Working Class Football Cheering On A Monarch? It’s Not The Celtic Way.

There are few things easier to do this weekend that spotting a Sevconian, whether that’s online or out on the streets. If you live in certain neighbourhoods you can actually look down a row of houses and identify them instantly. I am endlessly fascinated by what goes on in their heads, because it bears so little relationship to what’s in my own.

A few weeks ago, Liverpool fans were roundly criticised by the gibbering goons of the right when they dared booed the national anthem. I have begun to feel that those who decry “woke culture” are amongst the most scared people in this country. That level of bile, hatred and anger at their fellow citizens can only spring from deep fear.

Imagine the lefties got their way and every statue came down, every Union Jack was hoisted off the public buildings and we all had to respect a persons right to self-define as they liked and if we whipped out the curriculums and replaced them with something that taught people the actual history of these incidents, warts and all?

How in the Hell would the lives of these people change in a negative way? What difference would it make to their basic existence? I can tell you that minorities and other social groups would feel a lot more relaxed and at home in this country, but I struggle to understand why that would harm those who would condemn those changes as something evil.

In the aftermath of Paris, one of the things the spiteful bastards of the right used to justify the hatred they poured on the Liverpool fans – who, let’s remember, have gotten an apology from UEFA, who acknowledge they were treated abysmally – was that they booed the anthem, as though one thing has anything to do with the other.

We would have booed the anthem as well, not just Celtic fans but a lot of fans in Scotland. Of course, we already have our critics anyway and they would be criticising us no matter what we did or didn’t do. That’s a reality we live with every single day. They would have been driven to a heightened level of apoplexy this week though and I find that funny.

Most amusing of all is all the bunting and flag waving and generally grovelling at the feet of old leather-face and her delinquent brood, all but the one who married a black girl and ate no amount of shit for it. What always brings me to the giggles is when they celebrate their culture on the basis that it won their “freedom from Rome”.

What a joke. They got the Pope off their backs only to drop to their knees as “loyal subjects” – Good God, in the modern age, “loyal subjects” – of the German-Greek crime family instead. You would be forgiven if you considered it for a minute and then pissed yourself laughing. Yet a picture of the monarch adorns the Ibrox dressing room wall, like a teenage girl puts up a poster of the latest boy-band to trend on Twitter.

Liverpool fans strike me as particularly sane and well adjusted here. Not for them any of this forelock tugging pish. Few of them will have been queuing up at the Palace gates these past few days in the hope of getting what may or may not be an actual a wave from some third rate individual 121st in line to the throne, any more than our guys would be.

The whole thing is vaguely loony to me, and I have never understood it and I never will. I am nobody’s “subject” and find the idea that somebody is “born to rule” over me and mine to be alien, grotesque and utterly offensive.

But that this is widely embraced by the Ibrox fan-base is certainly no surprise to me at all. They cling to it even when it’s clear that the institutions they kiss up to couldn’t give a shit about them. Their club died because they believed in infantile fairy-tales about their own importance, and they waited for someone to save them because it was Rangers and Rangers was special when, in fact, they were just a West of Scotland football club.

Our support is not a homogenous lot, and I accept that we have various different strands of opinion within it and that this encompasses a wide range of views and perspectives and politics. But our club has a history steeped in the story of the underdog and the struggle against authority and establishment, and especially this British version of it.

But even if it were not so, we are based in the East End of Glasgow, representing working class communities whose relationship to that inbred sect could not be any more remote. The core of our support – Catholic and Irish – knows more than anyone on the planet about the struggle against the Crown and all who wear it … but we’d reject all this crap anyway.

It’s anachronistic, nonsensical and degrades all those who bow and scrape and accept the status quo and I can fully understand why the cowards of the right, hanging onto their reality by their fingernails, are so pissed off at the fans of Liverpool, another club born from a working class community in a working class city … but those fans are not the backward ones, the ones embracing century old traditions that have no place in the modern world.

Our fans would have done the same; indeed we have done the same, and I’m proud to say I come from a household where no matter where we’ve been in the world, or in whatever company, we have refused to stand for “the anthem” and never goddamned will.

Boo it? You better believe I’ve booed it. And the more, and the louder, the grovelling gutter rat goons of the right complain about it, the more I know that I was right.