wellbeing, the Bank of Scotland.

Now, seeing as how I’m a simple and innocent soul and tend to take things at face value I’m sure the Bank of Scotland (motto: charging you interest and calling in your overdrafts since 1695) is simply trying to accentuate the positive about Scotland and ensuring that everyone gets a wee turn at being as happy as Larry. Last year’s Happiness Index said that those in the Highlands and Islands were the most ecstatic people in Scotland. Next year, I predict it will be a dead heat between Clackmannanshire and North Lanarkshire, with the lowland industrial wasteland just shading it by a heart attack or two.

However, I’m willing to bet that there are some irascible old curmudgeons out there who will insist on ascribing an ulterior motive to the Bank of Scotland’s Happiness Index. It’s no secret that when people are happy they tend to spend more money and, if they don’t actually have much money, then they’ll get a loan from an organisation like … oh, I don’t know, let me see; like the Bank of Scotland … to enable them to solidify their state of wellbeing.

I was once contacted by the incredulous newsdesk of a major English newspaper to tell me that Aberdeen had just been named one of the three happiest locations in the UK alongside Oxford and a place called Reading/Bracknell (this was obviously before the oil prices started to tumble). “We were always told that Aberdeen was a bit cold, dour and miserable,” my English editor told me. “Be a good chap and find out why it’s suddenly become so happy and contented.”

I now fear that these surveys are coming down the line so fast that people will start to believe them all. There’ll be squads of Happiness Monitors operating in arboreal neighbourhoods chivvying people with frowns on their faces and telling them to buck up their ideas a bit. In places like Drumchapel and Possilpark (where they obviously don’t read the papers telling them how happy and satisfied with life they are supposed to be) VisitScotland will be taking spaces on billboards insisting that everyone is happy and that, if they’re not, they should perhaps start thinking about making a new life in Orkney, Shetland or Stornoway. After all, you don’t get seals and dolphins frolicking in the shallow waters off Saracen Street.

Here’s the reality. Scotland is not a bad place to live. We have more than our fair share of natural beauty to gaze longingly at, especially if you’re a tourist or can afford the time off or the money to get to them. Generally speaking, we’re not really any better or any worse than most other civilised nations on earth. There’s a reason why so many surveys seem to indicate that the Garden of Eden is actually located in Scotia and that the original Hanging Gardens weren’t in Babylon but in Camelon.

They are dreamt up by middle-class marketing executives who either have a product to sell or who represent someone who has a product to sell. They never add an accompanying codicil that, as we are one of the most affluent countries in the world replete with natural resources and a plentiful supply of food and energy, we bloody well should be happy. And they are pre-programmed to ensure that those population centres where patterns of multi-deprivation are at their most dense are never allowed to disfigure the overall picture of idyllic satisfaction.

If there is any lingering concern or distress at the picture painted by the 2016 Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (published in August) then don’t worry: there’ll be a happy lifestyle survey along in just a minute telling us all a different story. After all, poor and unhappy people tend to be located in the same places from decade to decade. Let’s just concentrate on our wee bit hill and glen instead.

I mean, come on … why are some people so desperate to have an independent Scotland when all these Happiness Indexes are telling us that life here is a bowl of cherries and that everyone wants to visit us.

Too many of us fall for it every time, including whichever Scottish Government spokeswoman said this about yesterday’s survey: “The findings of this study come as no surprise. While there remains more to do, since 2007 we know that recorded crime has fallen to a 42-year low, young people are more likely to be in learning, training or work, people are living longer and remaining healthier for longer, and we’re living in a more equal society with the proportion of individuals living in relative poverty having fallen, and the gender pay gap has decreased considerably.”


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