‘Flower of Scotland’ is the unofficial national anthem north of the border but soon enough we may never hear its like again. Jim Telfer, one of the country’s most celebrated rugby coaches, has called for the song to be dropped at sporting events in favour of an alternative that ‘shows us standing for something rather than against something as a country’. His plea has been echoed by former Scotland international Jim Aitken, who wrote to the Times dismissing the song as an ‘anti-English dirge’.

Telfer’s complaint prompted Lord McConnell, a former Labour first minister, to urge a more ‘positive’ musical number, while Scottish Tory MSP Murdo Fraser deemed the current tune too ‘jingoistic’. Scottish politicians are known for their keen interest in sing-songs at the football: their late, unlamented Offensive Behaviour at Football Act having briefly transformed Scottish police into the world’s only music critics with the power of arrest. So there will be some trepidation at them turning their attention to patriotic vocalising at Murrayfield.

The song in itself is harmless if hokey.

That is not to say the chorus of disapproval for ‘Flower of Scotland’ is misplaced. Written in the 1960s by the late Roy Williamson of folk band The Corries, it is an inadvertently revealing anthem for the Scots: a lament to the future. The lyrics romanticise Robert the Bruce’s crushing of the English at Bannockburn in 1314 and long for Scotland to ‘rise now/And be the nation again’ that sent Edward II ‘hameward/Tae think again’.

‘Flower of Scotland’ isn’t the only national anthem to revel in past glories, but it’s one of the few that can’t come up with any that post-date the invention of the printing press.

Williamson’s magnum opus was adopted for international rugby matches in 1990, officials having given up on ‘God Save the Queen’ which routinely attracted fulsome booing from Scotland fans. The national football team formally embraced ‘Flower of Scotland’ seven years later. Since then the song’s status has passed into legend, and it’s not uncommon to encounter Scots who came into adulthood before the record was even written yet who are convinced it is of centuries-old pedigree.

The song in itself is harmless if hokey. But it’s hard to shake the suspicion that, for some, this tacky little tea-towel dirge has become an anthem for boozy Braveheartism, sublimating anti-English animus into a culturally sanctioned bit of sporting banter.

So Telfer and McConnell have a point. But what do we replace it with?

One of its chief rivals for national hymnhood is ‘Robert Bruce’s March to Bannockburn’, a 1793 verse written in a hybrid of Scots and English and better known today as ‘Scots Wha Hae’. Alas, it, too, is problematic. Aside from exhorting the drawing of ‘freedom’s sword’ and casting aspersions on ‘traitors’ and those who would ‘fill a coward’s grave’, the song closes on a note of less-than-civic nationalism:

By oppression’s woes and pains!

By your sons in servile chains!

We will drain our dearest veins,

But they shall be free!

Lay the proud usurpers low!

Tyrants fall in every foe!

Liberty’s in every blow!

Let us do or die!

Of course, if our quest for a new anthem were to exclude all patriotic Scottish ballads that are ultimately about killing the English, we’d be left with ‘These Are My Mountains’ and ‘Ye Canny Shove Yer Granny Aff a Bus’. Still, the SNP has stopped closing its annual conference with this particular panegyric to Sassenach slaughter, so safe to say it’s well and truly cancelled.

‘Scotland the Brave’ used to be in favour but its 4/4 marching beat and some cringe lyrics — ‘High in the misty Highlands/Out by the purple islands/Brave are the hearts that beat/Beneath Scottish skies’ — make even the deftest vocalist sound, in Billy Connolly’s phrase, like a singing shortbread tin. There’s ‘Loch Lomond’ but that’s too maudlin, even for the Scots; and while ‘Auld Lang Syne’ has just the right blend of fraternity and sentimentality, it is too closely associated with New Year’s Eve.

Dougie MacLean’s ‘Caledonia’, a folk-pop saudade for Eretz Alba, tugs on the heart of many an ex-pat, but that’s the trouble with it, too: it’s the anthem of people who love everything about Scotland except living there. There’s always ‘Highland Cathedral’, a haunting, ethereal air for the pipes, but the occasionally sung lyrics — it is usually heard as an instrumental — are a touch too spiritual for such an irreligious nation.

Since Burns Night will soon be upon us, why not turn to another of his compositions, one that could command a consensus across Scotland’s cultural and political divides? ‘A Man’s A Man for A’ That’ has just the right mix of egalitarianism, mawkishness and self-righteousness. Then again, the lyrics might fall foul of modern sensibilities. Under the SNP’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill, a man is whatever he says he is.

Failing that, there is an anthem that celebrates one of Scotland’s great institutions, expresses no ill will towards the English, and that even Nicola Sturgeon has been happy to sing in the past: ‘God Save the King’.