Celtic Goes Top And The Bile Pours In. But This Time Things Are A Little Different …

This has been a remarkably good couple of days, and I’ve enjoyed them thoroughly. But the level of abusive stuff I’ve had to sift through hasn’t been much fun at all. In truth, it’s not really been just the last couple of days but a trend over the last week, after we left Ibrox with the point we needed to swing this title race back in our favour.

That was the result that triggered the perma-rage. All the weekend has done is open the floodgates. Some of the Peepul do not respond well to being thwarted.

They do not respond well to playing catch-up.

For a couple of months, they had managed to convince themselves that they were heading for a season of glory – and maybe they still are; it’s in our hands, but that doesn’t mean that we’ll be able to carry it over the line. We take nothing for granted here. Now, though, that there is doubt in their minds, now that we’re in the driving seat, you can see how completely they believed it but also how invested in it they all managed to get.

We Are The Peepul is a supremacist slogan; it stinks of exceptionalism, and it is clear that a lot of those who express that sentiment believe that they are exceptional. But they aren’t. It does not entitle them to anything, least of all to treat the rest of us as somehow Less.

And nor are we, as they seem to believe, barely tolerated guests in “their” country. Nor is their anti-Catholic and anti-Irish bile, which I have to sift through every day, intimidating, as they appear to believe. In fact, with the Hate Crimes bill, a lot of what I get sent is now criminal.

And let me say this very clearly; I take that stuff seriously. If people want to email this site racist and sectarian abuse, whether through the comments or elsewhere, they better understand that they are taking their chances, because in case it hasn’t sunk in yet, they can no longer do that and be sure that they are immune from any consequences. If I were to publish half of this stuff, I know for a fact that it would result in a raft of Hate Crime complaints, whether I made one myself or not … that alone should demonstrate how moronic the act of sending it is.

There are a lot of people out there who labour under the misconception – which I have tried to correct often – that this is a “Celtic site.” It depends which way you look at it. It is a site written by a Celtic fan, from the perspective of a Celtic fan … but this is, and it has been since I’ve been here, a Scottish football site written from that perspective.

And so, I do occasionally peer over the garden wall, and that does drive some of those on the other side of that wall a wee bit off their nut. But this site has written about Hibs, Aberdeen, Hearts, Livingston and other clubs over the course of this campaign too; ask the fans of those clubs who have gotten up in arms over it. None of them, not a single one, has ever sent me anything remotely like the stuff some of the Peepul have sent me in the last ten days.

Celtic are now the favourites to win this title. If we keep our composure, we can wrap it up in a nice little bow on 11 May. If we win our next two then that’s the big one, and if we win that we can just about take it to the bank. If that happens those on the other side of the city are just going to have to suck it up, and accept that their sole title win in the last dozen years was a fluke and that the biggest club in this country is ours, with no end in sight.

I don’t expect them to like that, and if they want to “rage against the dying of the light” – something, frankly, they should have accepted when it came back in 2012 – they are fully entitled to grieve and to mourn. What they are not entitled to do is pour their bile in this direction or in any other.

They better get it through their skulls that everything is different now … and if they don’t want to leave these 15th century attitudes behind then this country is going to have to drag them into the modern world whether they like it or not.

Because the days when the rest of us had to tolerate this stuff, they’re over, and like that football team they once followed which is called Rangers, they aren’t coming back.