Yes, we, who in our tens and hundreds of thousands have given our all to Celtic, for Celtic, even “Because” Celtic have no hiding place today. We, who have been immersed in the traditions of the club – or who have chosen Celtic more recently (all have their right to call themselves Celtic fans) stand accused.
That statement may seem unfair and it may even outrage some who stumble across this sad missive on a day of high emotion and low morale. But it is true.
And why? Because we let it happen.
We did not actively participate in the destruction of our club but we were eye-witnesses who did too little to help. Some of us complained a bit – but not enough – and a few protested. But, the truth is, we largely, en masse, listened to false prophets telling us how great this new, “pragmatic” approach would be.
As an inveterate socialist, I find myself paralleling Celtic to that other organisation that once was the vehicle of my dreams – the Labour Party.
I remember the transformation of Labour at a time when I was becoming, on a very small scale, politically active. It was the time of the “Dem Left”, the “New Realists” who would eventually be victorious in the battle for Labour minds (if not hearts) and reshape that party, forming it into something I could neither identify with nor care for, in pursuit of pragmatism.
Their side – the side of Kinnock and eventually Blair – won and my side, that hopelessly idealistic crew who thought that a Labour party that veered from its essential values was no Labour party at all, lost being consigned to a history in which Ned Ludd was the gatekeeper.
It won great success by the standards that those in power set for it. But I fell out of love with it, coming to resent it bitterly for taking something beautiful and idealistic and turning it into an entity without values, without soul, and justifying its metamorphosis in terms of Key Performance Indicators that had nothing to do with the Labour party I knew and in which I felt I belonged.
That whole New Labour experience was both a demoralising wake-up call warning -- that those things you wish to believe are less strong than the Machiavellian will of those unconstrained by the very notion of beliefs -- and a training exercise for compromising ideals and a commonly-understood set of values, even a code, when what seems the solidity of a century of mutual identity and understanding becomes disparaged as archaic, belonging in the past.
When New Celtic was born, many of us felt disquiet. But the spin was good – Mandelson and Campbell would have envied their mainstream and “independent” media manipulation – and their constituents were often too desperate to believe in a new dawn and too ready to believe the new informed, even intellectual, Celtic commentators who outlined the inevitable victory of the plan in such confident terms that those who had their doubts were routinely mocked and sidelined.
When we were clearly in decline, we did not all join in with the “happy clapper” brigade, scoffing at the plebs while snouts were in the troughs.
But the fans that once allowed themselves to be mocked for their “car park protests” adhered to the New Celtic spin that so many so wanted to believe in such numbers that we, collectively, left our club to the mercies of hard-bitten businessmen who think that everything that identifies a club can be expressed in terms of malleable brand values.
That if it cannot be recorded on the balance sheet, it has no worth.
What we have today, with an inexperienced manager working with a parlous squad, which has declined season-by-season, is our responsibility.
Because, “when they came for Celtic”, we did nothing.
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