Jackson Embarrassed Himself With His Anti-Celtic Fan Diatribe This Morning.

After Keevins had his say yesterday, with all the backward stupidity of his argument, it was the turn of Keith Jackson today. His piece was in many ways even worse.

It rang with such contrived indignation that you could almost hear the “outraged” squeals. It also rang with a kind of forelock tugging subservience that smacks of someone who has spent a long time in the orbit of Ibrox.

I’m not even going to go into the football element of it; he thinks his favourite club’s manager was handed a “lifeline” by Celtic.

He seems to be under the misapprehension that one bad result means this team isn’t as strong as it was, or that it has somehow done the impossible and elevated the team at Ibrox to a new level.

Neither of those is true.

So I will dispense with any notion that he had anything to say about football.

It was his foot-stamping at the “obnoxious” behaviour of our fans that grated on me.

He appears not to recognise what those fans did yesterday. As with the banners in Poland, this was not some slander against the dead monarch but against the idea of hereditary rule.

He seemed to suggest that the behaviour of Celtic fans, Hibs fans and Dundee Utd fans shamed Scotland.

But Scotland is too big and diverse a country to be hammered so easily into the mould that this eejit thinks it should fit.

As has been demonstrated ably by other, better writers, Scotland’s opinion on the monarchy is vastly different than that of England … it’s not even clear that the anti-monarchist sentiment of our fans is a minority view up here.

He says there is a “time and a place” for expressing such a view. I wish to God those writing such claptrap would have the balls to tell us when suits them. Because that’s the crux of it. Freedom of speech is not really what it says on the tin if we have people like this clown telling us where and when we might exercise it.

The one thing I’ve gotten really sick of over the last week and a bit are people claiming to respect differing views whilst they piss all over them.

He objects to the “crassness” in our national sport and talks of how it offends him. It’s funny that in all his years as a journalist he has only rarely expressed his views on the rampant bigotry and rising levels of bile in the support in which he self-defines.

It is amazing to me to find out what truly matters to these people.

They are perfectly fine with thousands of fans singing about being up to their knees in fenian blood but balk at a lack of deference to an institution which is nakedly racist, supremacist, imperial and sectarian.

He embarrassed himself with that article this morning, but then when does he never?

This guy is a dreadful writer and an appalling excuse for a journalist.