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?

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In the light of today’s news, and some clown on the BBC just saying that Scottish football has “depended on” the Old Firm for years, here’s a little non-political curio from the past. 15 years ago I wrote a piece for the sadly-missed Total Football magazine, putting forward the suggestion that the only way forward for the game in Scotland was to kick Rangers and Celtic out and form a new league without them.

While (some of) the names have changed, the feature is basically as true today as it was in 1997, if not more so.  Among other things it tackled the myth that other clubs relied on the Gruesome Twosome for their survival through increased gate receipts, and it might be worth keeping in mind over the coming days amid what’s an all-but-inevitable avalanche of drivel heading our way from a media which has studiously avoided covering the full extent of Rangers’ troubles until now, and has been shamed by a thoroughly tremendous blog.

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It won’t have come as any surprise to SNP supporters that the media – the same one that devoted hundreds of column inches to misrepresenting Joan McAlpine’s “anti-Scottish” comments on Twitter – was today absolutely silent on Labour MP Denis McShane’s comparison of Alex Salmond to Serbian war criminal Slobodan Milosevic.

MacShane, who voted in favour of the Iraq War, hasn’t deleted the tweet, despite a storm of protest on Twitter. But he’s only the latest in a long line of Unionist politicians to compare Scotland’s democratically elected First Minister (who as far as we know isn’t implicated in a single death) to murderous genocidal dictators.

Labour in particular are fond of crying about the nasty cybernat “bullies” who occasionally call Labour politicians names online, but those are pseudonymous internet users with not a shred of evidence that any of them are members of – or even vote for – the SNP. We’re not aware of any elected Nat representative or even pro-independence journalist ever having likened Gordon Brown or Tony Blair or Ed Miliband to Hitler, but the brave defenders of the Union have no such scruples. MacShane is merely the latest in a long and ignoble line, so we thought it’d be a good idea to keep track and see if we can get a full house.

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Malcolm Harvey over on Thinking Unpopular Thoughts finally got round to his delayed assessment of the state of the SNP this week, completing his analysis of all five of the parties in the Scottish Parliament. And given that the SNP is currently riding at a dizzying all-time high in every measurable sense it's a pretty downbeat view, echoing (and indeed directly quoting) many of the recent complaints of the erudite legal blogger Andrew "Lallands Peat Worrier" Tickell. Over on A Burdz Eye View, meanwhile, Kate Higgins is bemoaning that the SNP's recent announcements about future projects have been overly "macho", and haven't focused enough on wimmin.

Here at Wings over Scotland, though, we must admit to being bewildered by the wave of negativity from some nationalists lately. Is there something in our national DNA that tends to self-destruction? Heck, you'd only have to look at our diet and drinking habits to find some supporting evidence for that theory. But is it in our politics too?

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A wise old German proverb was quoted in the Guardian recently. It runs like this:

"What do two monsters do when they meet each other in the forest?"

"They smile."

It's hard not to think of it as you watch the progress of the Scottish Government's anti-sectarianism bill through Parliament. The media has devoted a lot of column inches to the bill in recent days, with a variety of viewpoints. SNP MSP Joan McAlpine wrote an impassioned opinion piece for the Scotsman in support of the bill yesterday, while legal blogger Lallands Peat Worrier took the opposite approach, forensically examining the finer details and concluding that in extreme circumstances it could conceivably be used to criminalise behaviour that might seem trivial at worst.

The Scotsman's main editorial coverage today takes an uncharacteristically neutral stance, reporting the fact that the opposition parties, particularly Labour, are refusing to back the bill despite having put forward no amendments to it. They also provide two further short opinion comments, one from each side of the debate.

Against the bill, a sociology lecturer from Abertay University (no, us either) offers a rather unfocused ramble that sounds uncomfortably like some bloke in the pub sounding off after a couple of pints and concludes dramatically that the bill is "the most authoritarian piece of legislation in recent history", while the President of the Association Of Scottish Police Superintendents contends that in fact it's a welcome clarification and simplification of the law with regard to sectarian offences.

The vast majority of the Scottish people, meanwhile, heartily sick of the poison that spreads outward from Ibrox and Celtic Park and infects the rest of Scottish society, wait to see if something is finally going to be done.

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Labour's former Lord Provost of Glasgow and celebrity Celtic fan Michael Kelly would have an entry in the "Zany Comedy Relief" section of our blogroll if there was a central link hub for his outpourings. His latest rant in the Scotsman, though, is demented even by his standards. Under the bizarre title "Alex Salmond’s anti-sectarian purge has gone too far" (is it possible to go too far against sectarianism? Are we saying there's an acceptable level above zero?), he attempts to make an extraordinary case which twists and turns on itself with every line.

Firstly, he expresses his outrage that the police reported Celtic to UEFA for alleged sectarian singing during their Europa League match against Rennes, rather than arresting the perpetrators. Yet in the very next paragraph he relates a tale of them doing just that to a fan accused of singing a pro-IRA ditty during a Celtic-Hibs game, and claims that the arrest "seems excessive".

Kelly then launches into a more general diatribe against the anti-sectarianism legislation currently making its way through the Scottish Parliament, culminating in the astonishing claim that the IRA "was not a sectarian organisation". Because we all remember all its many prominent Protestant members, of course. But Kelly isn't quite done yet. His penultimate paragraph contains the following mind-boggling passage:

"But further, both Celtic and Rangers fans argue there is a significant difference between celebrating the actions of current terrorist groups and remembering with nostalgia the exploits of the freedom fighters of a century ago. Thus the Boys of the Old Brigade and Here Lies a Soldier should be classified as folk songs like the Massacre of Glencoe and the grossly offensive but condoned Flower of Scotland."

This blog doesn't know about you, readers, but we've never heard "The Massacre Of Glencoe" being lustily bellowed from the Fir Park stands when Motherwell take on Kilmarnock – indeed, we've never heard it spontaneously sung anywhere ever, let alone at a football match. Perhaps for the strikingly obvious reason that, just like Michael Kelly's beloved ballads of a century-old war in a foreign country, it's got absolutely sod-all to do with Scottish football. But the notion that "Flower Of Scotland" – Scotland's national anthem – is "grossly offensive" leads us to wonder why in the world Michael Kelly still lives in such a hateful nation.

"Flower Of Scotland" could at a stretch be deemed to contain some anti-English lyrics, but the song is a tale told from a purely defensive perspective. It's about repelling a foreign invader ("and sent him homeward to think again"), not invading others (compare and contrast with the infamous verse in "God Save The Queen" about crushing the Scots in Scotland), and in that deeply moral theme it stands with some of the world's finest anthems, such as "La Marseillaise". Even then "Flower Of Scotland" sounds a pacifistic note, pointing out that:

"Those days are past now, and in the past they must remain."

To call it "grossly offensive", then, is fairly unarguably deranged. (Not to mention irrelevant, since this blog is unaware of any group of supporters having ever sung FoS at league games, which are what the sectarianism bill is designed to tackle.) The Scotsman no longer allows comments on Michael Kelly's posts. Perhaps it should take the logical next step and no longer employ him to write them at all.

"McBride told the Sunday Herald he had resigned over the party’s hostility to the SNP’s bill on tackling sectarianism in football."

The resignation of the leading QC is the first sign of a crack in the Unionist parties' united front in opposition to the Scottish Government's anti-sectarianism bill, which is likely to pass without any cross-party support. Oddly, neither Labour, the Lib Dems or the Tories have as yet offered any amendments to the bill, despite variously criticising it as rushed, impractical and dangerous. But with what could be a fight to the wire coming up for control of Labour-held Glasgow City Council next May, it's hardly surprising that nobody wants to frighten the large number of Old Firm voters in the city when they can instead blame the SNP for a bill which sections of both the Rangers and Celtic supporters have attacked, for fear it might criminalise the singing of their favourite traditional ballads of Irish history.

One of the most striking things about the current election is the BBC's total abandonment of even a pretence at impartiality with regard to the nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales (and other smaller parties like UKIP too), which is most obviously visible in the Corporation's determined exclusion of them from the defining theatre of the campaign – the leaders' debates.

In the light of protests pointing out that excluding what Ofcom defines as "main parties" in Scotland and Wales during an election is against broadcasting regulations, the BBC (and ITV and Sky, although the latter subsequently broke ranks – see above) hastily rebranded the programmes as "Prime Ministerial debates", and insisted that they were only for the politicians contesting the keys to 10 Downing Street.

The gigantic irony, of course, is that it looks increasingly as if NONE of the participants in the debates will actually be the next Prime Minister.

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Whatever it is that makes me love football, it’s not the commonly-cited feeling of community, because I’ve never really had that. When I was young I was pretty much the only gay (“Aberdeen fan”) in the village (“town of 20,000 people”) – the vast majority of people in central Scotland support the vile twin icons of bigotry Rangers or Celtic, or (if they have no interest in Irish history) to a much lesser extent Hearts and an even lesser extent Hibs.

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