Today is a momentous one for all of us.
There isn’t anyone alive in this country who has seen a more dramatic verdict by a court; the Prime Minister shut down Parliament for his own ends, to close down its ability to scrutinise his government and hold it to account. The prorogation is illegal.
It has been declared null and void. He has, in effect, lied to the Queen.
Unchartered territory.
Who knows where we go from here?
One thing has become readily apparent; the Supreme Court is more powerful than many thought.
It literally has the legal authority to put into law the constitutional protections our country has thus far lacked. There is no corner of government or public life where it does not have an absolute right to legislate. The whole world is talking about those 11 Justices today.
The Supreme Court has flexed its considerable muscle. Every constitutional scholar in Britain is debating this verdict. The acres of newspaper which have already been devoted to it could paper a tower block. There will be more – much more – to come.
Supreme Court verdicts have always been enormous and consequential.
And Scottish football had its very own day in that court, although you would not know that now, and you might have struggled to recognise the magnitude of it then. Only one club took it seriously; it was ours. The SFA ignored it. The press wrote up the verdict but did no analysis of what it meant.
The verdict came down on 5 July 2017.
There’s a good reason why it was greeted with so little real scrutiny or taken particularly seriously; it was the David Murray EBT case which found that the whole scheme amounted to tax avoidance.
It pronounced Murray and all his companies guilty of breaching tax law.
And we know the impact that had on our game.
Celtic responded to that verdict immediately.
We called for an independent review into the use of EBT’s and hinted that we wanted a wider review of the events of 2012. We questioned the veracity of the Lord Nimmo Smith verdict.
The highest court in the land had ruled that Murray and his club had broken the law. This was not a minor matter; it was huge. It was a game-changer. And the Scottish football authorities did nothing. Celtic’s call for an inquiry was quashed.
The SFA had not even bothered to wait for Celtic’s call before they announced that they would take no disciplinary action in relation to the result.
Their “legal advice” held that they would be unlikely to succeed. You know why? Because they couldn’t punish Sevco for the sins of Rangers … the Five Way Agreement which underpins the Survival Lie also flatly contradicts it.
The governing body in Scottish football is not fit for purpose. Celtic kept the debate in the public eyes for two months, and finally published the letters it had sent to the SFA on its website.
Rod Petrie, who had initially said the SPFL would support Celtic’s call for the whole matter to be looked at, then jumped ship and in September decided they wouldn’t bother.
Petrie, of course, is now the head of the SFA.
They had no respect for the highest court in the land; indeed, as far as they are concerned the Supreme Court is not supreme at all.
Only Scottish football could maintain that stand and have the local press let them away with it.
On the day the government and the Prime Minister himself is brought low by those justices, our game looks shamed by its own failure to follow the example of the law lords.
Shame on everyone who wanted this buried.
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