Neil Lennon really does provoke some emotion, doesn’t he? He got angry at the end of a game, after extreme provocation, and pointed a finger in a guy’s face and our government passed a law. Not many people will ever have that dubious distinction, but Neil Lennon can call it his own. He also has the distinction of being involved in an assault which took place live on the telly but for which the perpetrator was found “Not Proven.”
This is Scotland. I say that very deliberately. The country I love is not sectarian in nature, but it has elements within it who are flat-out bigots and we have a political class that is terrified either of admitting to that or facing up to what it means.
This law was passed by people who were in such a hurry to be seen to doing something that they did the wrong thing. That will happen when you have people in authority who can’t wait to exercise it but haven’t thought it all the way through.
Or not all of them anyway.
Some had seen exactly what they wanted to; a law that “equalised” things. They wanted to make political songs subject to the same laws as sectarian expression – for which laws already existed. Phil has written an excellent piece on that subject today, but this law has critics from both left and right of the spectrum. I recall reading a scorching critique of it from Alan Massie in The Spectator. In the months that followed people like Campbell Martin – a former SNP parliamentarian – and Janette Findlay wrote about it for Fields.
Campbell Martin had approved of the law at first, but came to believe there were serious flaws in how it was drafted and certainly in how it was applied.
Janette saw it as a means to attack Irish expression via criminalising it at the football; she worked hard not only on the political campaign against it but on helping those persecuted by it.
The victory belongs to them tonight, all of them, and I congratulate them on that victory.
I thank everyone, across politics, across ideology, who saw this as an attack on free expression and said so. I want to thank, even more, those who scotched the idea that this bill actually took the issue of tackling sectarianism seriously.
Sectarianism doesn’t just happen in a football ground.
That was always the absolute blind-spot with this law; even if it had done what it said on the tin, why in God’s name would you write it and frame it so that something you did on a Monday in a supermarket would be punished by a different law than if you did it on a Saturday in a football ground?
The laws to tackle the first existed; we didn’t need a separate one for a stadium. At some point it stopped being about sectarianism and started being about punishing young, working class males for holding different views to the chattering classes.
I have never seen a more on the nose protest against an unjust law than the one The Green Brigade put up about William Wallace and Bobby Sands; it was perfect, and yet it was the one which caused them the most hassle. I thought the sentiment behind it was right on the money. I thought the response to it from the club was tragic, and even disquieting. Because the Green Brigade captured the essence of the Scottish Government’s hypocrisy perfectly.
And it’s because I understand their complete inability to see why this law was so offensive to many of us that I dread what they’ll come up with next. I read James Dornan’s comments from this weekend with a high degree of alarm.
God forbid that these people get to write the next anti-football fan law the way they want to do it … the one that will impose Strict Liability on clubs.
My biggest bugbear with it, and I’ll admit this here, is that will be purely subjective and it will not attempt to differentiate between political expression and the kind of naked sectarianism we know so well from Ibrox, and there is a difference of course, all the moral difference in the world and the way this is sometimes ignored, even denied, is troubling.
I know a lot of people don’t like to hear this, but Celtic is a Scotch-Irish club with roots in both countries and to penalise Celtic for their fans singing songs about the Irish part of that … that amounts to a demand that we renounce that part of our heritage.
It’s simply not going to happen and nor should it.
Strict Liability, in the way these people intend it, would not make any attempt to separate Celtic fans singing about Ireland with fans who sang about the murder of Catholics, the celebration of the famine, smears against people living and dead … you get the drift.
The trouble is, these people already have a “list of songs” they don’t like. A list like that never gets shorter, but you bet your bottom dollar that it would grow and grow. Aside from that, the match delegates themselves would have discretion.
We should resist that with all we have.
The unjust law – the Lennon Law – is dead. But we need to keep an eye, we need to keep a close eye, on what comes next, on what replaces it, on what these people have up their sleeves. This is a big issue. There may be no bigger one facing our fans.
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