Scotland’s match officials demand immunity from criticism. They should not get it.

A lot of people in this league, and a lot of people in Scottish football generally, could learn from the example of Martin O’Neill. That they choose not to is one of the great tragedies of the game here.

We all know what has been going on over the past week. We know the media has disgraced itself. We know Hearts have been dishonest in their dealings with the public and with the press. We know a lot of people take the Scottish football public for fools.

But what we have also seen is that low standards exist across the board, especially when it comes to accountability.

That is an issue at our own club too, of course. The board of directors which almost cost us a successful campaign remains in post. They have to go. There is no question about that. They cannot be allowed to think Martin O’Neill’s success belongs to them, or that it reflects well on them. They played no role in strengthening his hand. Their performance was pathetic. Some would say self-sabotaging.

They are done.

I think a lot of us feared the worst for this season at various points. But there were two games in particular where my heart sank: the defeat to Hibs and the defeat to Dundee United. The last two games we lost. The lesson O’Neill and the players took from those reversals was clear. Do better. Work harder. Find another level.

Now look around the Scottish football landscape. There is precious little of that in evidence anywhere else. It is because we have people at this club, at least in the football department, dedicated to high standards that we have come out on top.

Hearts want to lecture all of Scottish football about morality right now. But they appear to have acted in a deeply questionable way themselves.

The Scottish media wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants to demand high standards from others while proving, again and again, that it has very few of its own. The fact that Keith Jackson is the recent recipient of Journalist of the Year, and that the guy who invented the story about a Celtic fan with a knife at Tannadice was Young Journalist of the Year, tells you plenty about the level of the industry.

But even with competition this fierce, the award for no standards and no self-reflection may now go to the referees.

Their statement today was typically brazen. It was filled with criticisms of other people, but demanded that they not be criticised in return. It demanded higher standards from everyone else in the game, while offering no improvement of their own. Instead, it demanded that they not be scrutinised properly, then contained a threat that they will consider all options, including strike action, if present trends continue.

I don’t know about you, but when I read that, the first thing that popped into my head was Blazing Saddles, where Cleavon Little holds a gun to his own head and threatens to blow his brains out to escape a crowd of bigots who are hell-bent on doing it first.

I wonder if there wasn’t a single person who read that referees’ statement and thought: well, that would at least improve standards for a while.

To me, it is not a credible threat. It is a bluff dying to be called.

Instead of buckling to this pressure, which leans heavily on high-profile instances of referees facing intimidation, we should be making a distinction that the statement does not seem terribly interested in making.

Threats are unacceptable. Intimidation is unacceptable. Leaking personal details is unacceptable. Nobody should have to go through that because of a football match.

But criticism is not intimidation. Scrutiny is not abuse. Demanding higher standards is not a threat. Asking why officials are not more accountable is not a disgraceful act. It is what happens in every serious profession.

If referees want people to stop criticising them, the answer is not to threaten the whole game. The answer is to get better at what they do.

Take a leaf out of Martin O’Neill’s book. Work harder. Do more. Find ways to drive up standards.

Scrutiny should not be something to hide from unless you have something to hide.

To me, this is not dissimilar to arguments I often hear against the so-called surveillance state. Nobody wants cameras on every lamppost, but if you live in an unsafe neighbourhood, you would probably love to have cameras on every lamppost. If you live somewhere that already has them, my guess is you probably live in a safe neighbourhood.

Transparency is not the enemy of integrity. It is one of the ways you prove it.

If referees had to declare allegiances, there would be no serious question of any of them being accused of hidden bias. Only the most complete morons would continue to do so.

If officials had to take regular tests to prove they knew the laws of the game, and if those tests could result in demotion or even dismissal upon failure, standards would improve.

If our officials were better at what they did, there would be a stronger argument for making them full-time and paying them the kind of salaries officials get elsewhere.

If there was a transparent system through which officials who consistently make mistakes were sanctioned, demoted or removed in the way people are in almost every other profession, mistakes would happen less often.

In those circumstances, there would not be wall-to-wall criticism of officials. They would be seen to be doing their best. They would be seen as committed to high standards. They would be seen as accountable, and the SFA process would be transparent.

There would be far less need for the controversies we have seen in recent days and weeks.

Some of those controversies have clearly been overblown by people bitter about the outcome of this title race. But not all of them have been without at least a core of truth, because there have been high-profile mistakes. While those mistakes cost clubs money, status and occasionally even silverware, managers get fired on the basis of them.

Officials, meanwhile, remain largely unaccountable. The SFA marks its own homework, and it is a pretty brazen organisation when it acts that way.

That is the real issue.

Not whether referees should be protected from threats. Of course they should. Not whether officials should have their personal information protected. Of course they should. Not whether the game should condemn genuine intimidation. Of course it should.

But protection from abuse cannot become protection from scrutiny. Safety cannot become a shield against accountability. Sympathy cannot become immunity.

Martin O’Neill did not respond to adversity by demanding that nobody question him. He responded by fixing what was wrong. The players did not respond to defeat by threatening to down tools. They responded by winning big games when it mattered.

That is what high standards look like. Scottish football would be a lot healthier if more people understood that.

Right now, too many institutions in this country want authority without accountability. They want respect without earning it. They want criticism to stop without giving anyone a reason to believe improvement is coming.

That is not leadership. That is entitlement.

And Scottish refereeing has had more than enough of that already.

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