Scotland seen from London

Yay! We made it onto the front page of this week's New Statesman! A whole edition devoted to little us, eh? Well, no, not really. 

Frankly, it's all a bit of a disappointment. Start with the front page: every cliche under the sun, as far as I can see, including our old pal the deep-fried Mars bar. A very kitsch set of pictures. But hardly symbols of modern Scotland - or any kind of real Scotland. No mention of the inventors of the 19th and 20th century, let alone the work done here on the scanning technology that let us see babies in the womb forty years ago, cloning, forensic anthropology, the development of video games, alternative energy, etc. There's a photo of the Forth Rail Bridge from the 19th century but what about the Forth road bridge, the new Forth crossing now under construction, the iconic Holyrood Parliament, let alone the amazing buildings now lining the Clyde and the Tay at Dundee? RBS, the failed bank, gets a mention but looking at this collection you'd think those of us in Scotland live off tartan and shortbread. 

And there's at least one mistake: it was revealed on TV last week that the guy in the fancy picture frame is not Bonnie Prince Charming. That's his brother, Henry. The Alan Ramsay portrait of Prince Charles Edward is much more interesting. 

And what rock group is this to his right? Not the Proclaimers obviously. Del Amitri? Biffy Clyro? Franz Ferdinand? 

You might think looking at the front cover that there's going to be some discussion of the independence referendum. There's a leader on the subject in which New Statesman accepts the unionist view without question, even endorsing Barroso's story about Scotland's EU membership and urging us to vote for the union because there's going to be a Labour government in 2015 (o yeah?) and it will give us all the social democrat stuff the Scots want (aye, right).  

There's a decent contribution by Alan Taylor, warning people down south to be suspicious of what the press is telling them is going on in Scotland and Prof Tom Devine describes neatly how Scotland got to where it is now. There's a factual account of Gaelic education - a real success story in Scotland. Other than that there are a lot of contributions from people with nothing to say about the referendum but who will be recognised by readers down south as being Scots.

There's a chat between Alex Salmond and Judy Murray, but the centrepiece is what the New Statesman calls 'an essay' by Alex Salmond. I'm not very happy about the tone of that. I can understand why the leader writer of this magazine can only see Scotland in terms of what independence would mean to the rest of the UK, but I would like the Yes campaign to stop trying to refute every argument put up by Better Together, the Tories and their pals. Independence has to be about more than that. We need to keep reminding the rest of the UK this is not about them - it's about us and our vision for the future. 

To end it all, Will Self mixes up the Erskine and Kincardine bridges - and he should know better, being married to a Scot and spending a lot of time here. 

But I suppose it's still better than last week's magazine which had one page devoted to Scotland (at a time when the Cabinet was on a flying visit here) and nine pages devoted to space travel, including three pages about a multimillionaire with more money than sense who wants to fly to Mars. Possibly by the time we get to September, we might have some decent discussion going on independence but I have a feeling it won't be in the pages of the News Statesman.