The broken glass is gone. The rubbish is cleared away. The Square stands empty once more. Streets which for a while last night resembled battle-grounds have been restored to their former selves. The accident and emergency rooms are off high-alert.
Amidst today’s relative calm, the righteous fury of civic Scotland has been unleashed on the animals who wrecked such havoc. There are expressions of horror. There are expressions of anger. There are expressions of disgust and even some of shame.
Amazingly, there are also expressions of surprise.
As if this were some cosmic shock. As if it were some outrageous one-off outpouring of violence and loutish behaviour. As if this were not all predictable. As if, indeed, some of us didn’t spend all week warning of it.
None of it was a shock. None of it was even slightly surprising.
Because some of us, all of us, have seen it all before. And before. And before.
It was only weeks ago that similar scenes produced the last burst of outrage from Scotland’s chattering classes, appalled by the behaviour of the Peepul, but not quite so angered by it that they did anything to prevent it happening again.
No lesson was learned from that, which itself is hardly surprising as that wasn’t the first time these sort of scenes have been seen in this city either. Or elsewhere for that matter.
Scenes like this are common whenever the Peepul are on parade.
Frankly, I’m tired of Scotland’s political class and media decrying this stuff after the damage has been done.
I am tired of them repeating the same tired mantras over and over again.
Some of what’s been said today is right on the money.
Some of it is embarrassing.
Some of it is absolutely false and needs to be called out as such.
I am tired of the arguments which prevent us from moving on, the same depressing excuses for doing nothing and the justifications and the dishonest narratives that underpin so much of the debate, a debate nobody really wants to have anyway.
This is the right moment to tackle some of those arguments.
Which is exactly what I want this article to do.
Let’s start with the obvious one; the “minority” argument.
This Is Not Small “Small Minority” …
As usual today, amidst the condemnation, the argument was put forward that those involved in the disorder constituted a “minority.”
But where I come from a minority is 49.9 percent, and if we’re talking about tens of thousands of people then it’s a lot.
You also have to be completely blind, deaf and stupid to accept the “minority” argument in the first place.
The violence may have been committed by a minority; that’s a fact.
There weren’t tens of thousands of people rioting in Glasgow yesterday, but it wasn’t a small number of them either.
But focussing on the violence rather takes us away from the bigger issue, because the violence was only one extreme on a spectrum of vile behaviour which was prevalent all day long and didn’t involve a minority at all, and I am heartily sick of people pretending that it did.
To be in the Square yesterday at all was a violation of the law.
I’ll get back to that point later on in the article, but every person who was there was, at a minimum, guilty of an offence. You did not need to be throwing stuff at the police yesterday to be acting criminally.
The real stuff was to be heard all day long; the exhortations to kill Catholics, to hang fenians, to wade up to their knees in the blood of fellow citizens. That was not a minority.
It was pretty near to being the lot of them, and there were thousands of others – tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands – who were happily belting that bile out far away from the Square.
This stuff is woven into the fabric of Scotland; rampant, blatant, hatred that one part of the populace has for everyone else who is different. It is real, and it will not end as long as people turn their faces away from it.
I am sick and tired of this hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil bullshit. Too many people in this country are cowards who won’t face up to it; many, many others are in sympathy with the bigots without expressing it openly.
I’ve lived here for the better part of my life, all but a brief time in Stirling where I saw that it’s not just a problem confined to the West of Scotland. But it lives here without any artifice and we see it every single year marching up and down our streets.
This isn’t about football either; those goons out there were the same ones who turned Glasgow into a warzone after the independence referendum in 2014.
There is an undercurrent of far-right politics here that, in addition to the anti-Catholic and anti-Irish nature of it, goes unreported on and largely unexplored. Amidst the bile and the hatred being poured out yesterday at those “traditional” out groups there was venom directed at immigrants, Muslims and the Scottish Government … which is now Public Enemy Number One for many of these Peepul.
And this is dangerous in more ways than one, and as long as Civic Scotland clings to the idea that we can ignore this and hope it goes away because it’s “only a minority” the more danger we are all in.
These Peepul are permanently looking for a fight.
When there’s no-one to fight they will fight each other. They turned on the police without hesitation. Those who aren’t involved in the violence are cheering it on. You don’t need to look too long at Twitter to see it.
This stuff isn’t going away.
It used to be that only the Irish Catholics of Glasgow were at risk, but this is bigger than that now and if our plight wasn’t taken particularly seriously Civic Scotland has to start treating that with the gravity it deserves.
This “minority” argument is untenable.
Even if it was, if that “minority” is capable of anything, hell-bent on mayhem how long can you pretend that this isn’t a clear and present danger to our society? And if you do accept that then you have to trace this problem to its roots, and they are not found in a handful of goons in George Square. They are all around us.
Too Many Are Pursuing A Policy Of Appeasement
This isn’t just the “minority” argument. If this were “a minority” as many people seem keen to say then tackling them would be easy and straightforward.
The truth is that it’s not, and everyone knows that it’s not, and so the very act of making that argument is a sophisticated excuse for not acting, and the reason nobody wants to act is that they are scared.
They are scared because this isn’t a “minority” at all, or at least it’s not a tiny and insignificant one.
People are scared because there are loads of these goons, and a lot of them are every bit as dangerous as those who stormed the Capitol in the United States, and so making the “small minority” argument allows for a policy of appeasement.
And there is a lot of appeasement going on, and in place you might not expect.
It is evident in the statements from the Government, before and during this, in allowing The Peepul to believe they could break the law with impunity.
When the police allowed crowds to gather, they were appeasing the goons.
When they didn’t disperse them as they grew they were appeasing.
When they allowed the drinking they were ignoring another violation of the law.
So the casual acts of vandalism took place.
Allowed by the police whose statement said that things were progressing “peacefully.”
Peaceful vandalism apparently no longer merits a police response. Fair enough.
But where do you stop turning a blind eye?
Violations of the health regulations, even as the country braces itself for the Indian Variant? No.
Public drinking bans being flouted? No.
Public order offences like interfering with traffic and climbing all over the statues? No.
The sectarian singing was going on all day. No line drawn there.
Pissing all over the monuments? Again, we’ll let that one slide.
So the violence becomes inevitable because these Peepul are belligerent and many of them are drunk and the whole attitude behind the “party” was one of ugliness anyway and so first they turned on each other and still that didn’t cross the line between what you pretend isn’t happening and what you are forced to confront.
Finally, the good citizens of the city are threatened and things are, at last, seen to be “getting out of hand” as if a day of constant criminality wasn’t out of hand, and by the time the machinery cranks up and the police are ready to enforce the law, these lunatics are ready and willing and game enough and arrogant enough to take them on as well.
You could trace the evolution of this all day long.
Indeed, many of us had traced it all week long, predicting exactly these kind of scenes because when the Peepul are allowed the inch they take the mile and if no-one tells them to stop they just keep on going.
Appeasement comes in many forms.
I spoke not that long ago about Show Racism The Red Card Scotland and how they first got onto my radar; they had accused Brendan Rodgers of claiming that Shay Logan brought racist abuse upon himself, when the manager had done no such thing.
At around the same time, the Peepul were furious because the organisation had brought Phil Mac Giolla Bhain in to talk about anti-Irish racism; the anger from that saw Phil ostracised by the organisation, which accused him of being a bigot, and the real bigots were brought in to meet them instead and treated to tea and biscuits and the full sit-down.
I asked them a load of questions at the time and the answers I got back were disquieting; they had been rattled by the sheer volume of the hate poured at them by the Peepul because they had spoken to Phil.
Rather than stand up to it, they bowed down to it.
Which is why for a long time afterwards I referred to them as Show Racism The Red Carpet.
Show Racism The Red Card Scotland has never mentioned anti-Irish racism since; they learned their lesson.
They became appeasers instead, and in the process graduated to the next thing I want to talk about.
They became enablers.
The Enablers Are The Worst
Scotland is full of enablers for these goons, and it’s discourse is full of enabling arguments.
We hear them all the time, from the attacks on denominational education to the “two sides of the side coin” bullshit, to those who claim that they are exercising free speech and others who blithely describe them as if they were some left-behind segment of our society who need to be coddled and understood and protected, instead of being seen for what they actually are.
Let’s stop pissing about here; their entire ideology can be summed up in four words, one of the most blatant manifestations of supremacist thinking you’ll ever get, and passed over as harmless and unimportant although it’s every bit as critical to an understanding of their mind-set as the words America First was to understanding Trump.
I’m referring of course to the words We Are The People.
Amongst the enablers, these words are legitimised by their use by people like Steven Gerrard and members of the press and the political class, who throw the initials around with wanton abandon and pretend not to understand what the phrase actually means.
But you don’t need Enigma codebreakers to understand it, because everyone who hears it or uses it knows what its meaning is. Nobody mistakes it for something benign.
This is about a sense of entitlement, and you can see that manifested everywhere, all week long, in statements from the club itself, from those associated with it, its pals in the press and even from senior police officers and politicians who should have known better.
It was there in statements about “how long they’ve waited” and of how “they deserve the opportunity to celebrate” and in the way some in the media subtly, and not so subtly, suggested that the country stop being such killjoys and let them have their moment … it all feeds into the idea that they are owed something by the rest of us, no matter the consequences for the rest of us.
This springs in part from Scotland’s other great act of appeasement and enabling; the “acceptance” of the Survival Lie, and in turn the ancillary Victim Lie.
Because of course, it was Stewart Regan who once talked of “civil unrest” unless the Survival fiction were swallowed whole, although he must have known that once it was the Victim Lie would follow.
Because I’ve been saying for years that this is one of the most dangerous untruths ever foisted on Scottish football and Scottish society.
If you are arguing that Rangers survived the grave then you’re also arguing that everything that happened to them henceforth was illegitimate and that they are, in fact, the victims of a great grand hateful conspiracy.
And if that doesn’t enable and justify their own anger and hatred and paranoia then what would?
They believe this because they’ve been allowed to believe it.
Their self-righteous fury, which was a big part of their “celebrations” yesterday – it was their “victory” over their imagined enemies – has been sold to them and packaged and rammed down their throats over and over and over again by the media, by their club, by the governing bodies.
Of course they take it as an article of faith, and alongside the steady drip-drip-drip of hate for immigrants and other signs of social progress and the sweep of the SNP at elections before, during and after 2014, which they are constantly fed in the echo chambers of their forums and by politicians and people inside the club who do not care about the likely social effects – or perhaps count on them – is it a wonder they are now permanently at war with the world?
But the enablers are only offering fresh excuses …they’ve just given them new things to hate, because of course the hatred has always been there for that section of their support and the society it hails from.
This is quite literally part of their culture and their history.
There’s A Long History Behind This.
This has roots that go far and deep and I don’t expect people to suddenly spontaneously change; that’s part of the problem, of course, that folk seem to be doing that.
The problem itself is ingrained in the history of this island, and it’s allowed its expression every single year in July and at various times throughout the year in places up and down Scotland and elsewhere where these tribal rights still mean something. Society should have outgrown this, but America should have outgrown all that KKK bullshit and it still hasn’t.
But let’s not kid on that the We Are The People mentality is simply societies problem.
There is at least one corner of this which we could tackle.
The followers of whichever football club plays out of Ibrox wallow in this to an unhealthy degree and they always have.
What we saw in George Square the other night was no different than what we saw in Manchester, and Pamplona and places like that prior to this.
I spent a long time writing about this back in the year before the liquidation of Rangers; how the Ibrox travelling support was getting increasingly violent on its travels and that sooner or later someone was going to be killed by them.
In fact, I didn’t know the half of it and you have to read Stephen O’Donnell’s excellent book Tangled Up In Blue to appreciate, fully, how far back into the annals of the Ibrox past these thuggish actions go … and always it’s had its appeasers and enablers.
We Are The People allows them to believe they are special.
The appeasers and enablers reinforce the view that they are.
And so when screens break down in Manchester they riot.
When foreign police refuse to show them the same tolerance they get here at home, they attack them.
When UEFA comes down on them for sectarianism, then it’s a conspiracy.
When HMRC tells them to pay their bills then that’s an attack on their culture.
When the club dies and the governing bodies and others pretend it didn’t that ports over all the old hatreds and adds a few new ones to the mix.
The mix is increasingly toxic.
Nothing that we saw last night was a surprise, because we’ve seen it before and before and before and the only thing that truly amazes me is that people in authority are yet to learn the lessons that past events should have taught them already.
You cannot reason with these Peepul.
You cannot appease these Peepul.
You cannot rely on any inherent good nature they possess or sense of restraint.
Theirs is the imperial mentality that the England supporters carry around with them, only infused with sectarianism as well.
I once watched a TV show where the former hooligan Darren Wells summed it up by saying that the greatest thing in the world was to travel with their fans and know the locals were terrified before you even turned up.
And that’s what you’re dealing with here, and you cannot give that mind-set an inch of room to run, or it’s just going to run right over you.
One of the toughest decisions I’ve ever had to made in my life, when I realised I was going to do this, was whether or not to do it under my own name … and I knew I had to because what other choice is there?
To hide under the bed and wait to be found?
To Hell with that, you have to stand up and say “no more of this” and refuse to be intimidated and refuse to be cowed and refuse to be silenced.
Dozens of us are involved in this sort of thing now, and for too long we’ve waited on the rest of the country to get where we are, and the wait goes on because those who make up Civic Scotland are cowards.
Are they also appeasers, enablers or sympathisers?
What does it matter?
If you’re not part of the solution you’re not just part of the problem, you are the problem.
No-One Has “Done All They Can” To Combat This
One of the great lies here is that Scottish society hates this stuff and is determined to rid itself of it.
That’s garbage, as I’m sure we’re all well aware.
To properly tackle it you have to face up to it, or at least be prepared to try.
One of the stupidest things I’ve read all day was also one of the most blatantly untrue; it was the comment from a senior police officer which seemed to suggest that there would have been scenes like these whoever won the league … he has perhaps chosen to ignore that we did win a league whilst in lockdown and several trophies besides, including the completion of the historic Quadruple Treble, and no such scenes took place.
This is another example of lies being allowed to pollute the discourse; this is a problem peculiar to one group of fans, one segment of society and one football club.
That people in authority aren’t even able to tell the truth about that is a big part of how we got here.
You hear often how much folks want this stuff to be eradicated; I call bullshit on that, because if the authorities wanted to eradicate this particular manifestation of it they could. It would involve courage, the rejection of any “moral equivalence” argument or the discredited “two sides of the same coin” pish we hear about all the time.
It would mean facing some hard facts.
The governing bodies in football allowed sectarianism in the stands for years.
The anti-racism charities don’t even mention it.
The police ignore it even when there are thousands of participants and then blames it on a minority.
And we allow its ultimate expression of legitimacy every year when we let naked bigotry and hatred march up and down our streets.
I’ll start believing that this is taken seriously when people start acting like they take it seriously.
One of the totem poles around which sectarianism in Scotland dances is Ibrox and the only argument against doing something about that I ever hear is one in mitigation; “but your side has these people too.”
And it’s true, it does, but not so many of them and the rest of us hate the sight of them and make that clear every time they raise their heads.
It’s not an argument, it’s an excuse for doing nothing and that excuse will no longer suffice, it will no longer save this society from the consequences of pretending that this is something we can continue to ignore.
Let’s put this in its proper context.
Yesterday, these Peepul violated lockdown orders which exist to protect them and the rest of this country from a deadly virus.
They did this in the weekend where it was found that particularly deadly strain of this virus is already in this city and circulating widely.
If we tolerate that then they might conclude they can get away with anything, and they’d be right.
Those who encouraged them, enabled them and appeased them saw exactly where that leads, as if the gathering itself with the potentially devastating effects for the city and the country wasn’t enough.
These Peepul don’t give a shit for anyone or anything.
They have no respect.
They have no consideration.
They are not chained to morality or decency or any sense of civic responsibility.
That’s the truth, that’s the only truth that matters … and the longer we tolerate that, as a society, the worse the effects of it are going to be for all of us.