Murdo Fraser, the Tory MSP, spread a lie about Celtic fans yesterday.
He didn’t openly accuse us but the inference was perfectly clear, and it ought not to stand. Whether he did this deliberately to smear us or not isn’t really important; what’s important is that he does what’s right unless he’s such a lowlife that he doesn’t think he has to.
Now, as you can see, that’s unquestionably an outright falsehood he put out there yesterday.
Whether he did so because he’s just a scumbag (and he’s a Tory MSP so he meets the qualification criteria) or because he has that disease I call “Sevconite selective hearing disorder” really doesn’t matter to me; it amounts to the same thing.
This comes across as the act of someone who is so infused with anti-Celtic loathing that either his ears played tricks on him and he heard (“on the wireless” as he puts it; I know Tories are backward but is this really 1955?) noises during the minute’s silence at Perth which were not there or he simply said he did just to stir the soup.
The fact is that the minutes’ silence at Perth was observed impeccably.
And this has been verified by both sets of fans, people who were actually there.
Now, as I said yesterday I am under no illusions about why that was done. We all know that the vast majority of the people inside that ground did it because they felt a sense of obligation to do it which had sod all to do with remembering the dead of the first and second world wars.
The whole thing has become a politicised farce, all meaning stripped from it, or worse; an excuse for simple minded, self-important halfwits to lord it over other people using the silence and the poppy as flogging sticks. I wrote an article on that very subject yesterday.
Murdo Fraser has proven himself to be one of those people; his lie about our supporters was Exhibit A in the case for dismissing this ridiculous spectacle once and for all. He had not the slightest interest in the war dead when he posted that yesterday, it was a spiteful piece of shit-stirring and shameless point scoring, standing over their graves and pissing in the dirt.
It is a thousand times more disrespectful – to use the dead as cover for your own prejudice – than anything someone in the stand might have done on another day.
If he does want something to make a scene about, I have a suggestion for him; he can look into this claim, made by Thistle fans at Ibrox yesterday.
I rather think he won’t bother though.
If he simply made a mistake – and let’s face it, only a complete moron would publish such a tweet without having it down cold – or he’s at it.
Either way if he’s a man at all instead of a low-order worm, which is what I think he is, he’ll gracefully retreat and say sorry.
I don’t expect it though, and no-one else should either.
But I trust that the next time he decides to moralise on some subject close to his heart this will be used to show him up for the hypocrite that he is.