As the shockwaves of the weekend’s trial of destruction continue to reverberate around Scotland, there are a few issues that still need to be tackled.
For once, Civic Scotland is basically saying all the right things – and I have been particularly impressed by some in the media with Andrew Smith in particular having written an outstanding piece – but next should come action and that’s going to be a more difficult thing to pull off.
The thing Smith’s article nailed was that there should be no more false equivalence; the focus should be kept on the guilty and on the entitled mind-set which drives them and this, indeed, is something we’ve been saying on this site for many years, with the weekend’s article The Filth And The Fury articulating many of the points in Smith’s piece.
The phrase which is trending on social media is “Scotland’s Shame” but I feel more strongly than ever that the message should be sent out to the wider world that this shame doesn’t belong to this country as much as it belongs to one subsect of it.
This is Sevco’s Shame, and I don’t believe that the rest of the country should continue being tarred with their brush.
Scotland has tolerated them for too long; that doesn’t mean that this country as a whole thinks the way they do.
I am proud of my city and my country; Scotland is very clearly a more liberal country than England is, and whilst every region of England has its own politics the idea that we would ever return Tory governments up here is for the birds.
We are not saints, we are not perfect, this is not an egalitarian paradise … but we try to be better, we want to be better and little by little we’re getting better.
These Peepul behaved disgracefully and all their enablers and allies are behaving disgracefully in trying to explain it all away or play their usual games of whatabouttery; Scotland as a whole is horrified by all of it and that needs to be said more.
There are people who are determined to make this the shame of this whole nation, but those people – and some of them think they are on the right side of this debate – need to be resisted.
Because blaming the whole country for this is like blaming every white person for the KKK, or every Muslim for 9/11 … this is one club, one Peepul, one section of our population that is stuck in the 17th century and determined to keep on hating.
The way to defeat them is to marginalise them … not to conflate their actions with the whole of this country.
If you’re going to get something trending on social media how about #sevcosshame. Or if you prefer shining this light on what this “institution” calls itself, #rangersshame.
But Scotland’s? Not so much, no.