Death to “Scottish Cringe”

Words: Didi Marina Salonia (She/Her)

“Scottish Cringe” has lived in our bones for too long, like a bad inheritance, like an echo we never meant to keep. It’s that half-second hesitation before you let your accent roll free, that instinct to shrink your culture down to something small, something palatable. Too loud. Too quaint. Too much. But while we’ve been side-eyeing ourselves, the rest of the world has been drinking us in like whisky that burns and soothes all at once.

Scottish identity isn’t some relic gathering dust in a museum. It’s alive. It’s messy. It’s stitched into catwalks and carved into city walls. Vivienne Westwood took tartan and turned it into rebellion, made it scream from runways, made it punk, made it power. Whisky gets treated like gold in Tokyo, in New York, in places that understand its worth better than we do. Our landscapes are legend, stretched across cinema screens, sold back to us with stories that barely remember to say our name. And while too many of us still joke about deep-fried Mars bars, Michelin-starred chefs are out here calling our seafood some of the best in the world.

Without pride, nothing grows. Nothing changes. You can’t build on something you don’t believe in. Chef’s Diaries: Scotland showed us that when outsiders come here, they see magic in our land, in our food, in our stories. And we? We act like it’s nothing special. Like it’s ordinary. Like it’s not worth shouting about.

That shame? That reluctance? It was planted in us, made to take root. Centuries of being told that real success, real intelligence, real culture belonged somewhere else. That Scots and Gaelic were languages of a primitive past, not the present. That wealth, power, prestige speaks with a different accent. But let’s be clear: that embarrassment was never really ours. It was given to us, trained into us. And anything learned can be unlearned.

And it is being unlearned. Look around. Glasgow-based painters like Lorna Sinclair, David Paton, David Iain Brown, Alice Campbell, Gordy Livingstone, Josh Thomson and David Lee are dragging imagination onto canvases, shaping bold narratives, vivid emotions, and striking perspectives that linger in the mind long after you’ve looked away. Michael Pedersen and Len Pennie are shattering the tired clichés of Scottish storytelling. Len by dismantling the weight of hypermasculinity with sharp wit and unapologetic vulnerability; Michael by weaving intimacy and lyricism into narratives that sidestep the old bravado for something richer. Kitti and Corto Alto are electrifying the jazz scene, proving that Scottish music doesn’t begin and end with a ceilidh. Jamie Genevieve is putting Glasgow on the global beauty map. Not just as a makeup artist turned entrepreneur, but as a proud Glaswegian redefining luxury beauty. Her 100% vegan, cruelty-free brand, VIEVE, now sits on the shelves of Harrods, Space NK, and Sephora. Graffiti artists like Panda, Conzo, and Little Book Transfers are spraying colour and chaos onto grey walls, refusing to let the city stay dull. Everywhere you look, there’s someone proving that Scottish culture isn’t just alive, it’s evolving and it’s restless.

“Scottish Cringe” isn’t dead, but it’s dying, and good fucking riddance. The problem isn’t that we don’t have enough to celebrate, it’s that we don’t have enough places that celebrate us. And that needs to change. Even tartan and bagpipes, all the things we were shamed into feeling embarrassed about: they’re ours, and they deserve the same kind of love the rest of the world gives them. But modern Scottish culture is bigger than that. It’s fluid, it’s shifting, it’s as much about neon city nights as it is about misty highland mornings.

If you’re a Scot and you made something, then it’s fucking Scottish. That’s it. That’s the rule.

“Scottish Cringe” goes hand in hand with our famous sense of humour: the instinct to underplay, to joke away ambition. People love our wit, yet so much of it is rooted in self-deprecation. It’s as if our cultural reputation itself has been shaped by our own habit of making fun of each other and ourselves. It stops people from trying. It stops them from chasing something bigger, from liking themselves, from knowing themselves. And it’s time we let that go.

Because Scotland isn’t a punchline. It isn’t some faded postcard.  Glasgow is not a nostalgia act replaying The Proclaimers. It’s the pulse of a Sub Club set, the raw energy of a Barrowlands gig, the rich improvisation of a night with the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra. It’s perfect Scottish seafood at Crabshakk, a delicate dosa at Dakhin, or Michelin-worthy plates at Brett. It’s poetry shared at Glasgow Zine Library, an afternoon lost in the Burrell Collection, the warmth of coffee and the sight of Highland coos at Pollok Park. We’ve got everything we need. The only thing missing is the belief that it’s ours to own.

And once we stop apologising for it? Once we stop acting like we need permission to be proud? Scotland stops looking back at what it was and starts defining what it’s going to be.