When BBC Scotland decided that our largest shareholder was fair game, you kind of wonder how that discussion went. You wonder if even one person employed by the broadcaster raised the utter hypocrisy of hounding a man for tax schemes which to the best of everyone’s knowledge are entirely legal when they have, in their own studios, In their employ, folk who can’t say the same.
The biggest football story in Scotland these past ten years has been EBT’s.
In the time since, the BBC has employed people like Alex Rae, Steven Thompson and Barry Ferguson. They recently invited former Dutch international Ronald De Boer to a nice wee soft-seat interview with a gushing Tom English, where, amongst other things, the player was allowed to trot out utter contemptible nonsense about having chosen Rangers over Manchester United … English apparently never thought to suggest the off-the-books wedge he got might have had a hand in it.
Graeme Souness has been on the BBC these last few weeks; his own EBT was even more egregious, even more suspect. He got it when he was no longer at Ibrox, although busily paying vastly inflated fees for players from that club. The same applied to Saint Walter, who they tiptoe around as if he were some kind of God of Football.
The BBC has paid all these people from the public purse, and over the years each and every one of them – and a host of others – have been allowed to belittle our achievements and cast doubt on our club. They have, to one extent or another, pontificated on our affairs.
Some of them have helped to talk the reputation of our sport into the toilet.
And the BBC had no problem with any of it.
Not once did they bother to ask any of these people to go on the record about their own grubby secrets. I don’t remember, as Paul Brennan has said so eloquently over on CQN, anyone sticking a camera and microphone in their faces. Nobody has been door-stopped or staked out.
The BBC employs tax cheats. We know a half dozen of its most high profile presents in London have had their own fingers burned on tax avoidance schemes. In Scotland it employs or has employed an inordinate number of them in their sports department.
For them to claim any sort of moral high ground on this matter is laughable. Their phony piety today exposes them as charlatans, guilty of the worst hypocrisy.