Last night was a disaster. Nothing short of one.
Let’s not sugar coat it nor try to pretend it’s other than what it was.
It will have profound effects on our football club in due course; when the window slams shut and our EU exit is formalised, our ability to sign promising young players from European leagues will be severely compromised. That’s the reality.
I’ll spend the day angry over this, of course I will.
English working class communities, locked in the prejudices unleashed by Brexit, have put that selfish and self-destructive idea before everything else. They have elected a brazen liar and a party which will take their votes and then remove from them everything Tory austerity didn’t already take over the past nine years.
It’s like Sevconuts embracing Dave King for his honesty and leadership.
It’s like rewarding Gerrard for failure with a new deal.
I cannot fathom it, but I do know they will reap a bitter harvest for it.
The thing is, this decision took such a shattering break with logic that I wouldn’t be surprised if Johnson or some other heartless toerag turned the same trick in five years.
Since the 2017 vote, my exasperation with Jeremy Corbyn grew to the point where, long before last night, I knew one of the silver linings of this morning would be his retirement from front line politics and his return to the allotment.
I like the man. I value the things that make him a brilliant spokesman for all the causes he espouses and cares about.
But as the leader of a political party, he was a bust.
This is a political era characterised by viciousness; his preaching of a “kinder, gentler politics” was lunacy.
The enemy lied at every turn.
Its media arm battered this guy from one end of Britain to the other.
The charge that he was a “terrorist lover” couldn’t be made stick in 2017. The charge that he was an anti-Semite was untenable if you looked at the evidence … but more importantly, those things did not matter a damn to the average voter except in the most symbolic way.
Those communities who turned their backs on Labour last night because Johnson seemed to offer them a way to “send the immigrants home” don’t give a monkeys about the plight of Britain’s Jewish population. Many of these white, working class, pro-Brexit English voters probably harbour far more anti-Semitic feelings than anyone close to Corbyn ever has or will … but it was the way Corbyn reacted to the charge, and others like it, that sealed his fate.
All Corbyn had to do, right at the start, was threaten to sue anyone who even suggested he might harbour anti-Semitic views.
Project anger.
Project loathing of all those who tried to use that as a weapon against him.
Do the same with all those other smears.
Appear willing to chew nails and spit blood.
Corbyn should have been channelling his inner bastard.
That’s what the moment called for. The public will forgive almost anything – Johnson is one of the most mendacious individuals ever to hold high office and the electorate knows it and doesn’t care. But he’s seen as a strong leader.
Corbyn’s real problem was that he was weak.
Kinder, gentler politics is weak.
The enemy was using every weapon in the arsenal.
You cannot defeat that by appealing to the better angels of their nature.
You beat it by hitting them back. Hard.
You don’t bring a straw hat to a knife fight. You bring a bayonet.
Anything less and you’re done.
What does this have to do with football, you might ask?
Plenty, as it happens.
Brexit, as I said, is going to screw us good and proper unless the game in this country has real, and truthful, leadership, and if you reckon Rod Petrie is the visionary who’s going to deliver that then you’ve been sleeping. This moment requires something else.
The SFA should be getting together with the FA down in London to start lobbying Johnson right now before the chance to protect football slips away. It requires both organisations to bring in someone with real heft to do the heavy lifting; fortunately, there are candidates.
These candidates have to love football.
They have to understand the politics of the game.
And they have to understand the game of politics itself.
One of them is Andy Burnham, but he might be a tad busy as Mayor of Manchester.
Fortunately, we do have an alternative, someone with experience of high political office and who also knows football having served as the chairman of a major club.
His name? John Reid.
If the SFA brought him in to do some of the lobbying I’m sure that would send a clear message, and provide a little gravitas.
Of course, Sevconia would trip out of its nut at the very idea of it.
But the idiot children over there need to be told to sit down and shut up.
Scottish football has pandered to those goons for far too long. They were exactly the people Regan talked about when he predicted “civil disorder” in the event of Sevco not being allowed into the league. They block reform in the game here, because no-one wants to get on their wrong side.
Well how’s that working out so far? Scottish football remains stuck in the mud.
Their financially doped team might have “restored some pride” in our game – this is the media line – and boosted the national co-efficient, but the elements of “moral hazard” are all too evident in their club policies; they’ve just handed new deals to three of their over 30’s and to Gerrard himself.
King might be on the way out, but there is no sign whatsoever that they are preparing to embrace fiscal reality far less discipline, and their crazy actions still represent a danger not only to themselves but to the wider game here.
The dust has settled on the Resolution 12 thing. But there is a case in front of the SFA that remains live and a major decision that needs to be taken. Celtic is content to let things percolate. This is another example of “kinder, gentler politics” that has thus far produced no results. The Resolution 12 campaign itself was hamstrung by the fact it allowed Celtic to drag its feet on making a decision until time bars were in place and other elements had run their course.
Weakness, in many forms. And our club looks weak because it hasn’t even proposed a reform agenda let alone pushed for it.
For too long we’ve waited for other people, or for God knows what … this game is bereft of leadership because Celtic won’t step up, and I sometimes think that Celtic won’t step up because the support hasn’t pressed them enough.
Kinder, gentler politics.
“We have left this in the hands of the SFA.”
Trusting those for whom trust and honour and keeping their word means exactly nothing.
When does it end?
It’s time to confront the big issues … and that does mean facing down the rabid lunatics of Follow Follow, so delusional they believed they could remove the SNP from every Scottish seat they held if they simply urged “unity” on the “PUL community.”
Look how that turned out.
Believe me, we’re not dealing with masters of the dark Machiavellian arts here.
We’re dealing with Peepul who’s handful of brain cells rattle when they walk down the street.
There is no point in hoping these Peepul will stay quiet. They were in uproar last night because the SFA wished them well in the game against Young Boys … think about that for a second.
Yet we pander to them., and the game panders to them.
The Celtic board wants you to trust the corrupt jokers at Hampden who have presided over a total shambles and who are stumbling into the effects of Brexit with their eyes shut.
Trusting the SFA to do the right thing now when we know their sordid history and the shameful way they behave.
Strength only respects strength.
If you show weakness you’re done for.
It has taken a monumental, cataclysmic UK election result to slap some people within Labour out of their pathetic stance and their lethargy. The next five years in Westminster politics will be a bare knuckle brawl, which is what the last two should have been.
Too late now, of course, for millions of people and the communities which will be devastated.
And at Hampden last Sunday Celtic beat a financially doped basket case club by a single goal, then went down to ten men and conceded a penalty.
The commitment of the players and the quality of our keeper prevented a confrontation between Celtic fans and its board as to why they allowed another Ibrox club the latitude to cheat its way to a major trophy at our expense, by defying financial gravity like the last one did.
There would have been no sign of “kinder, gentler politics” on this blog or on any of the others.
The writing on the wall would have been too big to ignore.
It’s still there.
Anyone choosing not to see it, time to open your eyes and look.
Crossing your fingers and hoping for the best doesn’t work. Relying on those who have proven themselves unreliable is to court disaster.
Our club needs to lead and give this game a shake.
If the board isn’t prepared to do it then perhaps it’s time we gave them a shake instead.