Tom English Attacked Celtic Fans At The Weekend. Will He Now Condemn Ally McCoist?

Tom English thinks he’s a crusader. He thinks he is some sort of spokesperson for the picked on and the downtrodden of Scotland. At the weekend he had a pop at the Celtic fans, and in the aftermath, in response to criticism over it, he spoke like some Reaganite on the pulpit, calling on the moral majority to rise up, with him as their champion. He wanted to speak up for a Scotland that does not wish to be mired in division and hatred.

Or so he says anyway.

But as a political geek, I know full well how many of the so-called “moral majority” who Reagan roused with his rhetoric were amongst the most amoral and hypocritical people ever to enter public life. The damage they did because of the bigotry they spread was enormous, and lasting. We’re still living with some of the consequences of that today; the evangelical right now embraces Trump, a serial adulterer who paid off porn stars and who knows what else.

Tom English wandered into the culture wars at the weekend by launching an attack on Celtic fans for singing Republican songs. At Easter no less.

Well, If he wants to do this country a favour, if he’s not just a snivelling hypocrite taking a cheap shot, he can get front and centre today and really make a stand. And it’s an easy one to make, it’s an open goal. He can be one of the first broadcast journalists not only to report on the appalling, bigoted garbage that came out of Ally McCoist’s mouth this morning but to condemn it as well.

I’ll be writing more fully on McCoist’s remarks later today, but for the moment I think it would be nice if the Catholic community in Scotland, and the Irish Catholic community in particular, were given some high-profile support after the former Ibrox manager suggested that intolerant scum who sing vile, hateful dirge every weekend might be the true victims now that Scotland has a law which explicitly criminalises those sentiments.

I am flabbergasted that McCoist got away with that, and even more so that the media has so far simply reproduced his remarks without pointing out how shocking and even dangerous they are and what an embarrassment to Scotland. That’s the mindset of a bigot right there, that’s like some redneck south of the Mason-Dixon line ranting about the federal government not having the right to tell him that his children have to go to school with the black and brown kids.

McCoist’s comments are nothing less than an argument that sectarians and racists should be allowed to continue promoting their views and that he should be allowed to do so as well. He said it, that’s not me inventing a context, his words are in the public domain and they are clear.

“I can guarantee you,” he said, “next Sunday at Ibrox, I, along with 48,000 will be committing a breach of that hate bill in the particular (Ibrox) vs Celtic game we are all going to.”

It does not get clearer than that.

He’s just said that the problem is the law, not the thousands of people who think anthems of ethnic cleansing are perfectly okay, and since Tom English has set himself up as a paragon or virtue, I await his denunciation of those remarks, that sentiment and the condemnation of the man who uttered those words.

Republican singing might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but McCoist has just declared that he wants to be able to sing about being up to his knees in the blood of myself and thousands of other citizens of this country … and I want to know that Tom English has our back.