A Celtic Director Has This Week Endorsed The Toxic Victim Lie.

Brian Wilson, a director at Celtic, has written an obituary for Walter Smith, in The Guardian, in which he has pushed the grotesque and dangerous Victim Lie.

It is a shocking thing for someone on the board of our club to have done.

He has endorsed one of the most outrageous falsehoods in the history of sport on this island.

I have nothing against a Celtic director writing a tribute to the former Rangers manager Walter Smith.

It is an act of decency and further confirms that we are a better club than some of our enemies would like to paint us.

But I have serious objections, and all of us should, to a Celtic director who lends credence to the toxic falsehood which powers so much hate in our game.

When talking about the crisis that brought the club to its knees, this is what a member of our board actually wrote about the liquidation of the former club.

“(By) this time, the club was caught up in a bewildering series of intrigues and takeovers as well as having been punished with demotion, in 2012, for having gone into administration.”

That is nothing more than a blatant lie.

There was no “punishment” of “demotion”; such a thing did not exist in the rulebook then or now.

Had Scottish football attempted such a thing the club would have had every right to contest it vigorously in the courts and there is no doubt whatsoever that they would have won.

The idea that the club was “punished” with a draconian sanction which was not available to the governing bodies or the wider game is utterly fictitious.

There was no club to contest such a claim.

They were liquidated.

The realities of this are quite clear.

Their club ceased to exist and in order for a new “Rangers” to emerge they were told they would have to start in the bottom tier of the game … these are the facts, as voted by the clubs themselves, in a decision that was nearly unanimous.

Yet the game in Scotland continues to be corrupted by this falsehood.

The worst excesses of the Ibrox support are justified by their allies in the media on the grounds that the first Ibrox club “suffered” unfairly in 2012.

The rabid hatred of their fan-base is built on this grotesque and false representation of those events.

Even the club’s current behaviour, where they are threatening commercial contracts, is in part predicated on their having been “victims” of a conspiracy.

When their own directors threatened this summer of “scores to settle on and off the pitch” these were the scores they had in mind.

They know, as we all do, that there is no basis in reality to any of it, but they use it as an excuse to wreak havoc.

I am astonished and appalled that this lie has been given credence by a director from our club.

He should retract that segment of the piece immediately and apologise to the wider game for lending legitimacy to a malicious untruth which pollutes our national game and makes honest discourse more difficult.

We have a hard enough time fighting against this garbage without a Celtic official engaging in what can only be described as wilful deceit.

If he’s not prepared to apologise he should be asked to resign.