SNP put boot into our game when it helps distract from the real issues
EVERYONE and their auntie knew Rangers fans would take to the streets in celebration the moment their first league title in ten years was secured. Nothing of real note was done by the authorities to stop it. Nothing will be done about it going forward.
Nothing, that is, other than the ruthless use of what unfolded for political capital and the all-toopredictable demonisation of the national game and its supporters by opportunistic MSPs.
Nothing other than the promotion of more hollow rhetoric over the supposed threat football, such a force for good when channelled effectively, presents to the fabric of the nation and the well-being of its people.
Something should be done, though. Something meaningful. By the people themselves. By all of us.
What has happened over the course of the past week holds a pretty unflattering mirror up to the society and the overall level of public discourse we have allowed to develop in Scotland.
Where the matter of a few thousand football supporters losing their heads over a title victory dominates the news agenda — and is allowed to dominate the news agenda — for days and days on end.
Where the big story, the matter of greatest import in a nation mired in scandal, neglect and a global pandemic ahead of a national election, revolves around empty threats from government to ban a game of football between Celtic and Rangers behind closed doors because of claims that rival punters might gather for a spot of name-calling outside the stadium.
Humza Yousaf was at the centre of taking the story off on that peculiar tangent a couple of days ago. For those with little interest in the great and good of Scottish politics, he was the Transport Minister caught driving without the proper insurance and is now the Justice Minister who spent the other week having a go at Holyrood committee members on Twitter as they quizzed First Minister Nicola Sturgeon under oath.
Yousaf says concern over the feasibility of staging the Old Firm game — a dead rubber now the Premiership has been decided — was centred on ‘police intelligence’.
Maybe so. But does anyone really believe anyone other than the usual smattering of fruit loops and silly wee laddies plan to turn up outside Parkhead next Sunday morning?
Violent confrontations haven’t taken place outside any other Glasgow derby this season. Or any game anywhere.
Sorry for getting in the way of a good yarn, but this is a pudding that feels rather overegged.
For the avoidance of doubt, let’s be clear about one thing. The Rangers supporters who flooded Ibrox and George Square last weekend were wrong. They were unforgivably selfish. They broke the law. Quite why Police Scotland stood back and let them — even escorted them through the streets, in some cases — is another thing entirely.
This was hardly disorder on the scale of Manchester 2008, though. It was an outburst of pent-up emotion that got out of hand. Like Liverpool fans after winning the Champions League. Or Leeds fans having a promotion party round at Marcelo Bielsa’s house.
Those gatherings didn’t fill national news bulletins for the best part of a week. They barely merited a mention amid matters of infinitely greater concern.
The level of attention afforded to Rangers fans in recent days, no matter your view on their actions, just makes Scotland and its standard of public debate feel decidedly tinpot. It makes football feel even more like it is being used.
In recent days, Holyrood has passed a contentious — and considerably watered-down — Hate Crime Bill that can extend all the way to things said around your own dinner table at home.
Criticisms of its vagueness and concerns over its impact on free speech should alarm all followers of the national game given the shambles that was the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act, a rushed, kneejerk piece of legislation repealed in 2018, just six years after coming into being in the wake of Ally McCoist and Neil Lennon shouting in each other’s faces at Celtic Park.
John Swinney (left), the Deputy First Minister and Education Secretary, also survived a vote of no confidence over government legal advice supplied to an inquiry committee. He is under fire, too, as a result of draft findings from an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development review of the Curriculum for Excellence operating in Scottish schools only being made available to MSPs on the basis that they don’t tell anyone anything about them.
The OECD report was due to be published in February. It won’t be delivered now until after the Holyrood election. We don’t know what it will say, but we do know the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment revealed that Scotland has just recorded its worst-ever results in science and maths.
The summer’s exam scandal — where kids from poorer areas were marked down and had their teachers’ estimates discounted until an embarrassing U-turn — exposed so many platitudes about closing the attainment gap.
Scotland has the highest rate of drug deaths in Europe. The £150m Edinburgh Sick Kids’ hospital still hasn’t opened. Sexual-harassment scandals within the SNP seem about as regular as criticisms over their attitude to transparency.
That’s before we even get to the cost to the taxpayer of malicious prosecutions relating to the financial meltdown of Rangers and loans paid to failing companies, the ongoing saga of the Alex Salmond complaints process and the atrocious number of deaths in care homes as a result of hospital patients being sent into them without being tested for coronavirus.
Homelessness, poverty and lack of mental-health provision are critical issues, too. We don’t need surveys and studies for proof. We just need to look around.
And, yet, against the backdrop of all this and more, we keep going round the houses about what Rangers should have done to stop fans breaking lockdown (as if anything would have worked) and supposed trouble around a game no one can access inside a stadium that has been fenced-off to the public.
We’re all to blame for this, of course. Football is our national obsession. It boasts a culture and identity that is the envy of many.
That can come at a cost, though. Particularly when that obsession and its place in the cultural consciousness — with all its tribalism, passion and whataboutery — can invade the space required for other thoughts and discussions when left unchecked or even propagated by outside parties.
The behaviour of Rangers fans was deeply disappointing. But it pales into insignificance alongside the disappointments — to put it politely — created by our health, education and political systems.
That’s what we need our elected representatives to be pressed on. We are less than eight weeks away from voting for the next Scottish Parliament, after all.
Rangers and their fans have had their rap on the knuckles. It is now time we all demanded a move past the bread-and-circuses and onto the meatier issue of sorting out a country with a host of fundamental problems prevented — intentionally or otherwise — from receiving the attention they deserve.