Isn’t it something, that all of British football has come together in a stance against racism? Clubs and even major sponsors are coming offline for a few days in protest at those on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere who can’t help indulging in this bigoted behaviour.
I applaud every single one of these organisations.
Except the ones based in Scotland, who are paying lip-service to the problem by continuing to ignore it in some of its forms. There are organisations which, this week, have shown themselves up.
I am going to talk about some of them in this article, because honestly, this has been a shameful few days.
One of the most over-used phrases is that “the silence is deafening.”
That is as true this week of Scottish football as I have ever seen it.
Because the sound of that silence is almost oppressive. It’s as if the incident that happened at Ibrox last week didn’t happen at all, except that it did and we all saw and heard the video footage of it.
Scottish football is filled to the brim with hypocrites and charlatans, but what’s worse is that the entire support network for the game is similarly filled with them. Scottish football cares about the things it cares about.
Some people are more protected than others.
Today’s cause celebre is the Albion Rovers player David Cox, who was the victim of an horrific slur in midweek.
Again, it is right that Scottish football has rallied round him, and it has and I hope he takes both comfort and strength from that … but honestly, this is further proof that the game here picks and chooses who and what it chooses to get angry about.
If you’re Catholic, and most specifically if you are an Irish Catholic, you do not get the arm around your shoulder.
You do not get the support of the whole game far less the civic institutions.
You get ignored. Your rights don’t matter. You do not count.
This article is going to look at the people who have failed us this week.
The Scottish Media
The Scottish media has uttered not one word about this matter. Not one word.
There has been nothing on the radio shows, nothing in the newspapers, not a single journalist has tweeted about it or mentioned it. It is incredible.
It’s as if the entire industry which exists to cover the news in this country has taken a vow of silence on this matter.
You would not get this kind of uniformity in a two-bob dictatorship.
It is almost beyond belief, except that this is not the first time they’ve completely ignored a negative story from Ibrox. This has become commonplace. It has become standard.
For decades, the media in this country flatly refused to acknowledge that the club over there spewed bigotry out of the stands every week.
They pursued the policy of “don’t ask don’t tell” when it came to a sectarian signing policy.
All but a handful of them have been like this for years, but even those on whom we can usually rely – Spiers, Murray, Stewart – are conspicuous by their silence.
There is not a single one of them – not one – who emerges from this week with an iota of credit.
This is a news story in any other nation.
Except Scotland.
The Anti-Racism Charities
Can you believe the stance – or lack of stance – of the anti-racism charities on this?
I emailed Show Racism The Red Card Scotland about this on the day after the story broke.
Days later I have not heard a word from them. Not a single word.
The only acknowledgement I got from them was a request to add myself to their mailing list. No thanks.
I didn’t even bother to email Nil By Mouth.
They can be relied upon only to sink the boot into Celtic whenever the chance arises.
I don’t credit them with a shred of backbone in matter such as these, they are full-on subscribers to the “two sides of the same coin” fiction which stands in the way of anything ever getting done.
As far as I’m concerned they are an utter irrelevance here.
Show Racism The Red Card Scotland is an entirely different matter; they have a history of appeasing the fans from Ibrox, they accused Brendan Rodgers of justifying racism – which even Neil Cameron slammed them over – and they have taken donation money from the kind of people you wouldn’t want to touch with a 20 foot pole.
In 2018 I wrote a piece after they took a donation of unspecified size from an organisation called First Scottish.
I dug into that organisation and I found that one of their key people worked for an organisation called David Murray Sports Limited; they, of course, owned Rangers.
His name is David William Murray Horne, and he had served on the DMSL board alongside our friend, the glib and shameless liar Dave King.
Another of First Scottish’s directors was Gavin Masterton, formerly of Dunfermline and up to his neck in the Bank of Scotland’s indulgences of Murray and Rangers. John Yorkson, also formerly of Dunfermline, served on the board too.
But these guys were nothing compared to the individual named John Douglas Berthinussen; he was a director of First Scotland and another organisation called Souter Kent.
They, coincidently, were the biggest shareholders in First Scotland itself.
And who are they? Well they are part of the business empire of one Brian Souter, boss of Stagecoach, the anti-union bus giant.
This is significant because Souter was responsible for some of the funding of the 2000 Keep The Clause campaign, which anti-racism charities, unions and civic institutions branded “homophobic”.
In 2015, his charitable trust made an unspecified donation to an organisation called Choices; they are a madcap religious organisation which “counsels” women who have had abortions or who are thinking about having them.
Let’s just say they don’t offer emotional support; quite the opposite.
A Herald report from around that time was scathing about them; “’Part of the healing journey to post-abortion recovery involves repentance …’ (Sexual-health services provider) Brook produced a dossier on crisis pregnancy centres last year after doing a ‘mystery shopper’ investigation. It found two centres had falsely linked abortion to an increased risk of breast cancer, with some service providers also claiming terminations caused infertility.”
You would think that their organisation would have wanted to keep a donation from such people quiet; in fact, as I wrote at the time, I had heard from a source in the organisation that they were getting informal, free, PR advice from a certain public relations organisation close to our hearts. (Ahem, not really.)
That would have made sense.
Their silence this week was not only scandalous … it was just what I expected.
The Politicians
As regular readers will be aware, I wrote to a number of politicians about this and got one reply back.
At the time of writing, I’ve still only had one reply, and that reply wasn’t great to say the least.
I wrote about this the other day; it was a horrendous response which tried to drag Celtic into the issue, and fell back on the old “two heads of the same coin” argument.
Partial credit is due, I suppose, for his being the only person who bothered to respond, but the whole thing was a pathetic exercise in deflection along with the old standbys of defending the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act and threatening something worth.
Our political class is absolutely gutless on this kind of thing.
There aren’t a handful of them who are willing to stand up and be counted on it, and even those who are didn’t raise their voices even to a whisper this week when we were looking to them.
This is an election cycle … some will say it was too much to expect one of them to put their heads about the parapet at a time like this, but to me that just echoes the pathetic response I got where the writer said he wouldn’t “pick sides.”
Not a single one of them has shown moral courage over this matter.
The Governing Bodies
The SFA has already opened an investigation into the incident at the Albion Rovers-Stenhousemuir game the other day.
They rushed through a case against East Fife.
They got Bolingoli in front of the beaks less than three weeks after he broke health protocols.
And they took 67 days to get from breach to a discipline in the case of the Ibrox Five.
When they want to move they can move.
When they want to move fast they can do so.
Here, they didn’t want to move, not even a millimetre.
Like everyone else, they’ve been silent.
See, part of this is the absence of a complaint.
Nobody from St Johnstone has raised this and so it’s quite easy for the governing body to pretend that it hasn’t happened, but then the SFA’s video review panel has punished people for incidents which nobody got overly agitated about at the time … still, the dead silence out of Perth in some ways makes the SFA’s position easier to defend.
But it’s their job to step into this whether there’s a complaint or not, or whether anyone wants to raise one or not.
The SFA is responsible for making sure this stuff is weeded out of the game and they have ignored this in the hope that it goes away, and that’s not tenable.
The governing bodies of Scottish football have turned a blind eye to this incident, although it was captured on film.
That’s an appalling position for them to be in.
The Ibrox Fan Base
The Ibrox fans were truly despicable this past week.
They were lining up to defend this behaviour and they did so in a number of ways which were truly mind-bending.
Some of them justified it on the grounds that we didn’t support Kamara.
Which most of us did, and anyway isn’t that a deplorable argument?
Others tried to defend it on the grounds that the word “fenian” isn’t racist, it refers to a religion.
But as Phil has often asked me, would you call an Italian a “fenian”; no, it’s anti-Irish which makes it racist.
There was a debate about whether being Irish equates to a race; of course it doesn’t but it clearly says in the law that discrimination on account of nationality is racism.
The precise wording in UK law, on who is covered by that legislation, reads as follows; “any group of people who are defined by reference to their race, colour, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or national origin”.
Of course, any discussion with the Peepul that doesn’t start in the gutter always ends there, and before long they are onto their favourite subject, which is child abuse.
It’s so commonplace you can set your watch to it, and it really ought not to come as a surprise that anyone who’s willing to brandish that as a weapon to “win” an argument is also a bigot.
As far as I’m concerned, they’ve shown what they are all about this last week.
The farce of standing up for Kamara has been revealed for what I said it was; nothing but a revelling in their new role as victims.
They have no internal consistency when it comes to this, no history of condemning racism or sectarianism, and I didn’t believe that what happened to their player had resulted in any sea change as far as that went.
It was a matter of time before they shamed themselves.