If They Want Backing, The BBC Should Cease Employing The Bitter, Anti-Celtic Brigade.

One of the great political debates of the moment is over the BBC license fee. The government wants to abolish it, and liberal Britain should be outraged. But some aren’t. In Scotland, the mood music is even less supportive.

Here, the collective shrug is the natural response from those who know that in the independence referendum of 2014 the organisation blatantly banged the unionist drum.

The idea that the British Broadcasting Corporation might have been neutral on the break-up of the political status-quo seems ridiculous now in retrospect; at the time many believed that their public service charter conferred a genuine responsibility on them to be so.

That it wasn’t is something that sticks long in the memory. That is hard to ignore.

Who does the BBC truly serve?

That it has been used as a political weapon by the state at times is without question.

That many people regard its input as so poor that it doesn’t justify the license fee would be hard enough to argue against.

And whilst I think that the right claiming it’s a shamelessly liberal organisation is evidence of their rampaging paranoia and intolerance, the left’s claim that its upper echelons are populated by privately educated establishment figures – more than a few of whom are Tories – is absolutely grounded in fact.

For those in Scotland who follow the football, the behaviour of the broadcaster is even harder to defend at times.

BBC Sports Scotland is widely derided for, and almost universally discredited by, the parade of goons it has allowed to traipse through its doors. It certainly tries to appeal to a wider and more varied audience than the clownish Clyde Superscoreboard, but as long as it employs the likes of Tom English it will never be viewed particularly seriously.

Others on the show are even worse than he is.

But foremost amongst them is the never-ending trail of ex-EBT recipients and washed up ex-Ibrox footballers. If you want a gig at the BBC, having once played for one of the clubs at that ground is an obvious bonus.

How can you trust a publicly funded organisation which pushes blatant falsehoods into the national discourse, as BBC Sport Scotland does with the Survival and Victim lies?

Why should we, as tax payers, be liable to fund an organisation which promotes such a ridiculous, such a false, narrative?

Who can trust that? Who thinks that has credibility?

Last night, Richard Foster, another in a long line of anti-Celtic ex-Ibrox players sat in their studio and blamed our new boy Ideguchi for the shocking tackle that was made on him, and which saw him leave the field injured.

His comments were so ridiculous that Andrew Smith, of The Scotsman, who this site does not enjoy, specifically singled them out in his column today, such was his disbelief at what he had heard.

He was not the only one who thought so.

Foster could have left it at “the challenge didn’t merit the red card” argument which others were making – I thought it should have been a red all day long – and you could have put that down to a simple difference of opinion, but blaming our player allowed the bile to seep through and not for the first time with Foster.

This is what the BBC does though; it hires these Peepul fully aware of their inability to be objective when it comes to our club, and yet every chance they get they have these people passing judgement on Celtic games.

Occasionally, as with last night, it spills over into the kind of outright bias which makes people like me inclined to tell them to ram their license fee.

I’ve talked about this on this site before; if the BBC wants the support of people like me on this issue then it has to convince me that as a citizen and a licensee fee payer that I’m getting a good deal.

But if they’re going to promote anti-Celtic nonsense like we heard last night then not only will I withhold my backing but I’ll join the chorus calling for the license fee’s abolition.

If the BBC wants to fill its studios with the Ricky Foster’s and even the Kris Boyd’s then that’s a matter for their editorial department and they are free to do so … but not in my name and not with my money, and I strongly suspect that many tens of thousands of Celtic fans agree.

No more of this. No more.