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Sevco Lynch-Mob Defeated As Herald Reinstates Haggerty

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Sevco’s online lynch mob today suffered a shocking reversal when the Herald announced, on Twitter, that it would be re-instating Angela Haggerty to the paper, with her new column due out at the weekend.

This website was one of dozens across Scottish football which was united in highlighted and condemning what happened to her and to Graham Spiers in the aftermath of his column which accused a Sevco director of calling The Billy Boys “a great song.”

The social media outcry in support of the two was only equalled by the outpouring of delight and open celebration on Sevco forums and sites, who proclaimed it a great victory.

For just a second let’s all marvel at how they can regard it as such, that they were able to harass two journalists to the point where one resigned and the other was sacked. In an open society such a thing is an outrage; for these gutter rats it was “job well done.”

Well not as well done as they’d thought.

The paper’s editor has tweeted, today, that Angela will be back at her desk doing her job, this coming weekend and we can only hope she uses her next column to call out those who tried to have her sacked.

This is a great victory for this community and this family; not only did we successfully stand up for one of our own, but Scottish football’s equivalent of the KKK has been set straight and reminded that they aren’t special.

Some of them too great offence to me using that term to describe them on social media not long ago; but the tag certainly fits them. Fundamentalist nut-jobs who are essentially intolerant, backward, fascist, racist and bigoted to the max, not to mention possessed of what can charitably be described as trailer park intellect … what else are you meant to call such people, especially when, as I pointed out earlier in the week, that they cloak all of this in an air of superiority manifest in their favourite slogan?

Their behaviour here was an embarrassment to Scotland. The spectacle of them on Twitter and elsewhere gleeful about seeing a journalist fired … it was sickening and they are a stain on this country.

Not all Sevco fans are like this; I know a lot of them who are highly intelligent, passionate about their team and who consider the people to whom I refer as an embarrassing aberration. They are keener than I am to see these folk rooted out of Scottish football, and society as a whole and today they, as much as I, are delighted to see the degenerates humiliated and made to look as unimportant as they are.

But more than that, all decent people are delighted for Angela and what he reinstatement means for free speech in Scotland. The fanatics have been beaten.

We shouldn’t be under any illusions about what changed minds at the paper either; the bean counters at Newsquest will have looked at recent sales figures and concluded that they made an horrendous error and have moved quickly to reverse it. Their editor has also won an important victory over his own bosses, as he was not in favour of the decision in the first place and fought to keep her in her job.

The NUJ in Scotland deserves enormous credit too; they went to the bat and fought ferociously on her behalf even if a lot of their members were conspicuous by their silence.

Their Scottish head, Michelle Stanistreet, said, at the time, “It is outrageous that commercial meddling has led the Herald to sack a respected columnist. This pandering to the mob does the freedom of journalism and the reputation of the Herald no favours. We call on the editor to reinstate these columnists at once.”

Congratulations to Angela and to everyone who gave her their support.

Score on for the good guys.

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