Leckie’s latest attack on Celtic is pitiful and idiotic.

Yesterday, my colleague on the podcast, Eric Knott, put up a piece on Bill Leckie. I read it today and agreed with every single word in it.

Leckie’s piece was a diatribe against Martin O’Neill in which he once again tried to position himself as the voice of the moral majority, and I am so sick of this prick taking that line. I am so sick of the smugness and superiority he adopts towards other people because, on the few occasions when I am exposed to his work, that seems to be what so much of it consists of.

He does a little thing towards the end of the piece which I have seen so many times now that it has become its own parody. He spends three-quarters of the column ranting about our club and then sticks in a passage criticising the club across the city as well, as if that establishes some great neutrality.

It is a joke. The piece in question was an attempt to blacken the name of Martin O’Neill and accuse him of engaging in petty point-scoring when O’Neill was responding to a question about something the Ibrox club had done which he found unacceptable: the decision to offer Celtic just 300 tickets. Leckie nevertheless has to dress this up as O’Neill falling below some kind of standard. Whose standard?

Bill Leckie’s standard, apparently, which is not a standard that anyone should be aspiring to. He presents his case as if he is simply sick and tired of the way the two Glasgow clubs behave towards each other and Scottish football in general, yet his outrage is so selectively directed, and so often directed against Celtic, that it is impossible for me to take the supposed neutrality seriously.

Very few people I know have ever bought this pretence that he is some disinterested observer who happens to support a third club. When you look at the content of his work down through the years, that line becomes increasingly difficult to swallow.

As we have always pointed out, there are very few genuine neutrals in Scottish football. Even those who pretend to stand above the whole Glasgow thing tend to have preferences, sympathies and dislikes, and it has been obvious for years where Leckie’s own feelings lie. If he is not outright an Ibrox fan, he certainly has no love for our club.

Once again, he reduces the whole argument to the most simplistic concept available: the plague-on-both-your-houses idea. He is hardly alone in doing that. It is pushed by plenty of people in Scottish football who simply do not want to judge individual incidents on their merits or judge the two clubs as separate entities.

If you treat the two as one indistinguishable entity, then whatever problems one side has can simply be shared equally between them. You never have to decide who actually caused a particular problem, who escalated it or who is principally responsible for resolving it.

Most conveniently of all, you never have to take a side even when the facts of the individual dispute require you to.

Yet while talking the talk of a neutral, Leckie clearly does have a preference and clearly does take sides. He does it frequently enough that it is not your imagination if you think you have spotted it, and this piece was no exception.

He talks about the ticket dispute as if both sides caused it, although the decision which triggered this particular row was made by the Ibrox club.

He talks about the dispute as if Celtic is perpetuating it, when the immediate controversy exists because the club across the city decided to offer 300 tickets and Martin O’Neill was asked what he thought about that decision.

He talks about the toxic atmosphere and sectarianism surrounding the game at Ibrox in the broadest possible terms, as if everybody involved contributed equally to everything that happened. He talks about the events of that day as though Celtic supporters were somehow the trigger for the whole thing, when the post-match disorder which made the game exceptional involved masked supporters coming onto the pitch, flares being thrown and serious disorder after Celtic’s victory.

This is one of the things the Scottish media does constantly. It picks the one spectacular incident where it can identify misconduct involving both supports and then treats that as representative of an equal problem while ignoring a much longer history of behaviour which occurs when Celtic is not even there.

Where is the equivalent outrage every single time poisonous banners appear elsewhere? Where is the sustained discussion about banners and displays which clearly draw on anti-immigrant or sectarian imagery, such as the one the Union Brats unveiled at Pittodrie?

I have written repeatedly in the last month about anti-immigrant sentiment; the protests we are seeing on certain streets and the dangerous attempts to divide this country into us and them. When imagery from that same political culture appears around football, we should not suddenly become incapable of recognising it.

Sometimes you do not need an accompanying paragraph printed on a bedsheet to understand the message. Context matters. Imagery matters. People who spend their lives around Scottish football know perfectly well what certain symbolism and references are intended to evoke.

Leckie knows that too, just as everyone working in Scottish football knows it, yet so much of this seems to disappear into that quiet area of things we apparently do not discuss. It is part of the same pattern we see repeatedly, where the sins of the Ibrox fanbase are airbrushed out of existence unless there is some way to attach Celtic to the same article.

There is always this strange sense that certain things cannot be discussed too directly because it might point the spotlight too firmly in one direction. Leckie wants to talk about hatred, but almost always within the context of two clubs simultaneously, and I do not believe his own attitude towards Celtic supporters allows him to view this objectively.

He has railed against Republican singing, and he is certainly not alone in doing so. What he will not do is differentiate between political expression and hate speech when he happens to despise the politics being expressed.

Perhaps I should not expect too much sophistication from him.

Back in April, I wrote about Leckie branching out into political journalism with what I called hilarious results. His suggestion that political candidates should effectively put aside party labels, wear plain white T-shirts and spend more time talking about themselves than policies was so ludicrous, so banal, so facile and so completely detached from how politics actually works that it deserved mockery rather than serious analysis.

So, it is no great surprise that he struggles with distinctions here either, but it does tell us something about how seriously we should take him when he appoints himself Scotland’s moral philosopher.

Like far too many people in the mainstream media, he pointedly refuses to address the weekly torrent of hate which can come from the Ibrox stands with anything resembling the intensity he reserves for Celtic.

He does not tackle the behaviour of supporters across the city in a sustained way except in the context of the Old Firm, where it can conveniently be lumped together with us as a form of balance which would otherwise be absent from articles doing little except attacking Celtic.

His contention that everybody should stop acting like children and get around a table is no different from the nonsense I heard from Tony Watt the other night, when he said both sides should simply sit down and talk. As if that solves everything. As if Celtic has not tried to talk these issues through repeatedly.

When the person on the other side of the table does not want the same outcome you do, what exactly are you supposed to achieve by endlessly returning to the table? Keep banging your head against the same brick wall?

Apparently, that is what some people would like Celtic to continue doing, but I cannot be alone in thinking that eventually it becomes a waste of everybody’s time.

Leckie is determined to present both sides as equally culpable when anybody who looks at this particular dispute objectively for five minutes can see that the immediate decision at the centre of it came from one club.

Apparently, our manager should not even be allowed to have a strong opinion on that. That is just about as stupid a contention as you will ever encounter.

Yet it is the hypocrisy which astonishes me most. Once again, we are reading someone deliver the plague-on-both-your-houses sermon, telling us how horrible the atmosphere is and how terrible these clubs are, when a substantial part of Scottish football’s problem could be addressed simply by forcing one particular institution and its support to confront behaviour which has been normalised for far too long.

Make that club accountable for the songs coming from its stands. Make it accountable for the banners supporters bring, for the conduct which surrounds some of these fixtures and for a culture which too often gets excused, rationalised or ignored.

You would make Scottish football better simply by doing that, and I think you would make this country better as well.

I am not saying this is an entirely one-sided problem.

I am saying that I believe the overwhelming majority of it comes from one side, and that even part of the problem which exists within elements of our own support has grown in an environment where hateful behaviour has been normalised for generations and people have concluded that answering it in kind is acceptable.

It isn’t. But pretending both sides contribute equally is not the answer either.

Leckie is not the only person who does this.

Just the other day Graham Spiers was challenged about old footage of Derek McInnes singing a sectarian song during his Ibrox playing days, and Spiers reached for the familiar defence that he knows McInnes personally and does not believe there is a bigoted bone in his body. That is broadly the same kind of personal-character defence which he has offered for Ally McCoist in the past.

It always reminds me of the scene in Dirty Harry where the mayor challenges Harry Callahan over an earlier shooting and asks how he could possibly establish that somebody intended to commit rape. Callahan replies that when a naked guy with an erection and a butcher knife is chasing a woman down an alley, he figures the man is not collecting for the Red Cross.

Crude? Absolutely. But I know exactly what he means.

I am tired of being told that somebody can repeatedly behave in a certain way and that we are nevertheless forbidden from drawing any conclusion about what that behaviour tells us. If we cannot judge people at least partly by what they say and do, how exactly are we supposed to form any judgement about them at all?

This is the warped justification Scottish football repeatedly reaches for when confronting conduct which would otherwise be regarded as unacceptable. If equivalent songs targeted other ethnic or religious communities, I seriously doubt we would see the same endless willingness to explain away the people singing them as basically decent guys.

Far too much of the culture here is still see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil, even when faced with people behaving in ways which deserve serious scrutiny.

That is why I have no problem calling out Leckie. He pretends to be the voice of righteousness, but too often he uses that platform simply to attack this club, and in this case our manager as well.

He builds simplistic straw men for his argument and then pretends that what concerns him is the wider issue of hatred in Scottish football.

Yet he, like many others, has spent decades apparently failing to notice regular manifestations of the very thing he claims to despise. He hides behind the idea that both clubs are as bad as each other, an argument which is as lazy as it is intellectually dishonest when the facts of individual cases tell you otherwise.

I was very glad Eric tackled the piece because otherwise I would probably never have known what Leckie had written. I do not read Bill Leckie regularly because I want to keep intact whatever brain cells I have left, and reading his work, with the dreadful grammar and painful sentence construction, often feels like an occupational hazard.

It is the same reason I would avoid reading people like Gary Keown and Keith Jackson if I did not have to do it for work. Some people spend their working lives in mine shafts, around dangerous chemicals or crab fishing in stormy seas. I read sections of the Scottish football press that I know do me irreparable harm. We all have our crosses to bear.

The hypocrisy which comes from some of these people ought to be called out every time.

I am sick of sharing a country with people this wilfully blind, deaf and stupid, and the fact that so many of them work in the mainstream press says something about the wider culture. But it says even more about the media industry itself and how far it has fallen from standards which, once upon a time, it at least pretended to take seriously.

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