The Ibrox Euro fan banner was appalling. It was also mind-bendingly dumb.

So, the night before last, the Ibrox Club played their latest game in Europe. We’ve gone over some of the details of that over the last couple of days, and I said that I was leaving out one particular element of the story that I wanted to get to. Obviously, it is the absolutely appalling behaviour of their supporters yet again.

And there’s a warning here to Celtic. These people are coming to our house, and that does not make a lot of us feel good.

There are two incidents I want to talk about initially. OK. The first is whatever the altercation was between their bench and the Ibrox fans behind it. The Scottish media is going out of its way, of course, to blame the Fenerbahçe coaches and substitutes for whatever that was.

But again, this is an example of the Ibrox fans reacting like thugs when they see something they don’t like. It’s another example of their being “provoked,” but I think they’re very easily provoked. They’re too easily provoked. These people are spoiling for a fight—always. And they’ll do it at any excuse.

The second, of course, is the throwing of objects, and this is not new. Ibrox is infamous for this—for the gutter-level behaviour of supporters who simply do not know how to behave. And these same people are coming to our ground. The net will protect our fans to an extent, but it will not protect the players on the pitch. I’m worried about the players on the pitch, and I always am whenever we play them.

But it’s the banner they put up that I want to talk about, and I want to go into some detail on this. The banner is grotesque. But it’s also a sterling example of how almost mind-bendingly stupid these people are.

I’ve been a political junkie since I was a teenager. I was an activist for a long time, and I have read numerous political tracts that left me scratching my head.

Believe me when I say this—when you have read a Labour Party policy document, you will see things in it that leave you gobsmacked. And you don’t even have to go that deep. You only have to listen to Keir Starmer or Rachel Reeves right now, framing the cutting off of benefits to disabled people as a “moral choice,” to understand how political language doesn’t resemble anything else. There’s no other field of endeavour in which something that horrible would be described as the moral choice.

A lot of political tracts are inconsistent, a lot are virtually incomprehensible, but I do not believe that in my life I have ever seen a political statement, a political slogan, a political banner, as shambolically incoherent and intellectually unsound as the one those scumbags in that stand produced the other night.

I have approached that banner from every conceivable angle, and I could not tell you who the target of it is supposed to be. I know that it’s blatantly racist, and it’s the kind of thing UEFA should come down on that club from a great height for. But I think they may even get away with it. And I’ll tell you why they’ll get away with it—because no one at UEFA will be able to understand it any more than I can.

The best way that I can square that statement in my head—the best way that I can try to come to terms with what it is actually supposed to mean—is by thinking of a story that Kevin Bridges once told in one of his comedy shows about seeing an anti-immigrant message in Glasgow with a swastika drawn next to it, and next to the swastika were two previous attempts at drawing a swastika, as if the complexity of that task was so great that they overestimated their ability to handle it.

That’s what that banner is like to me.

It’s like people who want to make a comment about one thing without understanding what it is they’re commenting on, and thus only confuse everyone who’s looking at it. I mean, it’s perfectly obvious that it’s some kind of anti-immigrant message. But it is so woefully inadequate at conveying any kind of coherent message that I marvel that there wasn’t one of them—not even one—who said to the rest of them, “You know, this doesn’t make much sense…”

“Keep woke foreign ideologues out. Defend Europe.”

Woke foreign ideologues. I am sure that sounded brilliant in someone’s head. And it may even have sounded brilliant when it came out of his mouth in a room full of similar mind; single-digit IQs. And it may even have gotten a round of applause from some people around them when they put that banner up.

But what the Hell does it even mean?

First, there is no “woke ideology.” I hate the word, personally. It’s a far-right word, and they ascribe to it whatever meaning they want. It doesn’t really have a meaning. It is the substance of wind. I’ve seen a lot of Celtic supporters use it online, and I honestly want to slap the piss out of them when I do. Because they don’t know what it means any more than the person who put it on that banner does.

I know what they think it means, though, and even in that context, it makes no sense whatsoever.

Let’s, for a moment, try to treat that banner as a serious message. Let’s start from the back, because it’s the best way to try to understand what’s going on in the heads of the people who put that up.

“Defend Europe,” it says. So, I have to presume that the people they want to defend Europe from are the non-Europeans. Like the Turks, for example, who they were playing against that night. That would make sense.

And “foreign ideologues”? Well, if you’re talking about Islamists, for example, or people who want to introduce Sharia law to Britain—and I hear this one a lot, and it’s preposterous—then it makes even more sense.

It’s a despicable banner in that context. It’s racist and bigoted to the nth degree. But it has a sort of coherence, even if you can’t call it an intellectual one, as most of the things believed by the people who subscribe to that view are as batty as anything the Ibrox fans have ever proposed on their own.

But this is where you lose me. To use the word “woke” in the context of those people is laughably ridiculous and betrays the utter, brainless stupidity of the people who thought that that word fitted in with their message.

The way “wokeness” is usually defined could not be further away from the ideology of the kind of people they’re talking about—people who think that homosexuality is an abomination that should be punished by death. People who think that women should have no rights at all unless given to them by a man. People who think that there should be no freedom of the press, that there should be no freedom of expression except that which praises God.

They’re the least woke people on the planet. They make the Trump government look like hysterical liberals seeing victims everywhere.

If it’s not Islamists, I’m not sure who we’re supposed to be defending Europe from. See, the word “woke” is very specifically a Western liberal word. The idea that they are so dead set against has all its roots in Western liberal democracy, and in particular in Europe, and in the European political experiment.

The whole culture war was created by the European and American right to combat mainstream American and European ideas. So, whomever they’re defending Europe from, they probably won’t be very woke.

If you listen to the current US government, they believe that “woke” is Western European. They believe that the EU is the birthplace of woke culture. They believe that the European Union is a grand socialist experiment.

Now, I’m all for defending that, and I’m all for defending the EU as an institution. But I get the impression that’s not what these guys have in mind.

Either way, the word “woke” is grossly misused, if we’re being generous. They don’t understand what the word means. They made the banner and they don’t even understand the words they put on it.

It sounds Trumpian. If they hadn’t included “Defend Europe” at the bottom of it, I would have thought that it was a Trumpian idea. I would have thought that that’s who they were. But to put “Defend Europe” at the bottom of that just makes it meaningless and dumb because Trump himself is not a great fan of Europe.

And it’s for these reasons that I think UEFA are most probably not going to sanction them for it, because how can you sanction people for being idiots?

It’s clear that they were trying to make a political statement. I think I can guess who they were trying to make a political statement about, but they lack any form of understanding about politics, and they certainly don’t have the sophistication to make one that makes any sense.

That banner is so staggeringly incoherent.

Now whatever message they were trying to send has been completely lost in the jumble of trying to work it out—an effort which I assure you, none of the people who were responsible for making it bothered to make.

If you wanted to advertise the intellectual poverty of your own fanbase, that’s the way you would choose to do it—with something like that.

And there’s something even funny here because I actually can think of one specific context in which it makes that banner makes sense. I mean, it makes absolute sense, but I’m 100% sure that this is not what they meant or how they meant it.

The people that they are trying to get investment capital from—the York family—hail from the most liberal city in the most liberal state in America. They’re also all Roman Catholics. They’ve done a lot for groups which seek to alleviate poverty, and they’re involved in progressive causes.

They’re also not very European. So, if you were perverted enough and had a warped enough mindset, you might see these liberal Catholics with all these strange woke ideas as being dangerous foreign ideologues. And since they are American, you might want to keep them out of Europe and out of European affairs as much as possible. But instead, they’re going to welcome them with open arms, and to me, I find that fascinating and yet another example of how dumb these people are. There is literally nothing in that banner that makes any sense to me. The more I look at it, the more I scrutinise it, the more problems with it I see, just on an intellectual basis.

I cannot find any underlying coherence to the argument they’re trying to make. Especially when you consider that a lot of their fans are far-right, little Brexiteers who are suddenly defending European values and European culture. Woke European culture at that. Which I’m fairly certain they’ve completely failed to comprehend.

Once again, I want to make it clear that I am not simply making a joke out of that banner. That banner is loathsome. That banner is despicable and disgusting because, as I say, if you take the word “woke” out of that banner, it makes perfect sense as a piece of undisguised and unremitting racism.

That shouldn’t be the afterthought, just because they were too stupid not to realise that a single word undercut the whole of the point they were trying to make.

I am appalled that our media has not made something of that banner. I am disgusted again with the moral cowardice of the people who make up the bulk of our press corps.

Under normal circumstances, I would expect UEFA to drop the hammer on that club as hard as it’s humanly possible because of that banner, especially in the context of who they were playing.

These are the people we’re inviting over to the house tomorrow.

These are the kind of people we’re going to have under our roof. And I don’t like that, and I can’t pretend to like that, and I can’t pretend to be happy about it. I know that our club wanted the maximum number of our fans to be able to travel to their ground, and in that, our club deserves praise for getting what amounts to a win. That’s at least 1500 more tickets than they ever wanted us to have.

But this is the flip side of it. This is what we have to live with.

These are the people we have to make welcome. And I wish to God that we could just push them as far away from us as possible. I wish to God that their own club had the sense and the strength to try to weed these people out of its ranks because they don’t belong in Scottish football grounds. They don’t belong in Scottish society. They are a blight and a stain on this whole country.

That, after all, is why we refer to them as Scotland’s shame.

Photo by Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images