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Civic Scotland Maintains Its Usual Radio Silence On Sevco’s Latest Shame. When Does This End?

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When I use the term “Civic Scotland” who exactly am I talking about?

That’s a question I was asked just the other day. It’s a good question and it deserves an answer. I mean our political class, our commentariat, the police and the various non-governmental organisations like the charities and other opinion makers and formers.

These people have tremendous power. When they bring it to bear, changes happen. When they bring it to bear. If you were waiting on Civic Scotland raising its voices yesterday, in relation to Union Bears and their appalling leaflet, you would have been waiting in vain. The silence from almost all of them has been deafening. And that is disgraceful.

Why were their voices important here? They were important because this is bigger than just an issue involving the Sevco fan group. Civic Scotland can condemn them for all its worth; these Peepul don’t care about that. But there is one organisation who could stop them, who could put these folk back in their box and push them to the social margins where they belong.

That organisation is Sevco itself.

Civic Scotland could have pressured the club to act. It could have shamed the club into action whether the club wanted to take it or not. In failing to do so, Civic Scotland has failed all of us. It has failed to stand up and defend the Good Society it claims to want to build.

And this is not the first time. Civic Scotland’s record of tackling sectarianism is appalling. The current government passed a law which they claimed was designed to do that; it wasn’t. Existing legislation would allow the police to tackle scum like the Union Bears, but it was never used against them. The Offensive Behaviour at Football Act targeted songs. It didn’t tackle the real face of the sectarian bigot in Scotland. It didn’t go after the people who promote it.

Sectarianism in Scotland comes from various agencies; the Orange Order is still allowed to parade it through the streets every single year. The Lodge is allowed to institutionalise it. The newspapers are allowed to stoke it when it suits them and ignore it when it doesn’t. And yes, it exists inside football. Nowhere is this truer than Ibrox.

I know this is not something Civic Scotland wants to face up to, but Civic Scotland is united in its utter cowardice for not confronting it before. Sevco – or Rangers as they insist on calling it – has been a bastion of sectarianism for as long as it has existed and Rangers was for as long as I’ve been alive, and for decades before that.

Civic Scotland has always treated the club with kid gloves.

Here are just some examples of that.

Sectarian Singing At Ibrox. When Europe Saved Scotland From Itself.

For decades, Civic Scotland did the sum total of nothing about sectarian singing at Ibrox.

Oh a few journalists wrote about it, but there was never a serious attempt at solving the problem. When Celtic set up their campaign Bhoys Against Bigotry we were criticised for “the provocative H” and accused of trying to solve a problem that didn’t exist.

The problem existed alright; it’s just that nobody in Scotland wanted to touch it with a 20-foot pole.

Things quite literally came to a head when Celtic went to Ibrox and Neil Lennon was subjected to such depraved treatment that Martin O’Neill wrapped a protective arm around him at full time. What he did next was inspired; he marched Neil Lennon back onto the pitch and took him all the way over to where the Celtic fans were still camped in spite of a defeat, to let the player know he was not alone. It was a rousing moment, never to be forgotten.

But O’Neill wasn’t finished. Civic Scotland might have ignored the disgraceful treatment our captain received that day, but his manager was not about to let it go unanswered. He chose his moment with the precision of a sniper taking a kill-shot. He held his tongue until he was sitting days later in front of Europe’s media, in the run-up to a Champions League tie, and within a few minutes he levelled the unspoken consensus that these things were not to be discussed by dropping a bombshell on the journalists in the room that day. Lennon had been subject to “racism” he said … and that it was by no means an unusual reception at Ibrox.

And there was an interested UEFA delegate in the room, as Martin knew full well.

The rest is history.

European football’s governing body sent its people to the next tie at Ibrox with ears wide open … and the investigations and the UEFA sanction which followed did what all the silence in the world had not been able to achieve; it drove some of the songs of hate out of the stands.

Tackling the club had worked. UEFA proved it.

For a while at least.

The Manchester Riot. Scotland Passes Its Shame Onto An English Club.

Civic Scotland’s lamentable failures to take seriously the problems being caused by Rangers fans going to European away ties – there had been trouble in several cities, for which they were directly responsible, including Pamplona and Barcelona – had made it more likely than not that something was going to happen on their travels which would be so bad that it could no longer be ignored, or the damage from it contained.

The whole of English football had been held responsible, and accountable, for the devastating events in Heysel, so it was not a stretch to imagine that rampaging Rangers fans could bring us all serious trouble.

Civic Scotland ignored it at their peril, refusing to make demands on the club itself that it work to weed these elements out of its support.

I was writing for the team over at Cybertims at the time, and I vividly recall predicting that sooner or later their fans would do something that would cast a dark shadow over the whole of Scottish football; it very nearly happened in Manchester.

Nobody died there. For that, at least, we are all thankful, but those scenes will never be forgotten by anyone who witnessed them. The city centre was brought to a standstill as the detritus of Ibrox and all their brethren headed there to get pissed and pick fights with the locals.

The whole day took place in an atmosphere of intimidation and aggro about as far removed from that which Seville experienced as you could ever hope to find.

And in the aftermath, Civic Scotland barely stirred … instead they allowed one of the most shameful cover stories in the history of fan violence to be allowed to go virtually unchallenged; that the evidence of our own eyes was not to be trusted.

These weren’t thugs in Rangers jerseys, these were Chelsea supporters who had decided to travel to Manchester for the day … just because.

And it was them, not the fans who had been trashing the continent in the years prior to it, in the name of Rangers, who had turned that city into a battlefield.

Civic Scotland accepted that. The club was never taken to task in any way for promoting it.

An English academic, Alan Bairner, a professor at Loughborough University’s School of Sport and Exercise Sciences, articulated the feeling south of the border, accusing Rangers of having “the biggest hooligan problem in the British game”.

Not a sentiment that anyone shared or supported here in Scotland.

Neil Lennon Sparks A New Law. A Riot At Hampden Results In … Nothing At All.

In the aftermath of the so-called Shame Game, Civic Scotland erupted in fury and in particular at Neil Lennon for daring to point a finger in the face of Ally McCoist. A summit was convened. In spite of the entire incident having been provoked by one club, who’s fans behaved as abysmally off the park as their players did on it and their coach did on the side-lines, it was decided that what Scotland needed to tackle this problem was a new law.

One that criminalised songs inside football grounds. And certain elements of speech online. Orange parades were allowed to commemorate and celebrate it a dozen times a year, but if you dared sing an Irish folk song in a football ground you were suddenly a criminal.

There was no serious disorder that night. Nobody invaded the park. But a touchline spat and the viciousness of Rangers’ players on the park changed Scottish society overnight … nobody got a grip on the club itself. No, the fans paid for it.

You would have thought Civic Scotland would have been similarly offended, and appalled, by the scenes at the end of the Scottish Cup Final two years ago, when Hibs fans ran onto the pitch to celebrate their first win in that competition since 1902 and were attacked by the supporters of Sevco, who charged on to meet them.

What followed was unbelievable.

The commentariat allowed a wholly fictitious account of those events to enter the annals of history; that Sevco fans had invaded the pitch to “save” their players from the victorious Hibs fans, who had not run on to celebrate their triumph but with the explicit intention of driving “anti-Rangers hate” to shocking new levels.

One newspaper shamefully said that every Sevco player had been assaulted by Hibs fans. This was a flat-out lie, contradicted in minutes by an ex-Hibs player plying his trade at Ibrox, Kenny Miller, who called that story out for the bullshit it was.

The narrative established there, that Sevco fans had run onto the pitch as if engaged in a latter day Raid on Entebbe, went unchallenged afterwards. The club itself was allowed to get away with an inflammatory, frankly disgraceful, claim that their fans had been “provoked” onto the park. It was a dangerous claim, one that Civic Scotland ought to have condemned.

Not only didn’t they, but the football authorities ignored it as well.

Campaigns Of Intimidation And Slander. What The Fans At Ibrox Do Best.

Civic Scotland has allowed Rangers and Sevco fans get away with so much over the years, but nothing comes close to the way they have allowed the club to dodge any and all responsibility for tackling the sickness in its support and the way that support turns its guns on anyone who offers the slightest criticism of them as well as the bile that pours out of the stands there almost every single week without fail, and follows them away from home.

Over the years, if it wasn’t journalists being attacked in the most vulgar terms it was prominent Celtic fans being subjected to scandalous levels of abuse.

Angela Haggerty, one of the most prominent people in the Celtic cyber-sphere had to go to court when she was the target of one of the most despicable attacks of all, on a Sevco fan podcast.

They have sung songs mocking Billy McNeil, Jock Stein and Jay Beattie in language that barely qualifies as human.

Their illegal Famine Song sparked one of the only protests Civic Scotland has ever mounted against them … and that only happened because John Reid, who was our chairman at the time, put the issue where it couldn’t be ignored.

Yet, because the club itself has been largely exempt from criticism, these Peepul have continued to engage in the most atrocious anti-social behaviour.

Even Civic Scotland itself has not been safe; when Show Racism The Red Card invited Phil MacGiollabhain to speak with them on the subject of anti-Irish racism, a matter on which he is an authority and author, the reaction of the Ibrox followers was venomous and they poured so much opprobrium on the charity that it quickly backtracked. That wasn’t enough, even after they slandered the journalist.

The Peepul went all out to have some of the SRTRC staff fired.

One suffered so much abuse and bile she concerned her position, but thankfully held firm.

The BBC journalist Kheredine Idessane did what no other hack in the country dared to during the Alfredo Morelos farce; he spoke to sources in China who confirmed that the story was a lie. The Peepul erupted. The BBC failed to back its man.

He was forced to issue a grovelling apology and then vanished from Twitter for more than three weeks.

This is who they are.

This is what Civic Scotland tolerates.

Until The Club Itself Is Made To Tackle This, These Problems Will Not Go Away.

The issue at play this weekend is simple; Sevco itself endorses the “work” of the Union Bears.

That fan group has organised a demo, using vicious sectarian language, and endorsing violence against Celtic fans, for tomorrow’s game.

Civic Scotland should be appalled by this, and the club itself should be asked what it intends to do about it.

The club is directly implicated in this.

All that had to happen here was that the club make an official statement disassociating itself from the shameful sentiments and symbols on that leaflet and to tell the group to stand down or not be allowed into the stadium for the game.

They would have whined and wailed, but I do believe they would also have complied.

It would have put Sevco on collision course with its own fans, but Celtic has not been afraid to take our supporters to task when they think certain fans have deserved it, so why should the Ibrox club? And why is Civic Scotland so weak when it comes to forcing them to confront this?

There is an element of their support which is out of control and has been for years. Nobody seems to want to do anything about it, and as long as that remains the case they will continue to disgrace not just their football club but Scotland as a whole.

I don’t expect their club to care; it’s lived with disgrace since it was born mired in it in 2012, and Rangers was perfectly content to operate in it for eons.

But Scottish society should care. Its civic organisations should care. And tonight they look weasly, and spineless and bereft of the qualities a moment like this calls for.

Shame on every one of them.

If something awful happens tomorrow, I know who I will partially blame for it.

We will remember this.

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