For a list of the current Friends of the Scottish Review, click here
The first Young
Scotland Programme
Sophie’s story part 1:
Jill Stephenson
Sophie’s story part 2:
Tessa Ransford
Catherine Czerkawska and others
The long-delayed announcement that Rangers had ‘won’ what is commonly referred to as ‘The Big Tax Case’ was significant but unlikely to be the last word on the matter. The 2-1 decision of the First Tier Tax Tribunal upheld Rangers appeal against HM Revenue and Customs and said that employee benefit trusts should, in the vast majority of cases, be considered as legal loans and therefore not liable for taxation.
At the time of writing, HMRC is currently considering an appeal against the decision. The Scottish Premier League’s investigation into alleged undisclosed payments to players led by Lord Nimmo Smith has already been postponed and its validity will now be called into question – a position taken by Rangers chief executive Charles Green. For Rangers fans, the announcement encouraged, rightly or wrongly, a sense of vindication after a year of easy criticism. But it also prompted agonising exercises in counter-factual history as fans pondered how the situation might have developed if the verdict had been known sooner.
Sir David Murray, owner of the club when the EBT scheme was in place, understandably welcomed the decision in a statement issued by Murray International Holdings which went on to note: ‘While MIH has at all times respected the privacy of the tax tribunal proceedings, a substantial quantity of confidential information relating to the case has become available for public consumption, stimulating considerable and often ill-informed debate’. It added: ‘This has been wholly inappropriate and outwith the fundamental principles of natural justice’. MIH then asked that the relevant authorities investigate how this was allowed to happen – a call echoed by Labour MP Ian Davidson on ‘Newsnight Scotland’.
The comments were probably referencing sites such as the Rangers Tax Case (RTC) blog and hinted at one of the significant undercurrents of this whole episode. In Scotland, the Rangers story (stories might be more accurate) has become a defining one in the battle between new and traditional forms of media and one that has been taken to herald the decline of print and broadcast journalism as its failings saw it supplanted by blogs and online content. It raises important questions about the ethics and intent of new forms of journalism, much of which is unburdened by even a sense of professional etiquette.
In addition, this clash has quite deliberately been given ideological dimensions and framed in simplistic and binary ways as a clash between ‘the establishment’ and ‘the people’. Variations on this theme were detectable earlier in the year when the term ‘Scottish spring’ was used liberally and somewhat inappropriately to describe what was being portrayed as a social media-enabled campaign to thwart the pro-Rangers machinations of the Scottish football authorities.
Setting aside the faintly ridiculous comparison of the events in a European footballing backwater to the overthrow of Arab dictatorships, this was really just a tired old cliché adorned with some tatty 21st-century accessories. On the establishment side we had Rangers and the so-called ‘mainstream media’, on the other we had the people using social media and emboldened by the knowledge gained by pioneering investigative blogs such as RTC.
Much of the prestige and self-importance of the coalition of blogs devoted to the Rangers situation was derived from the Orwell Prize awarded to this site. It conferred a sense of status and gave the narrative it was dedicated to promoting a veneer of plausibility and, as a result, many journalists paid homage despite one of the site’s guiding principles being utter contempt for their abilities and professionalism. Another irony lay in it excoriating the alleged pro-Rangers agenda of the mainstream media while being driven by a far more obvious agenda to maximise the damage suffered by Rangers. This was seemingly overlooked or deemed irrelevant by those who rushed to honour the investigative prowess of the site. To Rangers fans, it had the journalistic credibility of a sub-par, feverish tabloid.
Stuart Cosgrove, director of diversity at Channel 4 but better known in Scotland as a co-presenter of BBC Radio Scotland’s ‘Off the Ball’, was one who eagerly jumped on this bandwagon. In a recent article for the ‘Scottish Football Monitor’ blog, he explained the new dynamics in Scottish sports journalism with the aid of concepts borrowed from ‘French Marxist philosophy’. He declared there had been, ‘a fundamental change in the way we construct and receive knowledge’. Specifically referencing RTC he argued that ‘restricted documents are regularly shared online, where they can be analysed and torn apart. Those with specialist skills in such as insolvency, tax expertise or accountancy can lend their skills to a web forum and can therefore dispute official versions of events’. This all sounds desirable to a certain extent but in this case principle has, for some, obscured the grubby reality and intent has at best been dismissed as unimportant.
Through the agency of sites such as RTC and other affiliated blogs, the free use of words such as ‘cheating’ and meaningless but inflammatory concepts such as ‘financial doping’ entered the public domain and probably played a significant role, for example, in encouraging the ‘No to Newco’ campaign. The vaunted but ephemeral mobilisation of non-Rangers fans was claimed by some to have ushered in a new epoch that was the equivalent of the triumph of the blogsphere over the mainstream media.
Sports journalist Graham Spiers praised the RTC blog on a number of occasions and, to the extent that it had professional journalists pronouncing pre-verdict guilt, the still anonymous figure behind the site might consider him or herself to have been partially successful. Generally it seems there was a willingness to assume Rangers were guilty of cheating based on little more than a hope that this was the case but admittedly given support struts by the unwarranted prominence and validation of those who were more eager still.
The rush to declare a decisive victory for the blogs is premature and we should be glad that this is so because they have the potential to be at least as problematic as the forms of media some are so eager to displace.
Alasdair McKillop is a writer based in Edinburgh
