I had further communication with a spokesperson from the Renfield St Stephen’s Centre (RSSC) last night.
In the aftermath of the Police Scotland statement, I was keen to ascertain the precise sequence of events that had led to the Call It Out meeting being cancelled.
Unfortunately, the main person at RSSC involved in that (the manager) is on vacation this week.
Consequently, I have been dealing with a senior person in the RSSC hierarchy, but he doesn’t have the day to day responsibilities there.
For the avoidance of doubt, over the last 24 hours, he has been helpful, polite and open with me.
So when I asked him about the role of the Police in the cancellation he said this to me:
“I think the police had already been contacted by the Manager. How that fed into and influenced our discussion I can’t recall. Did it amount to ‘advice’? I myself can’t be sure. So it’s difficult to answer the first question.”
He was keen to reiterate that the RSSC had acted in good faith and that they were:
“…motivated by a wish to protect public order and exercise our duty of care towards employees and customers.”
From my vantage point, there is no doubt that this is the case.
He concluded with:
“We are very disappointed that the event did not proceed, as it is always our intention to protect freedom of speech, to support the expression of a wide range of opinion and to oppose bigotry, I would not like the Centre to be represented as complicit in anything to the contrary.”
Any reasonable person would concur that the RSSC is blameless in this sad affair.
The blame squarely lies with those that the RSSC spokesperson called “extremists”.
Ironically their actions they have demonstrated a clear need for Call It Out.
The meeting goes ahead.
It could be the beginning of something.
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Phil , you mentioned in an earlier piece that you had removed your ‘trio’ from Scotland so was unaware if the conditions prevailed that you had experienced as a child .
I am not of recent Irish Catholic stock ( several generations removed ) but grew up as a Catholic in the East End of Glasgow throughout the 50’s/60’s . Yes , there was open discrimination towards the Catholic community ( ”What school did you go to ?” was an early question when applying for work or meeting new people )
Happily , in my experience , this has reduced considerably due to many factors – far fewer people openly religious , better education , more tolerance ….However , there is certainly a hard core element within our society ( O.O. and an extreme minority among the Rangers/Sevco support ) that refuse to move their attitudes to Catholics /Irish into the 19thC never mind the 21stC.
They have been tolerated for far too long , partly because society in general has moved on and assumed that , in time , these neanderthal views would die out too . Perhaps they are and what we are seeing in the last wee while is the death throes of this intolerant minority . They do not intend to end with a whimper . They are similar to the extremists in other places who had ruled the roost ( or thought they did , but were simply used by the elite to divide and conquer the masses ) and as their influence waned , struggled vainly , to keep the status quo .
I am not naive enough to think that all such intolerance will eventually die out – people are people and we all have our own prejudices , but perhaps in the next few years we will see this minority diminish further .
Unfortunately, the inescapable fact here is that the “extremists”, I would call them sectarian bigots/racists, won. Despite the excuses and politeness and acting in good faith from RSSC – the bigots got what they wanted which was the event not to be held there. Now it may still be be held somewhere else, but that doesn’t matter because all that regular folk will take from this is “don’t get involved with stuff like this because you don’t want to bring trouble on yourself”. And sadly, RSSC are complicit in this by caving to the intimidation!