Sectarian chants aren’t a problem of Scottish football, so much as the Old Firm

Fraser Grant seems desperate to try to defend the SNP’S utterly flawed Offensive Behaviour at Football Act (OBFA) and ties himself in knots while trying to do so. If you attend matches and/or live near a football ground as I do then you will know that sectarianism is not a problem of Scottish football but of Rangers and Celtic. When their fans visit Edinburgh I hear the songs about Irish history they sang before the OBFA was introduced still being sung. If the intention of the act was to end this, then it has failed and should be removed from the statute books.

What Mr Grant perhaps also doesn’t appreciate is that the majority of football fans are now so used to the sectarian singing and banners from the Old Firm that they largely ignore it rather than be offended or riled by it. The drunkenness, public urination and sexual harassment which occurs around large crowds of mainly men are far more offputting when considering taking families to football, but then, the same is true of the international rugby games at Murrayfield over the coming weeks – this offensive behaviour is not confined to football.

Sectarian singing and remarks are now rare at Scottish football, other than when one or both of the Old Firm are in town. where I have noticed a large increase in the use of sectarian language and abuse is online.

This started during the referendum campaign in 2014 with the branding of the majority of the Scottish population as “Unionists” – a term which was associated by most people with the divided politics of North Ireland.

Unsurprisingly, this led to those who align themselves with the Irish Republican form of nationalism attaching themselves to the Yes campaign and the SNP, with the inevitable counter reaction of some supporters of the UK adopting Unionism on the Ulster model and sectarian slanging matches moving off the terraces and onto Twitter.

Too many SNP politicians have been fellow travellers in this sort of behaviour, with a few politicians from the non-separatist parties getting drawn into the nonsense also.

If the SNP want to put sectarianism in Scotland back into the dark corners in which it lurked a few years ago they should look first at their own failure to accept the referendum result and the side effects of their perpetual anti-british rhetoric.

(DR) SJ CLARK Easter Road, Edinburgh