Celtic’s captain can appeal for unity if he likes, but this whole club is “us” and “them.”

After that fiasco, Callum McGregor once again spoke to the media. And he did what Callum increasingly does: he put all of our problems down to a simple series of faults which have nothing to do with tactics or strategy, but whose solutions lie in working harder, staying united and hoping to get through the situation.

I remember back in 1994, when John Smith died and Labour was electing its new leader, and for a time it looked as though the choice would be between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. In the end, that contest never happened.

Brown stepped aside, they did their little deal, Blair won the leadership and the country never got to find out which of the two would have been better at that particular moment.

Brown got the Chancellorship and a great deal of power behind the scenes. Blair got the throne, and much of the rest of the party was basically excluded from the decision between them. It was something Labour Party members were to get used to.

But nothing was as revealing about that decision, and about that time, as a comment Peter Mandelson made which I heard repeated several times over the years that followed. He talked about the need to choose the candidate who would appeal not simply to Labour’s traditional “customers”, but to all those the party wanted to attract as well.

The moment I heard that statement, all the alarms in my head should have gone off at once. It was disquieting even then. It is horrifying to read it now.

Customers. He had reduced choosing a party to run the country to something akin to going shopping for groceries.

The way he saw it, you picked the most appealing stuff from the shelf, never mind whether it was the healthy stuff, never mind whether it was the right stuff. You chose the thing with the best packaging and the best label and threw it into your shopping trolley.

But this is the part he probably didn’t fully think through: when you reduce people to customers, you sever the link between their intellectual choice and their emotional commitment.

And people wonder why areas which voted Labour for decades, places where the joke was that you could stick a monkey in a red rosette and people would vote for it, eventually went the other way.

I’m not going to go deep on Martin O’Neill’s comments last night to the female journalist who tried to interview him before the game. But his condescending, patronising, smart-arse manner was truly shocking to hear, and I don’t care how much pressure he’s under. It is his job to answer questions whether he likes them or not.

His suggestion that he would answer the question on Celtic TV, directly to Celtic fans, was equally offensive because what he was actually saying – whether he knew it or not, whether he meant it or not – was that he would reserve his explanation for those who had paid for the privilege of hearing it first-hand.

Because that, of course, is what Celtic TV is now: another part of the corporate club. In order to find out what the manager thinks, the club wants £50 a year.

If this is the new media policy at Celtic, that certain questions will only be answered on the club’s paywalled platform, then it is a decision which ought to be condemned by every single right-thinking person in the fan base and by the media itself.

I imagine it was a badly handled answer. I am choosing not to believe there was anything more sinister behind it, such as a scripted advertisement for Celtic’s paid-for platform or some announcement of a bold new media strategy, because that would be plainly stupid, wouldn’t it? If Celtic believes it can control the narrative by restricting what questions the media can ask, it is absolutely wrong.

The optics of that were shocking last night, and that policy would last about two minutes if they implemented it across the board, with O’Neill answering only the questions that he wasn’t saving for those sitting behind the paywall.

But it all feeds in, you see.

It all feeds into a perception, and that perception is why I find Callum McGregor’s comments last night more amusing than inspiring. Because he can’t possibly be so naive as to think everyone is pulling together and heading in the same direction here.

There is no “we” at Celtic at the moment. There is no “us”. There is only the leadership of the club and everybody else. Nobody I know feels any real sense of togetherness at Celtic right now. Nobody feels as though we’re all part of the same endeavour.

We, the fans, have been reduced to the status of customers.

We’re no longer stakeholders. We’re no longer equal partners in anything. We’re just the people who buy the product, which now apparently includes answers to questions that we’re entitled to as supporters anyway.

Now they too have to be purchased, lest we get nothing at all.

You know, for years people were hawking around various tawdry ideas about membership schemes and everything else at Celtic. All of it had to be paid for, of course. If you weren’t part of the scheme, then you weren’t part of the club.

It didn’t matter if you were a supporter who had given your entire life to Celtic. It didn’t matter if you had barely missed a home game in decades.

If you hadn’t joined the membership scheme, you were not going to be treated in the same way as someone who had.

But that’s how the club has always operated anyway.

It has its favourites. It has the supporter organisations it talks to and those which it absolutely ignores. It has always handpicked little groups to come in and sit across the table from it, but that was never about altruism. That was about control. And Celtic exercised that control very well over the years. That was before there was a very vocal community of our fans which found its own voice and then gave that voice to other people.

Control is gone. Those days are over.

All those little handpicked groups do now is breed resentment everywhere else. It creates the perception of an us and them. Its latest fan representation exercise was nothing but a sham, another attempt to make it look as though the club was listening when, in fact, all the details of that scheme proved was that it was trying to grab back control.

Nobody inside Celtic wants to hear the voices of authentic supporters.

They don’t want to know what it is we think. They don’t care to hear people tell them they’re wrong, and so they will never voluntarily sit in a room with people who will tell them they are wrong.

When these people have worked so hard to split this club into those who are inside the tent and those who are not, when they have worked so hard to alienate and isolate entire sections of the fan base, when they have worked so hard to kick out fan media and treat fan media as a whole with soaring contempt, appeals to unity sound hollow and faintly ridiculous.

When nepo-baby Desmond sits in front of the AGM and attacks the people in that room, and by extension people across the wider Celtic family outside it, talk about unity means nothing. There is no “us” here. There is no “we”.

There is the board of directors, a club leadership which has gone out of its way to sever that link and then there’s everyone else. It’s us and them.

It has presented Celtic as the province of a select few, with the rest of us reduced to those who turn up and pay our money. That’s what we are now.

Celtic has become insular, and that means Celtic has become smaller. Instead of this being a community, the boardroom has sought to sow division, discontent and disharmony across the fan base. I think it believed that would ward off the consequences of its grotesque mismanagement, but those consequences are on the way in a form it did not expect, in a form it never saw coming, but which any student of history should have known was likely.

Labour worked when it was a partnership, when it was a broad coalition which had the left sitting at the table, when voters were treated as engaged citizens deserving of the best offer the party could make rather than as mindless consumers plucking things from shelves. The direction of Labour after that period became increasingly obvious to people like me, and I was gone within ten years, after a leadership which no longer felt that it had to listen to anybody took us into a war.

By 2010, Labour wasn’t even in power. Fourteen years in the wilderness was the answer the public eventually delivered to what it thought it had got out of the deal.

But that’s what happens when you turn people into consumers. You give them choices. You give them other things to do and other decisions to make. You sever the emotional bond. And it’s not just in the words you use; it’s in the things you do.

You centralise power. You put it in ever fewer hands. You betray the people on whom you depend. You piss on them from a great height because you calculate that they’ve got nowhere else to go.

That’s a form of emotional blackmail. That’s a form of coercion. It’s exactly what the Celtic board currently tries to do to all of us. But the moment it reduces us to just people who spend money, and believes it doesn’t have to listen to what we want or respect us in any way, there comes a time when people act accordingly.

So, I don’t want to hear Callum McGregor or anyone else putting the onus on the fans to merely show up and cheer. I don’t want to hear talk about unity and togetherness. It’s a phoney construct. It doesn’t exist at Celtic. It’s us and them.

And they made it that way.

The reaction to last night’s game online was apathy, not anger. People are wearily resigned to a looming disaster. That ought to frighten the people running Celtic far more than rage ever could, because anger at least means people still care enough to scream.

But it doesn’t hurt the way it used to.

Sunday could be a very long and horrible day, and if the people sitting in those executive seats grow frustrated because the fans are frustrated, if they grow angry because the supporters are furious about what they’re watching on the pitch and about what they’re being delivered off it, then the board should simply put aside its hurt feelings.

These are customers, after all.

And there are always more customers. Right?

Isn’t that how it works? If this lot become discontented and walk away, there will always be others willing to pick up their tickets. That’s the calculation, after all. And it’s as dangerous and stupid as anything else these people believe.

No, Callum. This is not going to come down to unity and everybody blindly walking in the same direction. We are no longer walking in the same direction. We’re no longer even facing in the same direction. It’s only us and them now.

Our real enemies are inside the walls. It’s as I said about that night in Linz.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

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