Celtic and our values; something real or just air in a bottle and a Presidential pardon?

What is our club? What does it mean to us? What does it mean in the greater scheme of our lives? Do we get our values from our club or do we impose our values onto it? These are questions I’ve pondered for years, and to be honest with you, I don’t know if I’ve answered those questions for myself yet.

Let’s put it this way; I grew up with two great passions. One was football and the other was politics. Football wise, that was Celtic. Politics wise, it was the Labour Party and the trade union movement of the early 90s. The important thing to note is that the football, Celtic, came first and that poses the interesting question as to whether that was the formative influence. In short, did my politics arise from this club?

Sometimes I think it had to have. I know that the very first people I got politically involved with came to me through Celtic. Even today my closest friends, including three I’ve known since my activist days, are almost all connected to Celtic. Indeed, I met two of them at a political conference on a weekend when the club was live on TV and the real bonding session took place over the course of that game.

The club influenced my political thinking, there is just no doubt about it. Founded by immigrants, for charitable purposes, Celtic was born of discrimination and the fight for the Irish to be recognised. Some of the earliest political tomes I read were not from the British left but were on Irish Republicanism.

I knew the Bobby Sands story before I knew the story of Nye Bevan. Before I knew who the Tolpuddle Martyrs were I knew the names of the leaders of the 1916 Uprising, who signed the Proclamation. My first trade union heroes weren’t the battling Red Clydesiders but Philip Larkin and James Connolly. At a socialist society event two decades ago when others were expecting The Red Flag I got up and sang the ballad that bears his name.

Without Celtic, would I have had such an avid interest in Ireland? Without understanding the Irish Republican cause would I have ever got interested in, and raised money and marched for, Palestine or any of the other causes i espoused during my 20’s when I was at my most active? I have no idea. I’d like to think so, but these things are all so intertwined that it’s impossible to be sure one way or another.

I have slammed organisations which tried to use Celtic for political ends. When the STUC, an organisation I have revered for decades, tried to use our stadium to make a protest about Israel in the early 2000’s, I was furious. When The Green Brigade did their first Palestine flag demo to “welcome” an Israeli team I thought it was a gross insult to our guests at a time when things in the Middle East were a lot quieter than they are right now. I never changed my mind on that, but thought that when the UEFA fine which was levied against us for it was “matched” by what ordinary fans raised for Palestinian causes that something momentous and good had come out of it and that it was the most impressive response to critics I had seen in years … or have seen since.

My own views on the issues at the centre of those events are hardly a secret; I was marching for Palestine when some of the GB kids were still sucking on their dummies. I objected to people using Celtic as a political tool. I did not therefore, believe that Celtic grows out of our values. Or at least I didn’t used to.

One of the reasons I’ve changed my views on some of this stuff is that it’s become increasingly clear in the last decade that if fans don’t define what Celtic is then somebody else will, and in a way that we are not going to like. We saw two contrasting examples of our values in the past few weeks, one from the fans and the other from the club itself and I know which one I find vastly more in line with our traditions and background and the principles on which this club was founded in the first place.

The first was The Green Brigade’s latest food-bank appeal, which raised a small fortune and has become an annual badge of honour for everyone involved. That is the perfect encapsulation of what Celtic is, and what Celtic means. It makes our club a force for Good. It connects us to our origins. This is who we are.

Except … this is a fan group, this isn’t the club itself, although the club is intimately connected to this act via the supporters themselves. The club has its own charitable arm, which does outstanding things, I am not knocking that, and they do immense work in a lot of areas … but in others, not so much no.

Because we’ve also recently seen the club indulge in one of the most scandalous acts in its recent history, the decision to get involved in the “virtual pitch” scheme, which to my mind is only one step up from a con job and is a blatant pre-Christmas cash grab which will leave an awful lot of people with a bad taste in their mouths come Boxing Day, when they realise that they’ve bought nothing at all.

And that, to me, is a tawdry shredding of our values as a club and this idea of Celtic as an institution with a deep sense of social responsibility. No club which sought to define itself that way would have gotten involved in something that reeks like this does. Even if it had already been disavowed by the club as a gross error and we’d taken our name off it there would still be widespread dismay that someone inside Celtic had such a warped view of who we’re supposed to be that it was done in the first place.

The idea is not new. People have been selling snake oil for as long as we’ve been trading and bartering as a species. Bottled air from the top of Everest is just one example. Those who have read Max Brooks’ brilliant World War Z will all have recognised Breckinridge Scott, the guy in the book who creates the fake Phalanx vaccine, markets it and makes a fortune during the early days of The Great Panic, as a particularly realistic creation, his real life inspirations are clear enough to see in a hundred different contemporary figures from politicians to slick corporate bosses.

All of them tap into the same deep well of human emotions. All of them exploit their fellow men. All of them thrive based on a simple concept; no-one forces people to buy this stuff, or to believe in what they’re selling. It’s all legal and above board and beyond that point then it’s all fair game, right? But is it, really?

When you are preying on people who might not fully understand what you’re shilling, are the rest of us supposed to just shrug that off, even if it comes with huge consequences? There are fans who will buy this stuff because it has the club name on it, and it comes with a letter endorsing this scheme, signed by the manager himself. Do you think they realise what it is they are getting – i.e. nothing at all except that letter?

When you understand the scheme, you realise that very quickly. Once you realise that, you can only come to one other conclusion; no-one who does get it would ever pay money for such a preposterous “product.” This is not something sensible people would purchase in their right minds, so who is its target audience? People who might buy it without knowing any better. That’s who this is aimed at. This is nothing but a piece of blatant exploitation. In short, it’s little better than a scam.

And our very involvement in selling something like this, or allowing it to have our name on it, thereby giving it some faux legitimacy, compromises us. It harms us because it conflicts with our values. It blackens our name for a handful of coins. Just a little, sure, but it’s needles and stupid and even if the rewards were ten times as great, any cash that comes in depends on people’s basic gullibility and that means this is the club in some way preying on its own supporters … and that’s about as wrong as you can get.

Over in the States, some in the Democratic Party are getting themselves into a real mess trying to justify Joe Biden’s decision to grant a blanket pardon for his son Hunter. Some of the arguments in favour of that would doubtless be the ones the club would produce here, namely and most notably that it’s legal and that others have done worse.

And my answer to that is simple; so what? That’s supposed to wash the stain of this off our hands, is it? That because this is legal that it’s okay? By that token its legal for Trump to pardon the Capitol Rioters. When he does, how is liberal America supposed to criticise him for it when some of them have defended the President on this?

Likewise, there are a number of us who have been vocal in criticising the steady creep of this stuff into football and in particular to Scotland. This is exactly the kind of thing our club should be coming out against, and assuming a position of moral leadership on. We certainly cannot exercise that moral right now, that’s over with. Instead, in signing up for this we’ve given legitimacy to every fly-by-night chancer in the sector, everyone from those selling “digital trading cards” to those who want to flog cryptocurrency with our name on it. If we signed up for this, those things aren’t far away … indeed, many of them offer much more, on the surface of it anyway, than this “air in a bottle” minus the bottle.

This club stands for things, or it should. It is better than this, whatever its critics might say, but we’ve given them enough ammo to shoot holes in any pretensions we might have had about being more socially responsible than the rest, and it is clear that there are some inside the club itself who have completely failed to act in line with our founding principles here. We have taken a bad step down a dark road.

And I ask myself; are we still the club many of us imagine us to be? If we can act like this and endorse this kind of thing, what has happened to our values and how deeply are they now compromised? Are we to become just another soulless corporate entity shorn of any sense of morals or principles or are we more?

I know where the fans are with this, and what their views on it all are. If we are more, is that simply because of us … or is it down to us? In short, if this club is not willing to live up to those values is it time for us to become activists in promoting those values and making sure that Celtic properly, and fully, reflects them?

In this case the club has fallen miles short. Right now, it is fans like The Green Brigade and those who contributed to their latest appeal, who are clear-eyed about the kind of ideals we represent, and regardless of whether you agree with them on everything or not, these guys have demonstrated to the world here what Celtic is really about. If only those inside the club had been as able to recognise the same.