IT WAS meant to be a normal karaoke night in the Bowler’s Tavern in Paisley, but when Leigh Harper saw her boyfriend stumble out of the toilet she knew that something was terribly wrong. Five minutes earlier the couple had shared the microphone for a lively rendition of American Pie by Don McLean. Now, as Miss Harper grabbed her boyfriend’s waist to stop him crashing to the floor, she saw that his clothes were soaked in blood.

There has never been an explanation for the random knife attack on John Sinclair, a 28-year-old lance corporal in the Royal Artillery, who was enjoying a quiet night out when he happened to catch the eye of two fellow drinkers.

They had been looking for a victim all night and as they saw Mr Sinclair walk past they thought it would be fun to follow him into the toilet, where they stuck a 10in knife into his abdomen and buried a meat cleaver in the back of his head. Within 40 minutes he had bled to death as he lay unconscious at his girlfriend’s feet.

More than three years later, Mr Sinclair is just another statistic in an epidemic of “booze and blades” that this week saw Scotland named by the World Health Organisation as having the second highest murder rate in Western Europe. Last week a report by the United Nations labelled it the most violent country in the developed world.

Miss Harper, 35, said last night: “It makes me sick to the stomach. Every weekend there are people knifed and attacked here, and that’s just Paisley. I would say on average there must be three murders here a month.”

There are now so many murders in Glasgow, which attracts 55,000 revellers each night and was described in the 2005 edition of Lonely Planet as “almost a byword for style and chic”, that it has been dubbed Europe’s “murder capital”.

The problem is so serious that Strathclyde Police, which last year reported 83 homicides in the region and a murder rate not far behind New York, has set up Britain’s first violence reduction unit, given the task of coming up with a long-term strategy to bring the killing under control.

From the razor gangs of the 1930s to rioting at Old Firm football matches, Scotland, and in particular the west coast around Glasgow, has always been known for its hard man image.

After a long love affair with knives, these days it is not uncommon to see them in the hands of 11 and and 12-year-old boys, and occasionally girls. Since January there have been 13 murders, 145 attempted murders and 1,100 serious assaults involving knives in the west of Scotland.

Detective Chief Superintendent John Carnochan, head of the violence reduction unit, says that the situation is now so desperate that violent crime should be treated as a public health issue. Despite Glasgow’s trendy modern image, he believes it is no coincidence that the most violent city in Britain is also home to the three poorest parliamentary constituencies. He told The Times: “You can’t look at it separately from diseases like heart disease or lung cancer.

They are all related to the way you live your life — whether you smoke, drink, are in a long-term relationship or have a steady job.

“We have to think of violence like an infectious disease. If you are born into a family where your father hits your mother, then you are more likely to become infected, even more so if you live in an area where those same habits of violence are reinforced in the community outside your house.”

While some of the violence is committed by more than 100 organised gangs in the west of Scotland, an increasing proportion betrays a “chilling randomness”, he said.

Among the material in his office is CCTV footage of a 27-year-old man walking down a street in Glasgow after stepping out of a taxi to meet his girlfriend for a Saturday night drink. A group of teenagers push past him, one suddenly grabbing him by the sleeve and appearing to punch him in the ribs. It doesn’t look like much, but ten minutes later the young man is dead, the knife in his assailant’s fist having severed an artery. His killer, later convicted, was just 15.

The culture of violence in the west of Scotland is such that, when a two-year-old boy died in March after being shot in the head by an airgun pellet in Glasgow, one local pensioner ventured that the toddler had “got in the way”.

In March 2003, Thomas Shields, a 15-year-old from Garthamlock in Glasgow, beat a 27-year-old man to death with a metal pole at a bus stop. Shields, who is serving life, told a BBC Panorama documentary in July: “I got into a fight and just lost control. I didn’t know what I was doing and woke up in the morning and my ma told me I’d killed somebody.”

Brian Morrison, 18, who is in a young offenders’ institution after he was convicted of serious assault for knifing an innocent bystander in a kebab takeaway shop, admitted stabbing five people. “Some of the people deserved it, some didn’t,” he said. “The ones that didn’t, I’m sorry about it now, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Scotland has restricted the sale of hunting knives and swords, doubled the minimum sentence for carrying a knife from two years to four, and has proposed a ban on happy hours. But many people believe that the culture of violence will only be curbed if the most extreme measures are introduced. “If somebody takes a life, they should pay for it by their own,” Miss Harper said. “In America they have that deterrent hanging over them; here there is nothing.”

SCOTS TERROR

According to Strathclyde Police, in 2004 some 1,597 serious violent crimes — including murders, attempted murders and serious assaults — were committed within 25 metres of a licensed premise

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