The Police Federation has blamed the Ibrox riot entirely on Celtic fans.

There is something deeply revealing about the way the events at Ibrox are now being discussed. You can see it in the language. You can see it in what is emphasised. But more importantly, you can see it in what is missing.

Because last night the head of the Police Federation of Scotland gave an interview in which he laid out a report he was given on what went wrong at Ibrox. In that report, and in the comments that followed, we are given a familiar list of explanations.

Overcrowding in the Broomloan Stand. Commanders not reacting quickly enough. Not enough police in the ground. Concerns about escalation. Celtic fans surging after a penalty shoot-out victory. Covers a lot of ground, right?

It sounds comprehensive. It sounds like a serious attempt to understand what went wrong. But it isn’t. Of course it isn’t.

Because the most important fact of the day is either buried or missing entirely. The violence did not start because Celtic fans went onto the pitch. It escalated because Ibrox supporters came onto the pitch to confront them. Everything else is secondary to that.

And when you remove that central fact, as that shameful interview did, you are not explaining the incident. You are rewriting it. You are lying about it.

Let’s deal with this properly.

Celtic supporters entered the pitch after a cup win. People can criticise that. They can debate it. They can condemn it if they want to take that position. However, it is not the same thing as violence. The reaction of the Ibrox fans elevated this into a major public order issue.

Celebrating a win on the pitch is not the same thing as supporters crossing the pitch with the clear intention of engaging with rival fans, players and officials. That is what happened next. Yet, in the excerpt we are given, where do they spell that out clearly? Where do they directly reference Ibrox supporters entering the pitch to attack? It isn’t there.

Instead, we get a sequence of events that gradually shifts the focus. Too many Celtic fans in the stand. A failure to react quickly enough. A surge onto the pitch after penalties. Officers injured. By the time you reach the end, the narrative guides you toward a very different conclusion than the one the facts support.

The problem becomes crowd size. It becomes policing levels. It becomes the emotional impact of the result.

Everything, that is, except the one thing that actually triggered the crisis: the acts of violence. That is not an accident.

This is how people build false equivalence. This is how they construct false narratives to replace the truth. It is a despicable fraud.

You take an incident where responsibility is relatively clear, and you flatten it.

You smooth it out and spread the blame so widely that it becomes impossible to pinpoint. Now everyone is part of the problem. Everyone except those who were the problem. Now it is “what transpired in the tie.” Now it is “a surge.” It is “overcrowding.”

The language does the work. Because language always does the work. No one wants to write the sentence that matters. No one wants to say plainly that one group of supporters came onto the pitch to celebrate and another group came onto it looking for confrontation. Because once you say that, everything else has to be viewed through that lens.

Take the point about injured police officers. We are told officers were hurt. That is serious. That demands a full investigation. But again, the obvious question hangs in the air. If the police line existed to separate Celtic supporters from the Ibrox crowd, and that line broke in the middle of a confrontation, then who injured those officers?

Look at the pictures. Those officers formed a protective line in front of our fans. So who, exactly, injured them? When people keep blaming our fans for this mess, they insult every one of those officers, because they let the attackers walk away scot-free.

So how did those injuries occur? That is the question that needs asked. You cannot raise that issue and then refuse to follow it through to its logical conclusion, unless, of course, you do not want to state the conclusion.

The same applies to the claim that Celtic fans “only did what they did because of the way the match went.” That line does a lot of work. Does that suggest the operation became so lax because nobody thought we would win?

It also allows people to fold everything that followed into that moment. As if the result itself set the tone for the entire sequence of events. It didn’t. The result explains why Celtic fans celebrated. It does not explain why violence followed. Those are two different things, and collapsing them into one creates part of the problem.

Then there is the broader narrative about policing levels, about reduced numbers over the last decade, about the balance between visibility and escalation.

There is truth in that.

There are legitimate questions about whether the system is stretched, whether planning was adequate, and whether commanders made the right calls. However, we should not overlook another possibility. Police Scotland may deliberately under-staff these events because it refuses to allocate enough resources and instead wants a confrontation over police numbers in the public square. That is very shady stuff.

If you plan for a high-risk game, with a full away stand, a knockout format, and the very real possibility of a dramatic finish, then you plan for more than crowd movement. You plan for confrontation. You plan for separation and for worst-case scenarios.

When you choose not to and then blame resources, you are effectively admitting you are not up to the job.

We have already discussed Police Scotland’s reluctance to police on the blog before.

But at the heart of this is a simple idea: you cannot fix a problem you refuse to name. What we are seeing here is not just a failure of policing on the day. It is also a failure to tell an honest story afterwards. In other words, it is a reluctance to describe events with the honesty they require.

Instead, we get safe language. Blurred lines. A generalised account of “disorder” that lumps everything together as part of the same issue when it is not.

By refusing to lay the blame at the Ibrox fans, and by treating Celtic fans as the sole aggressors, they paint the victims of a crime as the criminals and let the actual perpetrators off entirely.

That is a hell of a thing for the head of the Scottish Police Federation to do, and yesterday a journalist at The Herald allowed him to do exactly that.

Meanwhile, those fans he seemed so keen to leave out of the narrative were causing mayhem up in Aberdeen, again in full view of police officers who allowed them to run the streets.

Until people acknowledge this group as the problem, openly and consistently, we will keep seeing the same incidents, the same reports, and the same refusal to confront what sits right in front of us.

And nothing will change.

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