Scotland in 2025: a fearless young warrior queen known only as “Sophie of Dundee” is facing down hordes of Islamic immigrants ravaging her once noble city. Spurred into action by the failures of elites to deal with rampaging grooming gangs and asylum-seeking rapists, the tiny but indomitable Celtic maiden staunchly vows to make her swinish aggressors bow before her, or else feel the punitive sting of cold steel.
This, more or less, was a popular US take on a viral video circulating this week, showing a very young girl in Dundee menacing the person filming with an axe and a knife, plus a lot of high octane swearing and shouting. Though no potential migrant attackers could be visually detected, at least one heavily accented male voice could be heard urging the girl to “show the knife”, while she and another girl, said to be her sister, volubly accuse him of “battering kids”. The girl with the weapons was later arrested by police, the video put online, and its chaotic events processed by the meme factories to be served up frothing hot.
One typical image — mainlined into American veins via Elon Musk’s new pal Tommy Robinson — showed “Sophie” transplanted to a Highland setting, still brandishing weapons enthusiastically in the heather, but now tartaned-up in the colours of Clan Mel McGibson and with face daubed in saltire blue. Meanwhile Musk himself was busy describing the police officers involved as “traitors to their own people”, as if a more responsible constabulary would have given the axe-wielding pre-teen a pat on the head and sent her on her way. A puzzled American discourse has since erupted about why Scottish people, or the men in particular, don’t adequately defend their women from tribes of marauding foreigners roaming unchecked across their ancestral lands. A donor page has been set up for the two girls, real names Lola (12) and Ruby (13). As I write, the fund stands at nearly £35,000, which is a lot of money for young Lola and Ruby to spend on machetes and Irn Bru. “May God save your country from the terrors happening there”, writes one plaintive donor.
At the same time, people who actually live in Dundee have been discussing what happened there, with less mythologising and more weary familiarity with the city’s longstanding social problems. Though the local tourist board is probably not shouting about it, the place has the highest rate of child protection orders in Scotland, the highest national incidence rate of domestic abuse, the second lowest life expectancy, and the second highest rate of drug misuse deaths in Europe (beaten only by Glasgow). “A significant proportion of the difference in life expectancy between Dundee and many other [places] can be accounted for by deaths at a young age from drugs, alcohol and suicide”, notes a 2024 health and social care report.
On the city’s subreddit, one poster said she had watched the whole thing kicking off from the Farmfoods carpark — a place not remotely heather-strewn — and described witnessing “lots of swearing and aggressive behaviour between both parties”, but no physical clashes. Another pointed out that the same girls — again identified as “Ruby” and “Lola” from Monifieth, ages 13 and 12 respectively — were reported missing in the Scottish press at the end of July, then traced shortly by the police afterwards. “Clearly there is a lot going on for them”, was one more sympathetic verdict. Mostly, though, there was a distinct lack of surprise about why a young girl might be walking about the city’s backstreets tooled up like a video game character. Said one: “I’m 31 this year and seen loads of that kind of pish growing up, average [housing] scheme behaviour… Mostly just troubled kids left to fend for themselves tbf. Just more people filming it now.”
In the end, then, febrile visions of the tomboy queen, Sophie of Dundee, have proved as accurate as that time in 2019 when the American Left collectively hallucinated MAGA-behatted students aggressing an “indigenous elder”. In both cases, it seems it is easy to make up self-serving things about young people you don’t know. The Daily Mail has since found the film’s cameraman, who turns out to be a Bulgarian Christian — which is to say, not Muslim — with legal residential status. The police, with the help of Farmfoods CCTV cameras, have confirmed “there is no evidence to support the online rumours Mr Dumana… committed any offence”. Rumours of migrant hordes have also been exaggerated: it is true that Dundee City council houses some Syrian, Iraqi, Afghan and Ukrainian refugees, but a quick look online shows the numbers are apparently in the hundreds not thousands. In 2019, 18% of babies in the city were born to mothers from outside the UK, a figure only marginally higher than the national average at the time.
So: whatever the ultimate truth about what went on in the video, or about the fraying social contract in Dundee, it is clearly a lot less childishly simple than the feverish projections of people like Musk. Twenty-five years ago, I lived in the city, in a neighbourhood full of nice houses left over from the prosperous 19th-century jute trade. I worked in an electrical retail shop in the centre, from which hollow-eyed drug users would sometimes nonchalantly emerge with stolen stereos to sell in the alleyways off the main street. Back then it was a starkly divided place — and still is — though the major social divisions have little to do with skin colour.
On the one hand, there are the hipster West End coffee shops and the fancy waterfront V&A museum, the backdrop to fictional native son Logan Roy’s surprise party in HBO’s Succession. On the other, there’s the scary tower blocks in places like the Hilltown and Lochee — known locally as “multis” — their stairwells adorned with “human shite, junkies shooting up, groups of neds and a dead dog”, as one disgruntled local resident recently described the situation. I had female friends who grew up in the multis; they were frequently plied with alcohol in their early teens then assaulted and raped by groups of local men. Safe to say, then, that the idea of sexually exploiting vulnerable minors didn’t start with brown-skinned incomers.
To make such obvious points seems to drive the online Right on both sides of the Atlantic into a spitting fury; as if, through a strange Tinkerbell-like alchemy, every time a white man is identified as responsible for sexual exploitation, an Asian-born culprit gets exonerated. When the objectors are from North America, there often seems to be an accompanying insult felt to self-identity and amour propre: as if some great-grandfather from Linlithgow or Leicester were being held personally responsible, and by extension all of his descendants. It is perfectly true, to our national shame, that Asian rape gangs have operated here with impunity, and been enabled by authorities in many cases. But it is also true that the strategies used by the perpetrators to lure young girls were hardly new or innovative, and nor was what they did to their victims afterwards. Sexual exploitation of minors has been rife in places like Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Dundee for decades — if not centuries — without the authorities getting a proper grip on it; and the perpetrators have usually been homegrown.
All but the most economically insulated of Scottish citizens already know this. Contact with everyday local reality, plus a phlegmatic, humorous outlook makes most of them constitutionally unlikely to fall for simplistic a priori narratives imposed from elsewhere, whether these be about existentially noble refugees or existentially noble working-class white people. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for many radical Right-wing onlookers, who seem neither in touch with reality, nor particularly phlegmatic or humorous. Credulously swallowing every bit of agitslop thrown their way by activists like Robinson, and without any apparent awareness of the high potential for being led up the garden path, they are now as desperately wedded to images of white British victimhood as foreign tourists generally are to the sight of Buckingham Palace or Harrods. And their current vision of Scotland is about as accurate as Brigadoon.
There was perhaps a time not long ago when Musk-powered overseas attention to the scale of UK immigration and the scandal of grooming gangs was a bracing correction to elite inertia and denial about it over here. Perhaps it even briefly provided us with that most precious of gifts, according to Robert Burns: “to see oursels as ithers see us”. But if so, that time has definitively gone.
Though the aimlessly simmering political energy generated may look attractive, sober-minded British Right-wingers should be careful to avoid projected psychodramas about their home turf that come with twanging accents and the inability to pronounce “Edinburgh” correctly. And to be fair to them, so far most have, perhaps sensing the incipient danger. Curbing immigration is increasingly seen as a commonsensical position, even in Scotland; it would be a shame to spoil things by associating the position with the havering of ill-informed numpties. In the immortal words of imaginary Dundonian Logan Roy about his American children, these are not serious people; and it shows.
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