Wings Over Scotland

We were struck by a little parable in the Scotsman today, penned by our favourite teller of fireside morality tales Michael Kelly. (Who, as attentive readers will know, only fails to grace our “Zany Comedy Relief” links column due to the lack of any central hub address for his contributions to the paper.)

In what we could most charitably describe as a “there but for the grace of God” scenario, the man whose chairmanship of Celtic took it to within hours of the fate that’s currently befalling Rangers reiterated the tired old lie about how Scotland needs both of the Old Firm, but in the course of the article he also passed on an interesting fact we hadn’t previously known.

“Rangers were once before in financial difficulty. It was in the 1920’s when my grandfather, James Kelly (a former Scotland centre-half), was chairman of Celtic. Rangers had a temporary cash flow problem and their board came out to his house in Blantyre to explain the problem and seek help. Celtic gave them an unconditional short-term loan. The fact that Rangers felt able to ask and that Celtic willingly responded indicates that both clubs were aware of their inter-dependence.”

We couldn’t help but find the 1920s football situation strikingly analogous to the modern political one. Rangers and Celtic are supposedly the bitterest of rivals, and their fans treat each other like diametrically opposed poles, with honour and virtue the sole property of one side and bigotry and hatred found exclusively on the other. Yet when it comes to the crunch, the institutions themselves know which side their bread is buttered, and unhesitatingly come together in their mutual interest. Remind you of any two big political parties at all?

Kelly’s piece sent our minds back to a terrific graphic novel we read back in the late 1980s. Penned by the acclaimed Northern Irish writer Garth Ennis (who’d later go on to write the hugely successful Preacher series), Troubled Souls portrayed the story of two young men on either side of the sectarian conflict.

The key event in the book’s climax is when the IRA footsoldier Damian McWilliams meets his commander on a hill overlooking Belfast and is horrified to learn that the purpose of their rendezvous is to meet the local UVF and cosily arrange the exploitation of the city’s population to the two groups’ mutual benefit.

His illusions of a great moral war shattered, McWilliams runs off and kidnaps the Protestant character, Tom Boyd (who he’s previously intimidated into assisting with a fatal bombing), and the two men talk while holed up overnight in a remote shack.

Enough spoilers already. Buy the book. But we wonder how many Labour and Tory supporters these days are experiencing similar emotions, as they watch their two parties, still proclaiming in public to exist on the opposite ends of the political spectrum (though most vaguely intelligent people saw through that fiction years ago), snuggling up cosily together in the Lords and the Commons to protect their narrow self-interest at the expense of Scotland?

When it came to the crunch, Celtic bailed out Rangers to protect their mutual feasting on the lifeblood of Scottish football. And rest assured, when it comes to the crunch in the independence debate, Labour and the Tories will put their arms around each other’s shoulders on the same stage and do their utmost to prop each other up, by ensuring that regular Tory governments in Westminster maintain the illusion of conflict. Orwell foresaw such a future for politics only too clearly in “1984” (Chapter XVII):

“War, however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is a warfare of limited aims between combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material cause for fighting and are not divided by any genuine ideological difference.“

Far in advance of the rest of the UK, Scotland is showing signs of waking up to the reality of Labour and the Tories’ true relationship to each other, which is why they’re both frantically pulling out all the stops to preserve the status quo that gives both of them their power. Michael Kelly, consciously or otherwise, is talking about more than one Old Firm.