The Ibrox club has been appeased for too long. For the good of the game it has to end.

Let’s talk about appeasement.

It’s most famous example was the catastrophic Munich Conference of 1938 when the governments of France and Britain allowed Czechoslovakia to be sacrificed to Nazi aggression so that their own peoples could be spared another war … which, not too long afterwards, they got anyway.

It was one of the most cowardly, unforgivable acts of the 20th century.

Upon his return from Munich, Neville Chamberlain famously waved his piece of paper and declared “peace in our time.” When he brought those papers to the Commons, the MPs gave him a standing ovation. Only one, Winston Churchill, spoke against him and the prevailing mood in the House.

Churchill opened his response with the words: “I will begin by saying what everybody would like to ignore or forget, but which must nevertheless be stated, namely, that we have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat.”

And that, my friends, is what appeasement represents: a total and unmitigated defeat, and a humiliation which never goes away. Someone always pays the price for that defeat. Someone always pays the consequences.

In that famous speech, later called his “Disaster Of The First Magnitude” address, Churchill lamented the years-long “eager search for the path of least resistance.”

Surely that rings true in Scottish football today, because that’s all the SFA, the SPFL, and sections of the mainstream media have pursued since the new Ibrox club emerged from the grave of the old one in 2012.

The SFA told us the first Ibrox club was “too big to fail.” Yet when it did fail, they bent over backwards for the newco, attempting to parachute it into the top flight, then into the second tier, and when all else failed, into the league at the bottom. And through the infamous Five-Way Agreement and its notorious “side letter” they granted absolution for the sins of the old club, ensuring that Lord Nimmo Smith’s inquiry left the titles and trophies from the EBT years untouched.

Not one bit of it helped. Not one bit of it built the relationship between the Ibrox club and the governing bodies which those bodies had evidently wanted. When Charles Green stood on the pitch before Sevco’s first game and told the media that what had happened to Rangers had been about bigotry they should have hammered him and his club with sanctions there and then, in no small part because he was accusing them of being part of the conspiracy. They let it go.

That set the tone for much of what was to follow.

It didn’t make the club less aggressive or less intent on causing harm. Instead, what emerged was the worst of all possible worlds: an Ibrox club whose leaders and fans were convinced Rangers had been unjustly punished, and one that realised the governing bodies were spineless and easily manipulated.

The result? A club convinced of its own righteousness and fully aware it could bully and intimidate with impunity. Charles Green tried it. Dave King perfected it. King and his board turned the screws, ratcheting up the rhetoric and pursuing vendettas, on and off the pitch. They came in determined to exact revenge for perceived wrongs, and many us warned from the start they couldn’t be allowed to get away with that.

At every stage, blogs like this one have repeated the same message: you must draw a line and enforce it. If they cross that line, punish them so severely they’ll never dare again. But at every turn, the governing bodies have opted for that path of least resistance. What we’ve ended up with is not “peace in our time,” but brief respites between the latest Ibrox-SFA crisis.

This isn’t a war, but neither is it an absence of conflict.

One side is afraid to escalate; the other is not. One side tries to position itself “above the fray”; the other gets down in the gutter. One side is supposed to act in the wider interests of the whole game.

The other does not even have to pretend to represent anything other than its own extreme flank. The SFA may boast about resolving issues privately and point out that no club has formally gone to war with them, but the trouble lies in one simple truth: one club is testing boundaries aggressively, regularly, and without fear of any consequences.

This situation cannot last. No club behaving this way can be allowed to do so for too long, or it will begin asking, “How far can we go?” The Ibrox board constantly pushes the limits to see what they can get away with. This is unsustainable. The aggressor who goes unpunished will always risk further aggression. And always, always, there is the danger of a catastrophic misjudgement.

Let’s be brutally honest here: when it comes to the Ibrox board and the SFA, we are not dealing with the smartest kids in the class. Very far from it.

The danger in playing chicken is that you get two giant egos who are incapable of backing down or two morons who think they know what the other person is going to do. One of these days one of these sides is going to push the other side further than is smart, and all sides end up with the war they want to avoid.

It’s disgusting that any of the governing bodies have let us come to this point. There have been so many opportunities for these people to put that club in its place, and every single one of them has been thrown away. They got away with calling for Collum’s removal last season; why would they not think they would get away with this? They cast aspersions on Collum because of his religion. Why wouldn’t they think they could do it with Connor as well? They are out of control.

And the longer it’s allowed to go on, the worse this is going to be.

Standing in the Commons on that day in 1938, Churchill finished up his statement with words that have rung down through time, and they are equally relevant to this situation. If the governing bodies cannot act, this will echo like its own prophest.

“And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning.”