Thinkpiece
Jill Stephenson
The myth about university education
Life of George
George Chalmers
Paris daze
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I was pulled over by a man with a mobile wardrobe of black robes and headscarves at some distance from the Grand Mosque because I was showing some ankle, and had to robe on the spot.
Jill Stephenson
in the Middle East
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Islay’s daily pic
Hotel kitchen worker, Merchant City, Glasgow
Legal briefs
A man called Robert Green recently appeared in Stonehaven Sheriff Court on the minor charge of breach of the peace. The case is sub-judice. Even if we wished to do so, we would be unable to comment upon it.
But we are allowed to report the somewhat unusual bail conditions. Mr Green is prohibited from contacting various people against whom he has made allegations; from contacting people he has alleged are victims; from contacting a named doctor; from making similar allegations; and from entering the local authority areas of Aberdeen city and Aberdeenshire.
Two, perhaps three, of these conditions are reasonable, but cumulatively they are extraordinary for so trivial a charge. Mr Green wishes to stand for the Scottish Parliament in the Aberdeen Central constituency. His bail conditions prevent him from doing so effectively, if at all.
Mr Green next appears in the same court on 13 April for what is called an intermediate diet prior to trial. We can only hope that a sense of proportion will prevail and that the restrictions on the accused’s freedom will be relaxed. – KR
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Leading article
The media have a vested
interest in the extreme
behaviour they deplore
Kenneth Roy
The scene at Celtic Park before the big game
Photograph by Islay McLeod
Friday morning
If we needed fresh evidence that the media are part of the problem – and we didn’t, really – this morning’s coverage of the events in Glasgow on Wednesday night duly threw it up. ‘ The game that shamed a nation’, as the Sun neatly puts it – on page after page. As we solemnly prepare for next week’s ‘top-level summit’, the sort of thing Mr Salmond does very well, we must hang our collective heads.
Or must we? It rather depends.
On the one hand, we have the censorious leaders:
Time Old Firm clubs faced up to their responsibilities (Herald)
Old Firm disgrace batters Scotland’s reputation (Scotsman)
It is scarcely necessary to read either of these magisterial rebukes. You should be able to guess the rest; and what you cannot guess it would be entirely safe to invent for yourself.
We have unworkable ideas being taken seriously on front pages:
Old Firm in disgrace as police seek fans lockout (Times)
Fans lockout? As they say in Glasgow: Aye right. The day the Old Firm game takes place in front of an empty stadium will be the day the pope ceases to be a Catholic (if you will forgive the analogy).
And we have the heavyweight columns, the main such pillars being propped up by my old friends Joyce McMillan and Magnus Linklater.
‘Society’s ills played out on field of hate’ is the heading over Joyce’s think piece in the Scotsman. It is not possible to take issue with much of what she says – Joyce is always eminently sensible about everything – except perhaps her strange perception that sectarianism in Glasgow is ‘this strange ghost of what is now, in essence, a long-vanished religious divide’. There, I fear, my old friend has got it wrong. The divide is not long-vanished. If she likes, I will take her into parts of that dark city which will show her that the strange ghost is alive and kicking, even quite scary at times. She may require a stiff drink in some civilised watering hole to recover from such an experience. I will see what can be arranged.
There are parts of a newspaper where no right-thinking person dares to venture. They are called the sports pages, the bits written by journalists once memorably described as ‘fans with typewriters’.
Joyce has unexpectedly high expectations of the top-level summit. Incidentally, why is a summit necessary at all? Wouldn’t a simple meeting do just as well?
‘If,’ she writes, ‘the Scottish Government can do anything to address the profound economic and social pressures that have created and intensified those strains, then it will have achieved something remarkable, in the annals of government and sport’. No pressure, then, Alex. By this time next week we need action on (a) the dire state of Scottish education; (b) inner-city poverty; (c) religious intolerance; (d) Scotland’s drinking culture. No more talk. We need something remarkable. Like, now.
Where, on this desk awash with newsprint, is my old friend Magnus Linklater? Ah, yes: ‘Appalling scenes show game at its worst’. Again, it is hard to disagree. ‘This is not just a stain on the face of football,’ he concludes thunderously, ‘it is a black mark against society as a whole’.
Alan Cochrane, snorting into his beard, concurs. ‘Warring football factions are blighting Scotland’ is the headline over his comment in the Daily Telegraph.
‘Disgusting behaviour’…’depressing curse’…’cesspit of hatred’ (etc etc).
The message is plain. We are all guilty.
And yet…and yet. The first yet concerns the consensus of the commentariat. Such consensus is often to be distrusted.
Now the second yet. There are parts of a newspaper where no right-thinking person dares to venture. They are called the sports pages, the bits written by journalists once memorably described as ‘fans with typewriters’. Much has changed. They are now fans with word processors. But, on occasions such as this, as the nation mourns its dead – sorry, no one died – I mean mourns its – whatever it is we’re supposed to be mourning – it is to these pages that we must reluctantly turn for a dose of realism.
Graham Spiers, perhaps the savviest of Scotland’s fitba-writing brigade, observes unfashionably in the Times:
But of the ‘despicable’ Old Firm we also have to say this: don’t people love it? Wednesday’s 60,000 crowd inside Celtic Park, and the wider television audience, were gripped by it…Despair and hand-wringing are one thing, but a spectacle is a spectacle: where excitement and drama (and even mayhem) prevail, people are drawn to watch it. Certainly, while various Scottish football officials lament these events at Celtic Park, the sports executives of Sky television simply cannot get enough of it and want to pay the Scottish game bigger and bigger cheques for more of the same. Are these cheques to be turned down while the game is cleaned up?
Mr Spiers leaves his own question unanswered. At the back of this morning’s papers, where sporting realpolitik resides, there is not the same sense of editorial outrage about the behaviour of Messrs McCoist and Lennon. No one is calling for their resignations. About the worst you will find about Mr McCoist is that he is putting on weight in middle age, while Graham Spiers reflects sympathetically on Mr Lennon’s past as a ‘social, political and cultural underdog’ who grew up on the streets of Lurgan during the troubles and whose motto remains, ‘I take no shit off anyone’.
I think Mr Spiers has got to the heart of the matter. The media themselves have an intense vested interest in the extreme behaviour that they simultaneously deplore. Money talks no louder than it does in sport and no louder in sport than it does in football. The main effect of Wednesday’s eruption will not be to change Scotland for the better, but to make the television rights for Old Firm matches more desirable than ever.
Kenneth Roy is editor of the Scottish Review
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