This morning, E-Tims published the most important words of the day, by far.
In their daily diary they highlighted Gary Ralston’s spectacularly vulgar piece in The Record this morning and his “suggestion” that Holyrood should be squeezed for the money to do up the national stadium.
E-Tims summarily dismissed the idea with the following, splendid line;
“As long as there is one person without a roof over his head, or one person forced to use a foodbank to feed himself then there should not be a single penny of public money spent on Hampden Park.”
There is not really much I can add to the central thrust of the argument; it is a disgraceful suggestion, one that I would hope finds no support from any quarter. Public money should not be squandered on projects such as this. If the SFA cannot find corporate donors or lottery funding for their white elephant, they can exercise old fashioned capitalism and stick up the price of tickets and let punters decide if they are willing to pay.
On no account should the public purse be raided to bail them out.
They have taken this decision without the remotest hint of consultation with the fans – the people who matter – and should be made to live with it.
Anything else means the joke is on us.
No, I want to talk about Ralston himself and the way the idea seems plausible to him and to his paper.
I’m not even going to comment on the suggestion that the SFA – one of the most incompetent organisations on the planet – should try to play Holyrood off against the Tory government of right wing scum at Westminster. The idea is risible.
It’s the whole concept that astounds me, the casual way this idiot with a typewriter attempts to speak for tens of millions of pounds in your money and mine.
Am I surprised? Of course not.
This is the paper which has been at the forefront of pushing the Survival Lie, with brazen lack of concern for what it means; the dumping of huge sums in debts and the illusion that business went on as usual at Ibrox. They also push the Victim Lie, which is especially loathsome when one considers the actual victims; hundreds of creditors great and small including you, me and every other tax payer in this country.
The complete moral vacuum at the heart of sports journalism in Scotland is unveiled in articles like Ralston’s.
There are people in our media and in our chattering classes who do seem to believe that “government funding” is like a cash machine that never runs out of money.
They seem to realise this is not true only when they are faced with a choice of taking it from poor people; then they talk about how “sacrifices” have to be made. Just not to publicly funded pet projects. For them there’s always enough in the pot, such as Westminster’s ludicrous “luvvie bridge” and other such trash.
Here in Scotland it came through loud and clear during the 2012 crisis at Ibrox.
Our media would have happily seen Rangers bailed out with more public money; forget that the bank that funded all their mad spending was, itself, nationalised.
That wasn’t enough for them.
Alex Salmond allegedly went to HMRC and begged them to write off Rangers’ debts. There is little doubt that this idea would have had widespread media support had the tax authorities been willing to deal. Indeed, editorial after editorial made it perfectly plain that this would have been their preferred option.
The cavalier way the media here in Scotland has dismissed debt dumping and multi-million-pound fraud whilst at the same time suggesting that the public purse be raided to bail out a bunch of incompetents who can’t even understand their own rule book is disgraceful.
You only have to look at how many of the newspapers and media outlets employ EBT recipients to get this … but Ralston’s column today spells it out in a way no-one can miss.
These people are completely disconnected from reality.
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