Celtic Fans Need Answers From Police Scotland, And The Club Must Pay The Fines.

Everyone will have heard, by now, of the disgraceful behaviour that was meted out to the Green Brigade food-bank collection team today, when Police Scotland took it upon themselves to hand out spot fines to the pickup vehicles for parking violations.

Fans Against Criminalisation say that Celtic are blaming the police and that the police are blaming Celtic. We need answers to who actually is to blame and in the meantime foodbanks and their supporters should not need to be out of pocket in relation to this matter. The club should pay those fines or pay to have them contested.

What is wrong with Police Scotland? Who do they think they are punishing here? If this is about Bernard Higgins it is all the more shameful if the club appoints this man. More than that, Police Scotland itself needs brought to book for this shameful activity.

Part of the problem here is that we live in a culture which fetes the police. No political party wants to risk “the law and order vote” – which means middle class white people – by offending them.

One of the results of this is that we have, in Scotland, one of the least accountable police forces in all of Europe and the results of that are obvious when you look how many times they’ve been sued for unfair prosecution and this apart from the fact that they seem to pick and choose the circumstances under which they actually uphold the law.

The lack of effective scrutiny has allowed them to become – if you’ll pardon the pun – a law unto themselves and it is a matter of time before this morphs into a serious political problem even for those who don’t want to be critical of them.

Their behaviour today at Celtic Park has done not one bit of good to relations between them and our supporters. Indeed, most people who look at the photos and watch the footage of what happened today will find their actions reprehensible. The contempt it shows for the efforts of decent people trying to do the right thing is breath-taking.

Celtic should write the cheques on behalf of the affected parties, re-affirm our club’s commitment to social justice and put some pressure on the politicians until there are answers here. If some of our parliamentarians want to get their storm troopers back on the leash, that would be nice as well and a wee nudge from our club couldn’t hurt that process either.