An Orwellian anniversary

On this day ten years ago something happened that many had thought was impossible.

Rangers FC, the club established in 1872, was placed in administration.

It is worth noting that on the 14^{th of} February 2012 there was no mention in the Court of Session about a “holding company vehicle” or, my personal favourite, an “engine room subsidiary”.

Those creative fantasies would come later.

The events that followed was also a terrible reckoning of the Fitba Fourth Estate.

Throughout my work on the Rangers story, I never thought it likely that a journalist in another country would be across it while the local media in Glasgow were stumped.

Instead, they had wilfully looked away and hoped that it would all pan out.

This piece could have a hyperlink on every line, but there is no need as this site is fully searchable.

Anyone who is a new visitor here will be able to see the accuracy of my contemporaneous reporting throughout 2011.

By the start of 2012, my regular readers were in no doubt that an insolvency event at Ibrox was inevitable before the season was finished.

As the news broke the Ibrox klanbase became a case study in the Kübler-Ross model of bereavement.

Many were in denial that such a thing could happen to their club.

It didn’t take long for most of them to move effortlessly to stage two.

Rather bizarrely, some Rainjurrz chaps focused on my reports as a causative factor in the insolvency event.

Despite the post hoc ergo propter hoc their club was undoubtedly IN hock.

Although I tend not to sympathise with fascists and racists the Ibrox klanbase had a point regarding the narrative that they had been fed.

They and been regaled with ripping yarns apropos Craig Whyte’s stealth wealth.

At the start of that season, there was much talk of “front-loading” of the football budget.

On Rangers, message boards names of star players were earnestly discussed as possible acquisitions for the now cash-rich club.

Mr Whyte had indeed paid off the bank and got the club for the monetary consideration of £1.

Despite the warning signs the rather limited fellows on the sports desks didn’t want to follow follow the money.

Hector was hovering and in August 2011 Sheriff Officers crossed the threshold at Ibrox.

I had received information from an Ibrox source that this was about to happen.

It was necessary to capture this event as it occurred.

Consequently, I arranged to have a freelance photographer, a fellow NUJ member, waiting for the two chaps to arrive.

I tipped off another freelancer who did work for the Scottish Sun and allowed my guy to sell the images that I didn’t want to the Daily Record.

The photographs of the Sheriff Officers at Ibrox were up on this site first, although I am aware that they were grabbed by at least one Scottish title.

That notwithstanding it was a triumph for the Fifth Estate.

The Hugh Dallas email story two years earlier had been a harbinger of an altered media landscape.

It was further proof that a named journalist, using an independent online outlet could play a role in a developing story.

The Sheriff Officers were there on behalf of HMRC and then monies owed meant that Rangers should not have been granted a UEFA licence for that season.

Luckily for Mr Whyte he had friends in high places to get this little local difficulty smoothed over.

The Resolution 12 saga has forensically established that the Grey Brigade in the Parkhead boardroom were anxiously hoping that their Old Firm business partners would be ok.

As soon as the Administrators were appointed, I was writing about the inevitable liquidation of the club formed in 1872.

The local media doubled down and were soothing their dignified demographic that there was a route out of the situation via a Company Voluntary Arrangement (CVA).

Everyone was clear that a CVA  was necessary to preserve the club itself.

At that point, there was still no need for the chaps on the sports desks to invent a holding company vehicle or an engine room subsidiary to take the fall.

That was because they didn’t think that liquidation would happen.

Your humble correspondent laid out an entirely different scenario.

I was telling my readers that liquidation was inevitable because HMRC would block any attempt at a CVA.

A decade ago today that was a few months away, it would come in June 2012.

With the CVA refused then liquidation was a done deal.

It was then necessary then to invent some way of denying that Rangers could avoid a date with death.

If the original Rangers didn’t die then it was necessary to live a lie.

I was re-organizing the books in the study last week and I selected an old friend from the shelves and took some time inside the mind of a genius.

Great literature remains timeless because it speaks to us anew again and again.

I was a teenager the first time I journeyed into George Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia.

Since Sevco Scotland was allowed to pretend it was the original Rangers this site has been like the old man in the pub.

Anyone working in the traditional media in Scotland has to abide by the local Ministry of Truth.

The official fiction is that the team that Celtic recently beat three-nil at Parkhead was the same one that played in Barcelona in 1972.

Of course, it IS the same feral fanbase that trashed the Catalan capital that now supports the tribute act.

Moreover, the central tenets of their worldview, especially anti-Irish racism, remains extant.

Sadly, that has not changed.

In 1984 Winston Smith does not register the significance of what he was told by the old man about being able before the Revolution to wear a top hat and face down some posh git.

Orwell was sending a message about just how successful the party had been in re-writing history.

Pretending that the original Rangers is still in existence is a basic requirement for employment in the media in Scotland.

The coverage today of the 10^th anniversary of the insolvency event has the Ministry of Truth stamp of approval.

I suspect that any deviation from the officially approved Orwellian fiction would have the equivalent of a visit from Planet Fitba’s Thought Polis.

What the events of 2012 did prove was that there was no degree of cheating or malfeasance that would strip the Ibrox brand of its special status.

The football authorities did everything in their power that summer to make sure that A Rangers, indeed ANY Rangers was in the topflight for season 2012-2013.

When that was thwarted by the fans of other SPL clubs Plan B was to drop the new club into the second tier.

Only a rebellion of the good guys prevented that.

Throughout those weeks the sports desks earned about what would happen if there wasn’t an Ibrox club in the top flight.

Like all of their work on the story, it was pishful thinking.

A decade ago the universe presented Stenography Corps with a teachable moment.

Since then they have proved to be incapable of learning.

They did actually have a chance to become journalists and hold power to account.

Instead today this was typical of the coverage of the anniversary.

Rangers did not emerge from the events of 2012, but the Ibrox brand did.

Such a switcheroo manoeuvre should have been a clarion call to a functioning Fourth Estate to  constantly reference the 276 scammed creditors

Instead, there is obedient silence and compliance with a lie that would make Big Brother wince.