Celtic Fans Did Not Act Alone In 2011-12, And We Cannot Alone Defend Its Legacy.

Yesterday Paul Brennan over at CQN published a piece on the Manchester City case, and at the end of it offered a reminder as to the events of 2011-12.

One of the revelations which surprised some people was that it was Lawwell himself who steered his sterling article of October 2011 where he laid out the route Craig Whyte intended to take Rangers, towards a pre-pack administration, wholescale debt dumping and then continuing as before.

There are so, so many misunderstandings about what Celtic was doing in that period. Peter Lawwell was certainly concerned about the financial impact on our club of the one across the city going out of business, but he cared for that possibility much, much more than he did the alternative, which was their club making a mockery of all of Scottish football and our financially prudent policies, which had been in competition with their spendthrift madness.

People still tell me to this day that we could have “killed them” and chose not to. It’s not even close to being true. It was never in our gift to do any such thing; a club calling itself Rangers was always going to emerge from the ashes of this thing. That is just a fact. This is Scotland, and we have a small league. Their fan-base is too big and too well connected.

Look, when there’s a club called Gretna still playing football in Scotland, does anyone really think it was possible, then or now, that a club calling itself Rangers wouldn’t be?

I never cared what name the NewCo gave itself; I do care about the trophies and titles they fraudulently claim, and about a media narrative which prefers fantasy to fact.

I’ll never refer them to them as Rangers because they aren’t.

So the idea that we conspired to assure that a club crawled out of their grave has never held up to examination.

I know, I know for a fact, that it’s simply not true.

We recognised that there were two scenarios; in the first, Rangers did the pre-pack and got away with everything.

In the second, Scottish football rallied and prevented it and the NewCo was forced to start at the bottom.

That was our aim, and that was what Peter Lawwell set out to do when he gave Paul Brennan of CQN a push towards writing that article.

That wasn’t the shock to me that it evidently was to some others.

Because I’ve always known that Lawwell inspired that piece, and that he guided a lot of what was being written on that blog at the time and since, and yet to this day I still get people telling me that Celtic never wanted them to start at the bottom and that we would have been perfectly happy to see them in the top flight.

Nothing I have ever heard in public or in private supports that view.

Nothing at all.

Indeed, I can tell you that it’s utter tosh, and know that I’m right.

Celtic’s opposition to the Ibrox club being voted into the top flight or the second tier is a matter of public record. We stated our views on this openly at the time and made our opposition crystal clear.

The club was not saying one thing in public and doing another in private either, as others might allege.

The CQN article of October 2011 suggests very strongly that if Rangers had gone into administration at that point, done their little switcheroo and got it put to a vote that Celtic would have opposed it but that we would, in all probability, have seen it happen regardless.

Because at the time, the other clubs were terrified of the impact doing otherwise would have had on commercial contracts, TV deals and other sponsorships.

Whenever anyone tells you that Scottish football would welcome the departure of ourselves and the current Ibrox club, think back to that time and the genuine fear in the air at the prospect of Rangers not being in the league. You can see how preposterous the notion is.

Lawwell and Celtic’s objective in pushing for that article was to let our fans know what was going on, what the concerns were and to rally us for the fight ahead. On the day the piece came out, I was working with Paul and Dave Faulds, now of The Celtic Star, on the Celtic Quick News magazine which published Issue 3 in the same week.

I wrote a lengthy article on CQN that day on what our next steps had to be.

Most critical of all was that the fans of other clubs harness their own anger.

Because we couldn’t do it alone. We didn’t need to convince our club of this, our club was already on board. We needed to get organised for the job of convincing the rest of Scottish football.

That was our assigned role in those days of 2011-12.

To make sure that fans elsewhere knew what the scam was, knew what the Rangers board under Whyte was up to, and to make sure that no matter how much the press favoured the corrupt stitch-up that they let their clubs know that they would simply not stand for it.

Fans of all clubs hate one thing above all; they hate thinking they are part of a rigged game, and they all understood Scottish football would have been confirmed as one had that disgrace been allowed to happen. So what we did in broadcasting the details of that plan was critical. Those of us who were activists on the front line of that campaign soon found ourselves for the first time, but certainly not the last, in the crosshairs of the hacks.

We were soon given the derisive title The Internet Bampots. We still wear it to this day, as a badge of honour. I’m never taking the ribbon off.

CQN, The Scottish Football Monitor, The Rangers Tax Case blog, E-Tims, Cybertims, Scotzine and a handful of others (for there were only a handful at the time) did amazing work.

Scotzine, run by Andy Muirhead, was particularly influential because it was not a single club site and had a wide and varied readership across the boards.

And as much as I was a part of the CQN community, I still think the site called SFM, the Scottish Football Monitor, run by a good man called John Cole, influenced people even Paul’s site could not.

A lot of non-Celtic fans were prominent in that campaign, and crucial to changing the direction of travel of their own clubs. I know a couple at Hibs and Hearts who had a profound importance in that debate, and more than a couple at Aberdeen.

The thing that still inspires me to this day, and makes me hopeful about reform at some point, the reason I keep on banging on about how it’s other clubs who have to make the running in changing the way refereeing works is that those other clubs might have supported the Craig Whyte plan, or the NewCo plan which the SFA was later to try to impose … but by the time Administration Day came about the groundwork had been done, other fan groups were inspired and making their voices heard and we were no longer pissing in the wind.

When the SFA did attempt to push clubs towards letting the NewCo start in Rangers’ spot the fury from their own fans is what kept them from falling into line. One by one, fan groups demanded that sporting integrity come first and that’s the only reason it did.

For the first time, and so far the only time, Scottish football supporters spoke with one voice, and their clubs had no choice but to listen.

Remember what was arrayed on the other side of this debate; the SFA. The whole of the mainstream media. Even some politicians, to their shame, leaped on the bandwagon and demanded that “common sense” play its part.

Some media careers – that of Craig Burley for example – were almost completely destroyed by those events because of the blowtorch language they used against the “pygmies and part-timers” at the so-called “lesser clubs” who dared to vote on the fate of the Ibrox operation.

SFA careers should have ended, and Neil Doncaster should have gone with them, and it all looked like it might happen on the day Turnbull Hutton, on the steps of Hampden, called the conduct of the governing bodies “corrupt.” And it was.

We were not alone in that campaign, but our fans and our club led from the front, whatever some want to think, whatever some sections of our own support wish to believe. I was privy to a lot of what was going on, and I know what happened. It is something I am immeasurably proud to have played a role in. Those days are why I do what I do now.

The Manchester City saga has thrust all this back into the light and into the public discourse, and this is an opportunity to challenge some of the blatant bullshit which has been injected into the bloodstream of Scottish football by those who will not acknowledge what actually happened.

The fans did then what our “succulent lamb” media was too corrupt to do, a corruption which is now endemic and systemic and probably incurable.

Those same fans should take this moment to come together again and make sure that the spirt of those days endures.

That a supreme halfwit, but someone who was once at the heart of the game in England, like Richard Keys believes in such a warped narrative as The Victim Lie, and openly pushes it on other gullible fools, is proof of how necessary it is.

What happened was not an injustice done to Rangers. It was not about revenge or hatred. It was about standing up for the integrity of the game we all care deeply about.

It was an act of love for Scottish football, something we all cherish and hold dear. We must never let the Victim Lie or its ugly twin the Survival Lie replace the truth.

We fought for the greater good of the game, and we won. Together. Fans of Hibs, Hearts, Motherwell, Aberdeen, St Johnstone, Raith Rovers, Alloa, Brechin and all the rest. We were united then, in that common cause and we protected this sport from its own governors and a media which would have utterly destroyed it.

What we did then, all of us, was remarkable.

It is a legacy that I think is worth fighting for.