From his public utterances, we know that tomorrow, Super Ally will not be in the stadium that John Brown played for.
Initially, he was bullish about the prospect of joining the rest of the home crowd to break the new Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021.
The condemnation of his quip on Talk Sport was swift from people in Scotland with a functioning moral compass.
Apparently, Super Salary then realised that he had a prior engagement that clashed with the Glasgow Derby match.
Some cynics might say this was a public manifestation of the Dunkirk Spirt.
I, of course, couldn’t possibly comment.
Listening to the Graham Spiers podcast, I wasn’t surprised that he and his two guests, Graeme McGarry and Mathew Lindsay, both of the Herald, gave Ally a pass.
This spin from Spiers is worth relating verbatim for those who don’t subscribe to his Patreon (I do it, so you don’t have to).
“My take on this is Ally misspoke. He was just totally clumsy. I’ve listened back to the tape, and he just doesn’t get not just the tone right. He doesn’t get his words in the right order.”
Dear reader, pause for a moment and imagine that the Glasgow Derby match tomorrow is at Celtic Park with no away fans.
In a radio studio previewing the match, Neil Francis Lennon of County Armagh said, word for word, what Mr McCoist actually said about breaking the new law.
There is no doubt in the mind of this journalist that the hacks in Scotland would have been in a feeding frenzy about the Irishman.
There would have been no mitigating words like “misspoke” and “clumsy” deployed.
In one sense, McCoist was merely stating the obvious.
It clearly takes an outsider to point out that the Ibrox matchday experience has been built around a very specific type of hate with deep cultural roots for generations.
That’s what caused seasoned media performer McCoist to say the quiet bit out loud-culture.
Anti-Irish racism and anti-Catholic hatred have a long and intertwined history in Scotland.
Any visiting social anthropologist involving themselves in the Ibrox crowd would soon see the key components of their commonsense inventory.
It’s about nativist hostility to Irish Catholic immigrants who arrived in considerable numbers during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras.
Opponents of this new law state that it is both authoritarian and unworkable.
Given that the regional assembly in Edinburgh gave Planet Fitba the Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Act 2012, it isn’t unreasonable to suggest that this new legislation will also be an embarrassing shitshow.
Essentially, it is a law produced by people only speaking to those who already agree with them, with dissenting opinions being disregarded from the Get-Go.
It isn’t a great start when satirists like the brilliant Jonathan Pie are already parodying it.
As for the small matter of a football match, it has all the ingredients of an entire shambles.
The decision of the SFA to give the gig to John Beaton sent a message that could not be more clear.
Moreover, in doing so, they’re not doing their match official any favours at all.
Here, the most entertaining and knowledgeable trio in the Celtic Fifth Estate give their assessment.
Alan Morrison was recently on the Spiers podcast, essentially going head-to-head with Matthew Lindsay.
In the wrap up the chap from the Herald said he needed to go and lie down in a darkened room.
What caused him such angst was data.
Lots of it.
Alan has continued to gather it, and you can read it here.
Dear reader, this level of analysis is simply beyond the capabilities of the remaining hacks in those terminally ill titles.
Even if they were allowed to be truthful about the origins of the club formed in 2012 or the rampant racism of the home crowd at Ibrox, they could produce work of the standard here.
Over several seasons, with the assistance of an active qualified referee in England, Alan has detected an unmistakable pattern of assistance for ONE club in SPFL matches.
No one incident or one match proves anything.
What Alan has produced is evidence of a pattern of assistance over several seasons that favours ONE CLUB.
Incompetence by officials and human error is random and cannot form any pattern.
When you factor in how assisting ONE CLUB impacts their city rivals, who were formed by Irish immigrants, then this becomes a much darker vista than penalty calls in a football match.
Addendum
One old comrade sent me this bit of speculation:
Further to your blog, I wouldn’t be surprised if his England-centric bosses at TalkSport down at London Bridge were forced to have a more critical listen to the songs and chants behind Mr McCoist’s potential law-breaking defiance and then advised him to create a family outing diversion to avoid deeper and embarrassing scrutiny post-match to protect their brand.
Dear reader, when I read this, I was saddened at such cynicism in one so young…
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The problem with a law that makes hate speech a criminal act is that who gets to decide what is hateful and was is not. While at this moment it could be argued that it is obvious what constitutes a hate crime the same cannot be said for the years to come. And those that decide what is and is not will wield considerable power to censor and silence voices that they disagree with. Shameful, vile and vulgar it is but illegal? Its not a far stretch to seeing this used to silence opposing views and dissent. Not today or in the immediate future but like in so many cases laws overtime evolve into mechanisms of control and tyranny. Free speech is imperative in free societies.
Our board isn’t interested in doing anything to stop the cheating or bigotry. Their only concern is making money.
Outstanding HH☘☘
I’m not sure about your assertion on “nativist hostility”, and I hope you will correct me regarding my take on the issue. Rangers football club, founded in the 1870’s was not a club based on any sectarian premises, hence the subsequent emergence of the term ‘Old Firm’.
There is a school of thought which asserts that the Scottish sectarian poison only really emerged in the years following the 1920’s after the influx of a large number of shipyard workers from Belfast. Prior to this Glasgow was a developing city dependant on incoming workers from rural Scottish areas and from Ireland to support its burgeoning industrial development and its associated wealth. The Scottish experience in my view is no different from that of any other incoming group anywhere else on the planet, including Ireland. Just like today, incomers were resented and seen as a threat to the local culture and economy, but were not subjected to the same level of vitriol introduced by the Belfast immigrants. That to me is the fundamental difference.
As you know, this is an extremely complex issue, therefore I would appreciate a contribution examining the wider implications of an issue (immigration) whic has been a feature for thousands of years.
As you requested, I will duly correct you:
The influx of shipbuilding workers from Belfast to Clydeside started in the 1890s.
The ban on Catholics at Rangers was certainly in place a few years before the start of the Great War.
It was, in part, linked to the crisis over the Third Home Rule Bill.
You can Google “SS Clyde Valley, Larne and UVF”.
As for anti-Catholic hatred being an Ulster import of the early 20th century that is historically illiterate.
In 1796,there were more anti-Catholic societies in Glasgow than there were Catholics, as at that time there were but five Catholics resident in Glasgow!
If you consider the “Famine Song” to be anything other than a manifestion of nativist hostility (ruled so in 2009 by Justice Carloway in the case against one William Walls) then I can’t help you.
There isn’t anything “extremely complex” about racism.
Brilliant reply,Phil.
Chapeau !!
Schooled and clamped in one hit.
Outstanding,chara.
So just like Eric Morecambe when playing the piano “was playing all the right notes but wasn’t playing them in the right order” Speirs claims Super Salary didn’t get his words in the right order. If he expects us to believe that Speirs is an even bigger idiot than I thought he was.