The last acceptable prejudice

 

The last acceptable prejudice

I wonder if there is a support in British football with less self-awareness than some of those who follow Rangers? Not content with singing songs which drag the tattered reputation of their club  through the gutter, they resort to a display in a UEFA Champions League qualifier which purports to depict a character from mid-nineteenth century America who was known for his hatred and violence towards Irish Catholics. Ironically enough, it actually depicts Daniel Day Lewis in the film Gangs of New York. An actor who loves Ireland so much that he has lived for years in County Wicklow, but such things don’t compute with the mindset which thought that such a banner was a good idea. Numbskulls need things to be black and white, as shades of grey and contradictions confuse them.

Below this banner the words ‘Surrender or you’ll die’ were stretched along the front of the Broomloan Stand. Few Scots football fans need reminding that this is a line from the ‘Billy Boys,’ a song about a sectarian razor gang from the inter-war years in Glasgow. That working class Scots sing in praise of a fascist and racist group from a century ago is passed off as ‘banter’ by some, but the truth is, it’s pernicious and corrodes common sense. We all know where these public displays of ritualised hatred can lead. Just pop your head into the A&E department of any Glasgow hospital on a day when Rangers play Celtic and you’ll see.

Bill ’the butcher’ Poole was a real man who lived and died in New York in the 19^th Century. His nativist (anti-immigrant) leanings led the 200lb pugilist into many violent confrontations. For years, his Bowery Boys gang had a deadly feud with the Irish and German Catholic immigrants in the five points district of New York. He was eventually shot dead by an Irish immigrant. Poole’s political leanings were towards the ‘Know Nothing’ Party, so called because members were encouraged to say, ‘I know nothing’ when questioned by others about the party’s darker side. Abraham Lincoln said of them in a letter…

“As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.’

The Know-Nothings eventually merged into other political movements but that strain of anti-Catholic prejudice has deep roots in America and has only in recent decades begun to fade away.

On this side of the Atlantic, most European countries put religion into the private sphere where it could do little harm. In the UK, the monarch is head of the Church of England and the fact that no Catholic can ascend the throne is a grubby little left-over from England’s own anti-Catholic past and an insult to the 7 million Catholics living in the UK. Scotland’s own latent anti-Catholic fringe were reanimated by the arrival of Irish migrants in large numbers. Bear in mind that under the 1801 Act of Union, Ireland was a part of the UK. These migrants were not technically moving abroad but to another part of the same country.  Conditions on their own island had been made intolerable for them as the Irish colony, for that’s what it was, was run to enrich the landowning classes at the expense of the disenfranchised majority.

Competition for work and houses, rumours of wages being lowered because the Irish would work for less, all contributed to ill feeling. It seemed easier to blame the newcomers than to unite the workers and demand a fair deal for all. It was also convenient for the bosses to keep the workers divided as they were easier to control that way. The fact that Celtic Football Club was formed to help feed the children of this migrant community demonstrates the need must have been great indeed. Rangers initially were among the Celtic club’s warmest friends but things were soon to change.

The arrival of Harland and Wolff’s shipyard on the Clyde brought more strident types to Glasgow from Belfast. Celtic’s domination of Scottish football in the years before World War One was hard for some to swallow. With Rangers fast becoming the main competition for the ‘Irishmen’ Rangers took a more exclusive turn under the guidance of Chairman John Ure Primrose. He led the club until 1923 and saw them become a bastion of ‘Protestants only.’ As absurd as this sounds a century later, it was reflective of the society of the time.

It's equally absurd that the SFA, Scottish League and media said nothing as Rangers practiced this petty apartheid for a lifetime. It was boasted in those days that the three pillars of Scottish society were the church, the law and Glasgow Rangers. Such exceptionalism breeds arrogance and much as Rangers were Scotland’s most successful team until the mid-sixties, the arrival of Jock Stein at Celtic changed it in a manner they have never fully recovered from. For the self-proclaimed ‘people’ to play second fiddle as Celtic swept all before them in the Stein era, was hard to swallow. The sectarian policy Rangers operated then gave tacit approval to the bigots among their support and set the club back decades.  As they desperately strove to emulate Celtic’s European cup win, they accrued a mountain of debt which crushed them in the end.

The new century saw them collapse into liquidation and the formation of a ‘phoenix club’ was a golden opportunity to break with the poison of the past but as Charles Green pandered to the baser elements by saying ‘no surrender’ in a TV interview, we knew it was going to be business as usual. They climbed through the lower leagues like a men’s team in a school league and reached the SPFL in 2016 with the slogan ‘going for 55’ to the fore. Celtic duly won four successive trebles to further dent their superiority complex.

All through this period, graffiti, banners and a variety of unsavoury incidents reminded us that they still had a serious problem with bigotry among their support. It was telling that week in-week out we hear the tired old dirges of the ‘bygone days of yore’ as the SFA, Police and media did nothing. UEFA closing part of a stand for ‘discriminatory chanting’ reminded us that footballing authorities can act. So why don’t they?

It's almost as if anti-Catholic bigotry is the last acceptable prejudice. We saw Church of Scotland minister Stuart McQuarrie, at one time leader of the inter-faith chaplaincy at Glasgow University, stated that Catholics should stop ‘wallowing in their victim status.’ He also described ‘The Fields of Athenry’ as ‘vile, vicious and racist’, absolutely comparable to the unashamedly hate-filled sectarian ‘Famine Song’ Mr McQuarrie is not representative of anyone but himself, but that an educated man can verbalise such absurd views is telling.

The media in Scotland tend to follow the ‘unwritten rule’ when writing about this subject and portray both sides as bad as each other. They and many politicians demonstrate a moral cowardice in the face of bigotry and refuse to call it out in clear language. Their obfuscation and false equivalences cloud the issue and we get nowhere.

As for the ‘Know nothings’ and their stupid banner, they may snigger about a ‘Timplosion’ or ‘meltdown’ or other such juvenile nonsense, but the truth is, they damage their own club with these idiotic displays. I really wish they’d join the rest of us in the 21^st century.