Tomorrow, The Celtic Fans Need To Send A Loud And Clear Message To This Board.

I have nothing against The Green Brigade’s latest call for the Celtic fans to sing Grace to show solidarity for the people of Palestine, although what an Irish rebel love song has to do with the Middle East, I’ll leave to the armchair revolutionaries to explain. Support for Palestine is just fine by me, especially as the Israeli war machine moves into new areas in Gaza.

But something about it leaves me decidedly cold just the same. Because it’s another example of a Celtic fan group focussed on events far away instead of closer to home.

Changing things means bringing pressure to bear.

All the marches and demos and protests which have gone on across the world for Palestine … very little of it has come with any kind of impact or put the pressure on where it matters. It’s hard to make that pressure effective even when you are willing to take drastic action.

Climate activists are willing to go to jail for their cause. What’s that led to? Real change? No, and the right-wing media has made them into them wreckers and the government has passed laws handing down heavier sentences for it.

Alexei Navalny is dead. He quite literally put his neck on the block to oppose Putin and even when the Russian state poisoned him he refused to leave the country. His death, today, in the Polar Wolf prison where he was serving a lengthy jail term on trumped up charges, has been heralded as a political murder. His life barely moved the needle against the corrupt monster who  rules from the Kremlin. His death won’t either.

Even when you’re willing to get your hands dirty and put yourself on the line, real activism is like pushing a boulder up a hill. Most of the time you’re getting nowhere.

Don’t get me wrong; symbolic gestures can have an impact.

But I find it hard to believe that anything we do, as a support, is going to matter to the outside world when a group of arrogant, egotistical old white men sit atop our club, running it like their own little corner shop without feeling the cold wind of revolt down their own backs. If we’re not making life uncomfortable for these people, right on our doorstep, far-right Israeli politicians sending in the tanks won’t be quaking in their boots.

The summer transfer window was a bad joke. The winter window was an open insult. It’s not the first time the people running the club have failed to back the manager, nor the first time they have openly spurned his calls for quality.

They have imperilled our quest to win this title. They have acted as though deliberately trying to hamstring the manager and the team. Even if it’s not self-sabotage, as some would contend, the roots of it are not hard to see, when the board engages in nepotism and cronyism instead of hiring the best people to work within its walls.

These people are a clear and present danger to our club. They are pursuing a policy which will leave us further behind in Europe, will eat into the co-efficient, will condemn us to watching a decreasing level of quality until even the trading strategy is on its knees and virtually hand trophies and titles to an Ibrox club which will always put its money on the pitch.

This title race is now a real one in no small part because these people have elevated their family members and cronies to positions of real authority inside of our walls. They have no clear plan for the future except that it will involve the names Lawwell and Desmond. They see Celtic as their club, not our club, and believe themselves to be beyond reproach.

Are we really going to let these people take their seats on Saturday without them feeling a little fire on their backsides? Is our most vocal fan organisation really going to do their piece for Palestine and then spend the rest of the game singing about the Irish War of Independence? No wonder Desmond, Lawwell & Sons think they can do whatever they want.

We’ve left this late in the day already.

There should have been action from the stands when Lawwell Jnr was appointed, or when Daddy returned to the club after he’d misled shareholders, appointed a manager in the shower, fumbled over sacking him and then presided over a shambolic search for his successor. What’s it going to take for these people to feel a little uncomfortable?

Are we really just glory hunters? Is that what we’ve become? Is it really going to take watching the Ibrox Tribute Band win multiple titles before people get roused to do something about all this? If we act now part of our credibility comes from doing so at a time when the club is top of the table. Their best weapon against us is the idea that any pressure, when it comes, will arise from a bunch of malcontents who think we have a divine right to win things.

Our concerns actually have very little to do with what happens on the pitch.

Some of us have been writing about these people for the better part of a decade. Some of us did sound the alarm bell when Lawwell Jnr got his gig. Some of us did say not to trust a word that came out of Celtic about him being brought in as part of the Ange Postecoglou “dream team.” Some of us lamented the return of Lawwell Snr. Some of us wrote about how we wanted the Desmond’s run out of town on a rail even when this team was winning trebles.

Some of these folks have been at Celtic for nearly twenty years and it’s our contention that we’re pursuing a self-defeating, self-limiting policy of staying just one step ahead of a domestic rival which couldn’t help falling over its own feet. That strategy is dead in the water they minute they stop doing that, and history has shown us this board has no Plan B.

Rodgers was the best card they could come up with in the summer. When he’s no longer in the dugout, do you really want to trust these people with what comes next, or even just with another cursed summer to an incoherent transfer policy because they have decided to hire guys with the right last names instead of the proper credentials?

Even if we were a shoe-in for this title, even if we were odds on for another treble next season … this isn’t good enough. This isn’t how our club should be run. But because it is run this way, we’re risking not just this season but the next one and probably the next few after that.

Don’t look for any sudden change in the policy or those implementing it either; as I’ll write later, that’s the most forlorn hope of all, that’s believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden.

it’s time these leeches made way for some fresh thinking and new ideas. Instead, some of them think Celtic is their own property, to be handed down to their kids. That can’t happen.

Tomorrow is the first game back at home since the transfer window slammed shut. If we’re going to put these people under the white hot spotlight this is when it’s going to need to be done.

So sing Grace and support Palestine, it’s the right thing to do … but there’s business to attend to closer to hand, right here at home, and if we don’t at least make a start on it we’re storing up a lot of trouble for another time, and there will be plenty of pain on the road to getting there.