DRIVING home from work last week, I confess I became a little bit riled by an item on BBC radio Scotland’s Newsdrive programme about the planned new TV channel for Scotland.

It wasn’t so much the announcement by the broadcaster’s director-general that irritated me – although how £30 million is enough for a whole new channel is beyond me. And why the news programme will be broadcast at 9pm, competing with prime-time drama, is rather perplexing.

No, what irritated me most was some of the vox pops that accompanied the piece. One bloke, asked if he intended to watch the new channel, sneered at very idea. “In a wee place like Scotland – what would we talking about? Mrs MacDougall’s missing cat?”

I was screaming at the radio: “Why would you think that?”

I’m sure it would be pretty much impossible to find anyone on the streets of Norway, the Republic of Ireland, Slovakia, Lithuania, New Zealand – or the other 70 United Nations member states smaller than Scotland – who would scoff at the thought that their own country should continue to make its own news programmes. That got me thinking about the condition that some people call the “Scottish cringe”. I’ve never liked the phrase much because it can give the false impression that there is some kind of inherent inferiority complex rooted deep in the Scottish psyche.

But whatever you want to call it – cringe, inferiority complex, obsequiousness – it’s the hallmark of country that has never quite grown up. There is no other way to explain this child-like subservience other than as the product of centuries of being spoon-fed by the adults down in Westminster. It could also be called dependency – after all, the opposite of independence is not “separate”, but “dependent”.

But that, too, can be misleading, suggesting that Scotland has always been incapable of standing on its own two feet. We know that in the 1980s, North Sea oil funded Margaret Thatcher’s programme of mass unemployment, her destruction of mining communities, her war in the Falklands and her fearsome collection of Trident II nuclear weapons. More recently, we’ve helped bankroll tax cuts for City of London bankers, and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

We always had an abundance of natural and human resources – from the water that falls from our skies to the coal that lay under our soil, from the oil that was discovered off our shores to the skills and knowledge of our people.

But we had no control over these resources. The decisions that affected our lives were taken in London. And that’s how it was for centuries.

I believe the huge generation gulf on independence is at least partly linked to recent Scottish history.

Yes, younger people tend to be less conservative, less cautious and more optimistic than their elders. But they also grew up with the reality of a Scottish Parliament, while an earlier generation lived for decades in a country completely run from behind closed doors, by a secretary of state handpicked by Downing Street, and advised by bunch of pin-striped civil servants in Whitehall.

It’s 18 years now since the opening of the Scottish Parliament – that’s before some of our youngest voters were even born. The average 35-year-old was still at school.

They grew up in the devolution years and so found it natural and normal that Scotland should take its own decisions and make its own mistakes.

They are not held back by the sense of powerlessness that was instilled into their elders, which bred a collective lack of confidence in our country’s ability to run its own affairs.

The late Tam Dalyell was right when he warned that a Scottish Parliament would become a motorway without exits. And Lord George Robertson was wrong when he insisted that devolution would “kill independence stone dead”.

Tam was a Unionist to the marrow of his bones, but he was honest and intelligent. He understood that if you give people a taste of responsibility, they become more confident.

It feels almost patronising to say so, but the bloke on the radio raised a question that even Mrs MacDougall’s cat would probably be able to answer.

The problem with TV’s Scottish news programmes is not that we live in a “wee place”, but that our journalists are not allowed out of their own backyards. Reporting Scotland can’t talk about England, Ireland or Wales, never mind the big wide world, because that’s the responsibility of the clever people down in the London office.

The new Scottish TV channel has rightly been welcomed by the National Union of Journalists and others. It will create dozens of high-quality jobs in an industry that’s been decimated over the past decade.

The new channel will be a sideshow to BBC One, the flagship channel that dominates UK broadcasting. Even if it broadcasts high-quality material, it’s unlikely to disrupt the “main” channels.

BBC Four has produced some cracking stuff but BBC One pulls in six times the viewers.

It seems that the BBC has finally caught up with the post-devolution landscape and conceded some autonomy to Scotland 18 years after we got our Parliament back.

But like the Parliament, I suspect it will give people, professionals and viewers, a taste of real responsibility and power – and the desire for full-blown independence.

I suppose there is a risk that it perpetuates a sense of inferiority – are we not good enough to merit a Scottish Six competing equally with BBC One for news consumers in Scotland? I know some people in the independence movement have given up on the BBC, but I think any disruption and change to Scotland’s cultural airwaves should be welcomed.

A number of the people on Newsdrive’s vox pops were certain this new Scottish channel will just be rubbish. That ingrained disdain for all things home-grown will need to be gently challenged in the next referendum.

It’s no use me screaming: “Why would you think that?”

at the radio. We need to ask that question, in a friendly manner, on the doorsteps. And encourage people to question themselves about why they think Scotland is uniquely incapable of running its own TV channel, never mind being an independent country.