Scotland’s record in dealing with the virus is now being questioned because we have some of the worst hit areas in Europe. The national clinical director says that part of the problem is that Glasgow “seeded” the Delta variant and it spread out from here.
We know that the variant was in this city, in low numbers, before George Square. If it subsequently blossomed, we can trace at least part of the problem to what happened that day. Not even the stupidest person would dispute that this was a factor.
The knock-on effects were equally obvious.
The events of that day created a general disregard for the law which saw the Tartan Army travel to London in spite of being asked not to.
That caused further outbreaks and spread it more widely.
This is what happens when people believe that following the law is not mandatory, but something you can opt in and out of as you see fit; it is the obvious consequence of the police deciding for themselves what laws they are going to choose to enforce on any given day.
It’s also a spectacularly bad idea to treat football fans as if they are special, as if they have some kind of exalted status and should be treated differently than the rest of the country. Our law enforcement arm has a lot to answer for in how they “policed” that event.
Or rather, how they failed to police it.
The health costs of this decision are obvious enough.
The financial costs are likely to be just as severe.
Clean-up costs were huge. The cost to local businesses, who had to close for the day, would have been enormous.
The same costs are likely to have to be met to accommodate orange walks later on this month. The decision to let them return to our streets fills the nostrils of all good citizens in this city with the reek of bigotry and anti-Irish racism.
Whenever Scotland’s chattering class drone on about how much they’d like to see this stuff eradicated, I point simply to Halloween in July.
It’s time that we moved past this sordid little exercise in intolerant indulgence.
There’s no moral case for allowing it, and the financial costs of it go up every year.
It’s surely time Scotland banned this pantomime of hatred.
Today was a landmark moment for Police Scotland’s decision not to enforce the law that day in the Square.
They reached 50 arrests in connection to the events.
Think of it. God alone knows what the cost to the tax-payer is in waiting all these weeks to scoop some of these Peepul up.
God alone knows how much has already been squandered in pursuit of “justice” after the fact.
All the police had to do that day was disperse people as they started to gather.
All they had to do was shut the Square off under the various regulations they had at their disposal.
This was not policing by any stretch of the imagination.
They allowed law-breaking on a grand scale, starting with the violations of the health regulations and going on all day long.
Instead they let things steadily escalate, and it’s only now that they are dealing with the matter.
Somewhere an entire department has been “working” on this case for weeks.
Overtime rates must be through the roof, all because they didn’t do their job on the day.
When a Freedom of Information request saw documents relating to all this released a few weeks ago, it made it clear that, as I said at the time, they had made the decision not just to allow an illegal procession but to effectively steward it all the way to the Square.
Not only did they tolerate the law-breaking, but they facilitated it.
People should have lost their jobs over that.
And the costs just keep going up and up and up, another example of how the Peepul do the wrong thing, and the taxpayer picks up the bill.
All of this, of course, comes hot on the heels of the news that the costs of Police Scotland’s botched prosecutions in relation to the liquidation of Rangers have now hit £100 million … all of it coming out of your pockets and mine.
The club itself was the biggest beneficiary of the Scottish Government’s scheme to save football by giving clubs millions in loans. Ibrox took over £2 million and they didn’t use it to keep on the lights, which is what it was intended for; they bought players with it.
Society continues to pick up the tab for all of Ibrox’s excesses.
It’s hard enough to stomach when it only results in them securing silverware.
But the spectacle of Police Scotland conducting expensive investigations in lieu of their own decision not to enforce the law – not just in the job description but the actual damned job itself – would make even the strongest stomach turn over.
It is truly shocking.