Do not mourn for the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act – spit on its grave

Politicians of one party made football fans subject to special laws and extraordinary police attention. Its death knell should be welcomed

Keep politics out of sport, we were once told. A noble ideal.

Let the dreamers dream and the players play, without the cynical machinations of a different world

Political, offensive or criminal? 50 years ago,
Tommie Smith & John Carlos shocked the
USA with this gesture at the Olympics,
calling attention to Black Human Rights 

turning fair athletic endeavour into another field of conflict.

Moscow was the target in 1980, when Soviet intervention in Afghanistan led to the US leading a boycott of the Olympic Games.

Four years later, the Games were hosted in Los Angeles, providing a perfect opportunity to 14 Eastern Bloc countries to retaliate by implementing their own boycott.

Not for the first time, the Olympics had been made into a political football.

It was difficult to see who had won in either case, apart from the competitors who won medals that boycotting non-participants would likely have secured.

The fans didn’t win. Both Olympiads had been significantly diminished.

But who has ever really cared about the fans?

Politicians just couldn’t and wouldn’t keep their noses out.

Politicians are the weirdest of breeds. The most successful of them see everything – but everything – as a political opportunity to be exploited or a risk to be mitigated. (Watching The Thick of It or Veep gives something of a feel for that politicking mentality for those who are not politics fans.)

When you hear them saying, “Don’t play (party) politics”, on any issue, you know they believe that they cannot win.

Yet this is the preferred message of some to the Scottish Parliament as it prepares for what should be the final nail in the coffin of the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act (OBFA).

Scottish politicians chose to interfere in sport with the OBFA – but only one sport.

The only one that could be considered the Scottish national sport, which vastly exceeds all others in participation, attendance, television viewing, and economic contribution. Football.

Would you expect a “Gouging at Rugby” Act? A “Cheating at Golf” Act? A “Hooliganism at Outdoor Music Festivals” Act?

I’m guessing not.

But the OBFA created a special class of citizen under the law that would be subject to prosecution and police action in circumstances that did not apply to any other section of society.

In fact, it was specifically contrived to exclude every other section of society. And, in doing so, it made football fans an underclass subject to special treatment in other areas.

You fancy packing a few tinned G&Ts or Mojitos on a bus trip to a pantomime? Fine – nobody is going to harass you.

Set up for the journey to Pittodrie? Let’s pull over and search that bus for six-packs of beer.

Why? Because the roads to football grounds are paved with unrepentant or unwitting sinners – the distinction does not matter because they are all potential criminals, though they know not yet what they do.

And, yes, the wording of the Act is so vague and all-encompassing as to include offences of “offensiveness” that could only occur if people who might have been present, but weren’t, had only been in attendance to claim offence.

And it takes no consideration of the mere technicality that the offenders may have had neither the desire, intention nor knowledge of the potential criminality of their hypothetical offensiveness – as long as it was in a tangentially-related football context.

This was deemed to be good law by the Scottish Government and was pushed through against all objections from every opposition party.

Now that it faces what should be its death knell, the only party that has ever supported the OBFA is claiming to be the victims of political expediency – or put another way, saying, “Don’t play party politics with this issue.”

Holyrood members of that party have, remarkably, all supported the Scottish Government’s position on an act that has been condemned by Sheriffs, Human Rights organisations (such as Liberty) and pressure groups claiming to represent plebeian football supporters.

The politicians even made it a criminal offence to express political views within a football context.

One of the Act’s most vociferous supporters, SNP MSP, John Mason, even noted that wearing a Yes badge (supporting Scottish independence) should be considered unacceptable while watching football, commenting: “We should all know by now expressing political views is no longer acceptable at football matches.”

Of course not – they might be offensive.

But only at football.

At the Olympics, it’s a different matter.

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Masks, Nazi salutes, Scott Sinclair attacked – all in the name of The Rangers and the Union Bears

The “Goodnight, Green White” march went on to demonstrate just how low the fans of The Rangers have sunk but the blame goes much wider

To start with the usual disclaimer, all football clubs have their undesirable element. And most of us view the excesses of our own supporters with an understanding that tends towards lenience while being acutely focused on the specks in our rivals’ eyes.

So much for the “whataboutery”.

But Scottish football, through inaction, excuses and encouragement, has allowed a monster to grow and it is best illustrated by The Rangers “Ultras” group, the Union Bears.

The UB had their much-publicised march before the game with Celtic on Sunday, behind a banner with the logo of someone in a Celtic shirt being kicked in the head and the words, “Goodnight, Green White”.

Police Scotland, forewarned of the event and having promised to crack down on any potential hate crime, watched as masked fans, dressed in black, made Nazi salutes. But they took no action.

After the match, it was reported that Celtic player, Scott Sinclair was the victim of an attack at Glasgow airport by suited fans of the famous “same club”.

At times like these, typically, a few politicians blame football itself. Newspapers seek examples of anti-social behaviour from the “other side” to show that “they’re all as bad as each other”.

Some writer will lament piously about what football can learn from rugby union and a social commentator will push the context of a disenfranchised, white, male, working-class youth, seeking recognition and affiliation in the absence of the place their forefathers might have occupied in heavy industry.

Statements are issued, a few arrests made and a handful of faces splashed across the papers.

But the noise itself eventually becomes of chatter, rather than the cranking up of the machinery of change.

It would be hopelessly naive to think that this occasion will be any different. But it should be.

The output of the Union Bears is something like a magnifying glass to the sun. It is an intense concentration of values that formed the bedrock of Rangers Football Club and were the main traditions thought worth preserving after that club was liquidated and the new club was formed. (And the absolute denial of the truth of that liquidation is part of this toxic culture).

It is an aggressive right-wing, Protestant supremacist attitude manifesting itself in a hatred of the Catholic, the Irish and Celtic.

Fascism

You can openly make Nazi salutes amid the Ibrox throng for a good reason. Many of these people are simply Neo-Nazis in their element.

Every Fascist movement has had its “white-collars” defining a strategy that depends on “boots on the ground” – ill-educated thugs desperate to believe that there is glory and prestige attached to attacking whatever “othered” group is the current victim of choice.

In Scotland, that disdained group has overwhelmingly been the Irish Catholic community, the belittling and oppression of which has a tradition of more than a century.

It was validated by the Church of Scotland and put into practice by polite, white, Protestant Scottish society, both working-class and middle-class.

In the working-class, it was enacted through restricting access to apprenticeships, once the best bet of lifting your family out of poverty. In the middle class, it was through closing off opportunities in the professions.

The media combined both and allowed a comfortable consensus to be formed that society was largely all right, just as it espoused the hypocritical British sense of fair play.

Most of those socio-economic barriers have now been lifted but the institutions formed in that atmosphere have changed only superficially.

Dangerous

A sizeable proportion of Scottish society remains hostile to that Irish Catholic community that gave birth and identity to Celtic, regardless of the diversity that the club embraces.

That is why so many hate Celtic just for daring to allow that class that they believe should be the eternal subordinates an open expression of confidence and pride.

And this is what makes these times increasingly dangerous. The supremacists ultimately lost completely and finally. Their club was liquidated.

The new club, formed to feed off the supporters of the old one, loses again and again and again.

And, without on-the-field success, their supporters are becoming increasingly aggressive.

When the Scottish football authorities were talking of “social unrest” and “Armageddon” if Rangers were allowed to die or if the rules were not broken to allow a new Rangers to exist, they were acknowledging a culture that they had nurtured.

The blazers at Park Gardens and then Hampden were, after all, almost entirely worn by members of that same white, Protestant demographic, impressed by the “dignity” of the likes of Struth, Waddell, Ogilvie, Murray and Smith – men very like themselves, without Irish immigrant names.

The fans were singing about being “up to their knees in Fenian blood” – it was simply passion barely worthy of comment. The players were singing the same in the dressing room – exuberance. (Neither Chick Young nor the BBC thought it appropriate to comment on footage of Graeme Souness’s team doing so until 30 years after they filmed it).

The suits were doing it – just harmless banter.

Widespread prejudice

Of course, much prejudice is genuinely unconscious. If 85% of your workplace seems to look and think like you, you may normalise dysfunctional attitudes. Likewise, few people define themselves to be bigots, never mind much-loved relatives or respected members of the community who seemed fine, loving people but who didn’t like Catholics.

Low-key expressions of bigotry can seem benign. So, that great champion of the working-class, Mhairi Black MP can mock “plastic Irishmen” without apology or admonishment from the Scottish National Party, which seems to take every other form of discrimination very seriously indeed.

The SNP will not legislate against hate marches any more than Labour (formerly the traditional party of the Irish working class community in Britain) have done – so thousands of members of the Orange Order will march on Scottish streets in an open display of contempt for the one community that it is still acceptable to denigrate.

Tories, propped up in Westminster by the anti-Irish Democratic Unionist Party, are regularly found to have expressed various forms of racist and anti-Catholic abuse – with even MSPs tweeting “WATP” (again supremacist language: “We are the People”).

The politicians will not actively address anti-Irish or anti-Catholic hatred as they either actively or tacitly support it or are fearful of losing more votes than they may gain. That in itself tells you something about how far-reaching these attitudes remain in Scotland.

Instead, the SNP created legislation against football fans in general  with the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act and dressed it up as being “anti-sectarian”, though the word was not even mentioned.

Same hate, different march

In essence, the Union Bears march was not significantly different to the Orange marches that are so popular in Scotland.

There were flares and smoke and the uniforms were paramilitary in style, rather than faux military marching band designs. The hatred, though, was directed against the same people.

However, there was one key difference.

The logo inciting violence against Celtic players and fans was prominent and yet no action was taken to remove it.

And later three men were removed from a flight after abusing a Celtic player.

Should we really believe that the sentiment so freely expressed by the Union Bears had no bearing on three men thinking that it was acceptable to harass a man famous for wearing the same green and white hoops that appeared in that logo?

Does the problem that needs to be addressed lie solely within the Union Bears or The Rangers Football Club as an entity?

Would it be more honest to blame Scottish football as a whole?

And what of Scotland?

More on this topic

• Why The Rangers and Police Scotland must take action against the Union Bears
• Falkirk Twidiot outs The Rangers pal as author of Union Bears ‘Bash-a-Fenian’ post
• Blogging for the public good – police take action against Union Bears’ violent threat to Celts
• Union Bears in crisis! The Rangers fans split over violent sectarian idiocy ahead of Celtic match

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