“HAVE A WEE DRAM afore ye go,” runs the traditional old Scottish greeting — or, in the English translation: “I’m going to stuff this broken beer glass in your face.” According to the World Health Organisation, Scotland has the second-highest murder rate in Western Europe, with 2.33 victims last year per every 100,000 people. Another United Nations study goes even further, revealing that Scotland is now the most violent country in the developed world, with Scots three times more likely than Americans to suffer a violent assault.

We can be thankful to Scottish devolution for exposing the murderous habits of the Scots. In the past, homicides north of the border would simply have been lumped together with those in the South to produce a single British murder statistic, thereby allowing the violent Scots to defile us peace-loving English and Welsh. At a mere 0.7 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, England and Wales narrowly have the second-lowest murder rate in Western Europe after Germany. In fact, if you stripped out attacks committed by drunken McSporrans and McTavishes just arrived on the train at Euston, I wouldn’t be surprised if England came out as the most murder-free country in the world.

Yet in spite of evidence, we still tend to view England as the place with the crime problem. I was speaking to an estate agent in Edinburgh the other week who told me of the droves of English families who were looking to move to Scotland “to escape crime-infested London”. How can they be so stupid? It is hardly as if there is anything new about the Scots propensity for murder: when they sit down to read the particulars of some 19th-century fairytale castle in Renfrewshire, maybe these English house-hunters should stop to wonder: why were the Scots still fortifying their homes so late? It was because they all feared going the same way as the MacDonalds, 30 of whom were bumped off by their house guests, the Campbells, at Glencoe in 1692.

When even a former Scottish Labour Minister, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, ends up being jailed for setting light to the hotel where he had been drinking, there seems little hope in reforming the Scots. This week Charles Clarke will be blathering on about tackling violent crime by using more electronic tagging and other illiberal measures. There is an alternative: just rebuild Hadrian’s Wall.