Bill Leckie exposes himself yet again with his latest Green Brigade rant.

Bill Leckie is one of those loathsome people who practically begs to be mocked.

We’ve already covered him on here recently. He dipped into politics earlier this week with one of the most bizarre and laughable ideas I’ve seen in a long time, and now he is back again, this time commenting on the Green Brigade returning to Celtic Park. His comments are every bit as ridiculous as you would expect.

He says he does not want to hear 90 minutes of IRA karaoke.

I love that he cares. I genuinely do. Honestly, I love that he suddenly cares so deeply about what gets sung in Scottish football stadiums. I love how animated he is by it. I love that he wants people to take responsibility for their behaviour and that he wants clubs to take responsibility for what they allow in their grounds. What I especially love is that he is warning Celtic that the club could embarrass itself over all this. Wonderful.

I would just love to see these people stick to their guns. I would love to see them show a little consistency. How good would it be if they treated everything sung in grounds up and down the country with the same seriousness?

But of course, they do not. Of course no one does.

Because if they did, then every single week the press would be highlighting the bile that pours out of the stands at Ibrox. Since they plainly do not want to do that, I find myself having to engage this subject in a wider way.

Leckie’s comments are idiotic for several reasons.

More than anything, though, he objects to the Green Brigade because their politics do not align with his. So, this is really another political rant from him, whether he knows it or not. Like a lot of nitwits with strong opinions, he lacks the intellectual horsepower to follow them to their obvious conclusion.

IRA chants are not the same as racist chants.

That is the point, and it should not need saying.

Some people may find Republican songs distasteful. Some may find them abhorrent. Fine. I find Leckie’s own politics abhorrent, especially after his throwaway remark earlier in the week about “22 genders” being represented in the Scottish Parliament.

That is small-minded, parochial bigotry.

I will mock him for holding that view. I will criticise him for holding that view. But I would not suggest that he should be forbidden from expressing it. It makes him sound like a clown, but it also exposes the wider ideology behind everything else he says.

That is why I am using it here as a magnifying glass on his anti-Green Brigade comments.

He put that view in the public square. He made it relevant. So, let’s examine it.

I have never accepted for a second the argument that one side is as bad as the other because one sings about being up to their knees in blood while the other sings songs commemorating the Armed Struggle. Those are not the same thing. There is no moral equivalence there. One expresses a sentiment of racial and cultural supremacy. The other expresses a political position tied to a conflict.

You can dislike that. You can disagree with it and even condemn it. But you cannot honestly pretend it is the same as naked hatred.

People who reduce the Republican movement to mere gangsterism or criminality ignore history.

The ANC were once called terrorists and criminals. The PLO were once labelled terrorists and criminals. The Taliban, absurdly enough, now deal with the same Western powers who once defined them differently when it suited them. History is full of movements that powerful interests branded one thing and later treated very differently when circumstances changed.

The Republican movement in Ireland emerged from conditions that no other citizens of these islands were expected to tolerate.

There were civil rights abuses. Political gerrymandering. There was religious discrimination in jobs and housing. They had rotten electoral structures. There was a sectarian quasi-paramilitary police force. Additionally, there were arrests without trial and detention without proper recourse.

You can go on and on.

And when Sean Mac Stiofáin, the former chief of staff of the Provisional IRA said that oppression breeds resistance, he was stating the obvious.

People who insist it was all just criminality make the same mistake Thatcher made in the 1980s.

She tried to frame republicans as criminals, which led to the 81 Hunger Strike.

Then she contradicted herself completely by unleashing military force in response to IRA operations.

You cannot claim you are dealing with ordinary criminals and then deploy the machinery of war.

That proves the point the Republican movement made for years, that this was a war. The Good Friday Agreement was built on that reality. Wars end with political settlements. Prisoners go home. That is how it works.

So, I do not care whether Bill Leckie likes Republican songs or not. They are political expression.

Support for the Republican cause may not be to his taste, but whichever party he puts an X beside at election time is almost certainly not to mine either because based on his recent comments, I think we can safely infer it will not be some great bastion of progressive politics.

He has every right not to like Republican songs. He has every right to criticise them. But he sounds like a stinking, snivelling hypocrite when he starts banging on about 90 minutes of republican karaoke while 90 minutes of racist karaoke pours out of another Glasgow ground and he says nothing.

And he is not alone in that.

The mainstream media here has a long and ugly record of ignoring that issue until it suits them to mention it. Then, when they do mention it, they fall back on the same nonsense Leckie is pushing here. Two sides of the same coin. Moral equivalence. As if there were any. Listening to that rubbish year after year is exhausting.

If you want to talk about singing, then let’s talk about it properly.

Let’s have the conversation in full.

Let’s separate political expression from a hate crime. Let us ask why people in this country still deem it acceptable to sing about murdering Catholics. Because if people sang about murdering Jews, Muslims or any other religious group, the reaction would be instant.

Games would stop. Authorities would shut down entire sections of stands. They might close stadiums. Police would drag people to court. And everyone knows it. So let us stop pretending we do not know it here. Let’s stop pretending this twerp has any kind of point.

I do not often deal with this subject in quite this way because most of these hacks have the basic sense to keep their mouths shut. Whether they like Republican singing or not, they usually avoid talking about it too openly. Not because they are frightened, but because they know exactly where it leads. It leads here, to this comparison. It leads to a conversation they do not want to have.

So, when one of them is stupid enough to blunder into it the way this clown has, then yes, let’s have the debate. Let’s do it properly. Unless you are a moral coward.

But Leckie is more than a moral coward. He is also a complete idiot.

He has wandered into territory no one else in his own trade wants to touch, exposed his own hypocrisy, and reminded us all why he works for that low-rent tabloid in the first place. Let’s be blunt. He is not sharing a writers’ room with the best and the brightest.

This is the newspaper that hired Katie Hopkins. That is his level.

And if it were not for papers that live in the gutter and pander to the lowest common denominator, he might actually have to work for a living.

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