Shame on The Record for their latest piece on far-right links to Ibrox.

Today, the Daily Record ran one of those astonishing articles, astonishing for the lack of journalistic integrity at its heart, for the lack of fundamental examination of the most serious point, and for the way it went out of its way to avoid putting the focus where it belonged and confronting the gamut of implications contained in the piece.

The article was about one of those football fan Fight Club-type events held in a wood somewhere south of the border, involving football hooligans from different parts of Europe. These things have been going on for years, and that is not what made this one different or genuinely newsworthy.

What made this one different was that people involved subsequently posed together with a swastika flag, while photographs also showed members of the Hansa Rostock contingent giving Nazi salutes and wearing neo-Nazi clothing. The Scottish group involved was Rangers Riot Crew, alongside hooligans connected to the Germans and French club Lyon.

That is the story. Not football hooligans fighting in forests, but far-right extremism attaching itself to football hooligan culture. That distinction matters enormously.

I have written about this already.

Far-right organisations are gaining a foothold around sections of football culture, and we have to be very careful about how we discuss it. We have seen far-right mobilisation on streets elsewhere in Britain, including masked protests in places like Portsmouth and Dover, and we have also seen warning signs around Glasgow football.

That is why my first problem with the Record’s article is the framing. Its headline talks about “‘Fight Club’ football hooligans” and its opening describes a “squad of Scottish football hooligans”. Only then does it identify the Rangers Riot Crew connection.

Needless to say, this is not a minor editorial decision. It immediately creates a wider frame than the story itself requires. It takes a specific group, from a specific football club, involved in an event where Nazi imagery was openly displayed, and initially turns it into a story about “Scottish football hooligans”.

Not quite plague on both your houses. Plague on everybody’s house.

And here is where the article becomes even harder to defend. For a while, it actually pivots towards the real story.

It talks about the swastika, it talks about neo-Nazis, it talks about the far right, and it quotes people whose expertise and concern is not football supporters battering each other in woods, but the growth of extremist organisations and the possibility that football hooligan networks are becoming entangled with them.

Scotland’s Community Safety Minister is quoted discussing far-right and racist hatred. A source explicitly links the rise of far-right politics in Europe and Britain with the emergence of these fighting groups.

That is the real story, and the Record knows it is the real story. That is why those are the people it interviews. Nobody needs a government minister to explain that young idiots arranging to punch one another in a forest is stupid.

The reason politicians, police and people concerned with extremism become relevant is because this event crossed into something much darker. It involved Nazi imagery, people associated with extremist politics and a wider background of far-right activity which is increasingly visible in public life.

That is what elevates it from an ugly little football story into a serious societal one.

But then something very revealing happens. The article pivots back.

Suddenly we are hearing again about previous organised fights involving Celtic, Hibs, Falkirk and St Mirren supporters. And that changes the frame all over again.

Now we are back to “football hooligans”. Now we are back to the general phenomenon of young men arranging fights. Now everybody gets dragged back into the story.

And the actual issue, the far-right ideological component which made this particular gathering so disturbing, starts to disappear underneath the wider football narrative.

That is the part I find dishonest, because these are two separate problems.

One is football hooliganism. It is old, it is stupid, and it has existed for decades. If consenting groups of idiots want to arrange meetings miles away from stadiums to batter seven bells out of one another, I struggle to find much sympathy for anyone involved.

But the other problem is far bigger.

The other problem is the intersection between organised football violence and far-right political extremism. Nazi flags are not simply another feature of a football fight. Nazi salutes are not just hooligan theatre. Far-right political networks are not interchangeable with football casual culture.

When those worlds overlap, that is a different story and a much more important one.

The Record could have separated the two. In fact, it should have. It could have said that organised forest fights involving football hooligans are an existing phenomenon, but that this particular event raised a different and much more serious concern because of the far-right symbolism and people involved.

Instead, by repeatedly returning to other clubs and other fights, it blurs that distinction. And once you blur it, the shame gets spread around.

Celtic supporters have been involved in pre-arranged fights. Hibs supporters have. St Mirren supporters have. Falkirk supporters have. What does that have to do with Rangers Riot Crew members appearing at an event where participants posed with a swastika flag? You cannot use unrelated football hooliganism to dilute a story about far-right extremism.

And yet that is effectively what the framing does.

Because if the article stayed focused exclusively on the important part, it would have to keep asking uncomfortable questions about one particular football environment and one club. The Scottish contingent at this event came from Rangers Riot Crew.

And this does not emerge in a cultural vacuum.

At Ibrox, we have already seen a notorious banner reading “Keep woke foreign ideologies out – defend Europe”, which UEFA classified as racist and/or discriminatory. The club themselves called that display shameful and embarrassing, and UEFA fined the club with a suspended stand closure.

That banner was displayed in the area occupied by the Union Bears.

The group already has established links with serious organised crime, so there are warning lights flashing around parts of the fan culture at Ibrox, and serious journalism should be examining them rather than constantly widening the frame until everybody in Scottish football somehow shares the stain.

Hansa Rostock understood the seriousness immediately.

When the German club learned what had happened and saw the far-right imagery, it did not publish some woolly statement about football supporters generally. It said right-wing extremism, Nazi symbolism and dehumanising ideology had no place at the club. It informed regional police, federal police and state-security authorities, and reports in Germany said the club was examining sanctions against those involved.

That is how you recognise what the story actually is.

You isolate the problem, you identify it and you confront it. You do not dissolve it into a wider discussion about everybody else’s hooligans. The Ibrox club has been approached for comment on the latest incident, and what it does next matters because it has already had opportunities to confront toxic elements within its support.

After the March Scottish Cup game, the level of violence at Ibrox was so serious that the independent review warned that potentially life-threatening consequences had narrowly been avoided. Masked supporters entered the pitch armed, there was violence, and there were weapons and missiles thrown at our fans.

The consequences from that day are still being felt now, including the absence of away fans from this weekend’s match. Into that environment, the Ibrox club initially proposed giving Celtic only 300 tickets for Sunday’s cup tie. Celtic rejected it.

Thank God. Because whatever anyone says about allocations, putting a tiny group of Celtic supporters into an increasingly hostile environment would have created its own obvious security concerns. Not that they give a toss about that, as we’ve already found out when we asked them to address security concerns before.

Now there will be none of our supporters there.

As Paulina has already written, that means that the risk to Celtic’s players, coaches and staff becomes even greater. And this is why the wider far-right question cannot simply be filed under “football fans behaving badly”.

It is a matter of time before political extremism and football violence overlap in a way which produces something much worse than some clownish high-jinx in a forest.

An Ibrox-linked hooligan group travelled south. They took part in a pre-arranged fight alongside groups from Germany and France. Afterwards, participants posed together in front of a swastika flag, while other photographs showed neo-Nazi imagery and Nazi salutes.

That is the story. So, to keep dragging Celtic, Hibs, Falkirk and St Mirren into it pivots away from the ideological component and back towards the general history of football Fight Clubs. But they are not the story. Far-right infiltration of football against the backdrop of increasingly aggressive political activism is the story.

But the real story gets airbrushed out. Not by refusing to mention it. That would be too obvious. You mention it, you acknowledge it, you quote experts discussing it, then you surround it with enough generic football stuff that the reader is left with the impression that this is simply another instalment in a nationwide hooligan trend.

For the record, in this case there were no Celtic groups involved in this gathering. There were no Hibs groups involved. There were no St Mirren groups involved. There were no Falkirk groups involved. The Scottish group identified in the reporting was the Rangers Riot Crew, and the participants subsequently posed with Nazi symbolism.

The Record chose to drag the rest of Scottish football into the headline to soften the blow.

I have seen some cowardly stuff from our media in my time, but this one blows me away. The lack of social responsibility is breathtaking, and the refusal to keep the focus on the problem where it actually exists is gobsmacking. And this matters beyond football rivalry. That is precisely why I am so angry about it.

This is not about getting one over on the Ibrox club. It is not about scoring Celtic points. It is about a dangerous political movement increasingly looking for spaces where anger, violence, grievance and tribal identity already exist.

Football is an obvious recruiting ground. Ibrox has proved to be fertile soil for this before. That process is not just already happening; it’s here and the media has a duty to identify it clearly and relentlessly.

Not after somebody gets killed. Not after a riot. Not after organised political violence spills onto the streets. Now.

The Record knew what the real story was. You can tell because the people it spoke to knew what the real story was. Then the article wandered back into the safer, easier narrative about football hooligans generally.

And in doing so, it did exactly what our media does far too often. It turned a specific problem into everybody’s problem, which is another way of making sure it becomes nobody’s responsibility.

Shame on everyone at that rag for the cowardly way they did this.

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