Wings Over Scotland

Dear Chairman,

You are, it appears, being placed under almost intolerable pressure to do Scottish football’s dirty work for it. You’ve been handed the responsibility for dealing with a farcical mess of a situation despite having had no part in creating it. You’ve been threatened, cajoled and bullied into doing what the SFA and SPL didn’t have the guts to do for themselves. Over recent days you’ve been fed a great deal of misinformation, scaremongering and outright abuse designed to intimidate you into going along with a course of action that undermines every principle of sporting integrity.

I understand, however, that as chairman your job is to take hard-headed business decisions in your club’s interests, rather than to uphold lofty ideals even where doing so would lead your club into bankruptcy. So I hope you’ll consider the following facts before you decide how to vote at the SFL’s Special General Meeting on July 13.

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The past week’s most viewed posts, for the benefit of latecomers. With both Parliaments on holiday, see if you can guess which story overwhelmingly dominated the news agenda of the last seven days.

Ranging far and wide
Jim Traynor’s sudden change of mind

Scottish football decides
LIVE POST: How the SFL clubs are likely to vote on Friday 13th.

Straightening the record
LIVE POST: Busting the myths around the Sevco fiasco.

The customer is always scum
The SFA and SPL’s hatred of their customers revealed.

Stop this sick filth
Token story not about Rangers!

The end of the world
Stewart Regan predicts Armageddon.

For those who doubt
Uncovering the Unionist agenda of Rangers fans.

Why we write about Rangers
Why nationalists should care what happens at Ibrox.

Quick number crunching
Will Sky really cut off their nose to spite their face?

It’s not just us
How everyone else is struggling for politics news too.

We should be grateful for the ongoing Rangers circus. With both the Scottish and UK Parliaments now off on their summer recesses, we’re entering what newspapers traditionally call the “silly season”, where there’s little for political reporters to cover and they’re reduced to fabricating copy out of nothing to fill their sections.

Even so, the Herald’s front-page splash today is a bit desperate. Watch in amazement as the dramatic headline (“Cameron under pressure to stage vote on independence“) crumbles to pieces before your very eyes in the space of a few short sentences:

Frustration is growing in Whitehall that Alex Salmond is “dragging his feet” on sorting out key issues surrounding the 2014 poll, most notably on whether there should be one or two questions.

To be able to deliver the SNP Government’s preferred time-table, it is thought there is just a matter of months to pin down the technical details of the referendum. By next spring, if agreement has not been reached, then the Prime Minister faces a major political dilemma.

Asked if he might have to decide Westminster will legislate to hold an independence referendum in Scotland, a senior Coalition source told The Herald: “Potentially, this is a scenario he may have to face.””

So let’s break that down. “A few months” in fact means “almost a year”, while “Cameron under pressure” actually translates into “POTENTIALLY, Cameron MAY come under pressure, at some point in the fairly distant future, IF the Scottish Government’s consultation process hasn’t resolved itself in a manner everyone can live with, and IF Cameron then decides to commit electoral suicide by imposing a London-run referendum on Scotland”. Well, hold the front page.

We’re reminded of a popular Scottish phrase regarding the addition of certain physical appendages to the person of one’s grandmother in order that she might be denoted one’s grandfather. We commend the Herald on their powers of invention in a lean news period, and will now get back to our piece on what the constitutional implications will be if Michael Moore is unexpectedly revealed to be a Nazi from the moon.

It’s becoming impossible to keep track of all the lies, disinformation, smoke and mirrors surrounding the Rangers fiasco at the moment. We’ll try to update this page with at least the more egregious ones as they arise. Let’s get started.

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For any of you sick of football talk (to be honest, that includes us) and questioning this blog’s oft-stated belief that the fate of Rangers FC (IL) and the fate of the independence campaign are intertwined, we attach below the minutes of the Rangers Fans’ Fighting Fund meeting held earlier this week at Ibrox Stadium. As far as we’re able to ascertain they’re genuine, and we thank the alert reader who sent us the link. The entire document is below, but we’ll highlight the relevant passage right here:

“A representative from Denny then informed the panel that he had four reasons why we should go into Division 3. First he believed it would test Charles Green resolve; secondly he believed it would show the benefit of Auchenhowie and allow the management team to gain experience. Third, it would galvanise and unite the Rangers support, and lastly it would allow us to move on and concentrate on defeating the SNP’s fight for independence.”

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Sky TV has somewhere in the region of 1 million subscribers in Scotland, of whom approximately 50% will also be Sky Sports subscribers.

Assuming all subscribers, both Sports and non-Sports, have the most basic package available (£21.50/month without Sports, £42.50/month with), that means Sky’s gross domestic-viewer revenue in Scotland is roughly £32m/month, or £384m/year.

The deal Sky signed with the Scottish Premier League for live broadcast rights over the next five years will see it pay the SPL around £1.3m/month, or £16m/year.

Should Sky pull out of the TV deal entirely in the event of Sevco Rangers FC being placed in SFL3 (or worse), and some subscribers cancel their service – either in anger or simply because it no longer includes Scottish football – the proportion of Scottish customers leaving which would lead to Sky making a net loss is just over 4%.

If we restrict ourselves to Sky Sports subscribers alone, and assume that they only cancel their Sports package (keeping their other channels), the figure is 13%. Or put another way, if Sky completely abandon Scottish football they need to still hang onto almost 90% of their Sports subscribers in Scotland in order not to lose money.

Simplified, obviously. Just thinking out loud.

We’re sure yesterday was a trying day for SFA chief executive Stewart Regan. Indeed, on the basis of the evidence you’re about to read below, it’s sent him stark raving mad. It’s a story which appeared briefly on the Scotsman website, only to vanish again minutes later. (EDIT: It’s back now, slightly edited where Regan claimed the Scotsman had misrepresented his position – most noticeably in the opening paragraph – and boasting a new and slightly less apocalyptic headline.)

It’s several steps past the sober, measured impartiality that might be reasonably expected of an administrator, some distance beyond outright dereliction of duty, and even wildly-irresponsible lunacy is just a tiny dot receding fast in the rear-view mirror as Regan hurtles off into the distance, towards the edge of a cliff.

Try as we might, we cannot see how he can possibly now remain in his position until the weekend and still have the universe make any sense at all. Judge for yourself.

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The current positions of all 41 professional football clubs in Scotland (plus Queen’s Park FC) on the future status of the club currently registered as Sevco Scotland. Where possible, direct links to the official club website are provided for verification, otherwise the most helpful news report is linked. Updated as the situation develops.

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We don’t like to write articles that are 70% adjectives, so let’s start with a disclaimer: it’s nigh-on impossible to exaggerate the naked, open contempt with which the Scottish football authorities are now treating their paying customers, so let’s just take it as read that any opinions we might offer in the following piece are understatements by a factor of around 1000 and get on with it.

Direct quotes from those who attended today’s meeting of the Scottish Football League are thin on the ground, with the main participants reluctant to be interviewed, so we’re going to have to rely on second-hand accounts from reporters outside Hampden. Seemingly, SFA chief executive Stewart Regan revealed that Charles Green’s new football company Sevco Scotland (which he intends to rename Rangers, but has not yet legally done) will not be admitted to the SPL no matter how the Premier League’s members vote at their own meeting tomorrow.

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We got an annoyed comment yesterday from a reader about the number of articles we’ve written on the Rangers fiasco. Only a tiny (fingers-of-one-hand) number of readers have ever objected to the football pieces, but we don’t want that number to grow, so we’re just going to put this here for future reference.

There’s a whole raft of reasons why the “crisis” at Ibrox is relevant to a Scottish political blog. As we’ve touched on before, we believe that were New Rangers to either disappear entirely or become a greatly-reduced force in football over the next two years, it could be a game-changer in the independence campaign. The parallel that could be drawn if the game survived in a healthy state bereft of the big Union Jack-waving institution everyone said we couldn’t do without would be pretty obvious.

Secondly, there’s no point pretending that Rangers stories don’t draw in a wider audience to the blog, from right across Scotland, exposing people to its core content who’d otherwise never see it. We’re not here to preach to the converted, that’s a waste of time. We have to speak to people who have no political axe to grind and may not have made up their minds about independence yet, and anything that puts more eyes on pages is a positive.

The third reason, though, is something much more personal.

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An alert reader recently pointed us to a story we’d missed in last week’s Sun. Headed “SICK TAUNTS FOR ‘NO’ GIRL CEILIDH WATSON”, it describes the “vile internet abuse” suffered by the 2010 Miss Inverness after she appeared at the “Better Together” campaign launch. Oddly, the worst (in fact the only) example of these attacks the paper felt able to provide was one alleged “cybernat” saying “It’s amazing how low some will stoop for 15 minutes of fame”, which is a bit unfriendly but we’re not sure it quite reaches the level of “vile abuse”, particularly when directed at someone who’s voluntarily and actively involved themselves in a heated political campaign.

The piece also referred (we presume, being unaware of any other incident that fits the description) to this blog’s own brush with infamy last week, noting that we’d “posted sick images of a funeral cortege of dead squaddies passing through Royal Wooton [sic] Bassett”, apparently in response to Ms Watson speaking of her soldier boyfriend.

We still haven’t seen the launch event – there appears to be no footage of it available on the campaign’s website – so we had, and have, no idea what Ms Watson’s boyfriend does for a living. The image in question had absolutely nothing to do with him or her or anything she may or may not have said at the No campaign launch.

As for “sick images”, though, the picture we used in our mockup poster wasn’t edited in any way (except for blurring out the numberplates of the hearses in an attempt to protect the identities of the dead men, which were then spread across the internet anyway by Labour activists), so if it constitutes a “sick image” then pretty much every newspaper in Britain – including the Sun – is guilty of the same crime.

You can see the full story below, without having to visit the Sun’s website.

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We were struck by a thought this morning. Between them, measured by average attendances, Rangers and Celtic between them command more support than the other 40 clubs in senior Scottish football put together. They pull in somewhere over 100,000 paying customers at a time to their home games, (and could probably attract considerably more had they the stadium capacity to accommodate them), while the other 10 SPL clubs struggle to get half that many combined.

It’s a massive dominance, and obviously is particularly the case in Glasgow, where the vast bulk of Scotland’s media is located. So it’s weird that offhand we can’t think of a single print or broadcast journalist anywhere in the entire Scottish media that admits* to supporting either one of them. If every writer in the country who claimed to support Queen Of The South or Albion Rovers actually turned up to either of those sides’ games at once, they’d pack their stadia to the rafters rather than having crowds you can count on fingers and toes.

The question arose in our minds when pondering a couple of pieces in today’s papers.

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