When 500 pioneering Jamaican immigrants aboard the Empire Windrush sailed into Tilbury docks in June 1948, Ernest Bevin, then the foreign secretary, announced they would not stay long. England was too cold, he said, they “would not last one winter”.

Modern aspirants to a new life in Scotland might be forgiven for thinking the Scottish executive is trying to deter them with similar logic. Its website, Scotlandistheplace.com, declares “It doesn’t always rain in Scotland”, before going on to confirm that, actually, most of the time it does and certainly a lot more than in England.

That sounds a little like encouraging newcomers to set up home south of the border. And throughout the 20th century that is what most immigrants did. Between 1921 and 1961, when mass immigration helped England’s population grow by 30%, Scotland’s population remained static. In 1966 only two out of every 1,000 Scots came from the new Commonwealth. The proportion in England and Wales was 12 times higher.

The rhetoric of ethnic diversity flows seamlessly from the lips of Scottish public servants and institutions, but it is a huge distortion of reality. The 2001 census reveals that only 2% of the Scottish population is from an ethnic minority. Its largest ethnic minority group, the Pakistani community, numbers less than 32,000 and makes up a mere 0.63% of the population.

Unfortunately our miserable climate is not the only factor working against the executive’s efforts to attract fresh talent. There is growing evidence that Scotland in 2005 is hardly more welcoming to overseas immigrants than England was in 1948. Last week the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) warned: “The executive may understand the benefits of increased immigration, but we are not certain the wider public is ready for it.” It backed up its assertion with evidence that 10% of Scots think there is “nothing wrong in attacking people from another ethnic background” and almost half deny that terms such as “Paki” and “Chinky” are racist.

It also revealed that 68% of Scots want to keep immigration low and 40% have been so duped by the pretence that white, monocultural Scotland is already an ethnic melting pot that they perceive a “real danger” of race riots in the near future.

These findings are supported by opinion on the ground. The broadcaster Hardeep Singh Kohli — from Glasgow — recently identified “terrible” racism in Scotland. Kohli, who now lives in London, added: “I speak to asylum seekers from Sighthill (in Glasgow) and the situation, the abuse they face, is awful. Where is the compassion? I’m fed up with the myth that Scotland is warm and welcoming to everyone, that there’s no racism in Scotland.”

The CRE hopes to convince ministers that if its “fresh talent” initiative is to work, Scotland will have to become much better at welcoming and integrating new arrivals. It fears any influx of foreign workers will awaken the “latent racism” inherent in Scottish society and warned the executive that “integrated societies do not emerge by themselves, and unless we proactively deal with the implications of adopting a pro-immigration strategy, new migrants to Scotland will experience the same difficulties as previous generations”.

Research commissioned by the executive has demonstrated how difficult it is to eliminate racist prejudice. In 2001 ministers launched a £1m anti-discrimination campaign. Four years later the investment has achieved nothing. More than half of Scots admit they would be worried if people from other ethnic or cultural backgrounds came to live in Scotland. Twenty-eight per cent say it is acceptable to use racist language privately to friends or family, and a substantial minority claim it is not racist to be offensive to people from non-Scottish backgrounds.

Last week, statistics outlining the level of recorded crime in Scotland showed that the problem goes well beyond attitudes. The number of race crimes committed north of the border rose from 3,097 to 3,856 in 12 months. Since the concept of racially aggravated crime was incorporated in Scots law six years ago, the figure has risen fourfold.

So the comfortable, complacent myth of Scotland as a less racist place than other parts of the United Kingdom cannot be sustained. It is astonishing it ever existed.

Modern anti-racist campaigners can point to examples such as the racist murder of Surjit Chhokar in 1998 and the brutal stabbing in Glasgow in 2001 of Kurdish asylum seeker Firsat Dag. But they delude themselves if they imagine the fable of Scottish tolerance was based on more than the fact that immigrants have traditionally provided a small minority of the Scottish population.

Mr Deasy in James Joyce’s Ulysses pinpointed the attitude when he observed that Ireland had never had a problem with Jews because it never let them in.

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