Sectarianism. First Saturday of the Scottish season and a minority of Rangers fans embarrass Scotland again. The chanting of hostility from the terraces, directed at rival fans, is endemic in football. It isn’t only the Old Firm of Rangers and Celtic; Edinburgh and Dundee have their share of poison, and Aberdeen and Rangers can generate their own unique brew of historically specific rage (the tackle of Neil Simpson on Ian Durant that blighted a brilliant career).
I read some newspaper responses to the behaviour of the small minority of Rangers fans chanting their ridiculous but dangerous version of history at Inverness. Stephen Smith of the Rangers Supporters Trust laid in to the offenders.
We don’t want a situation where 30 or 40 half wits ruin the relationship between he supporters and the club. These people are idiots who don’t give a monkey’s about Rangers. They think they can do what they want because they are at a football match. We would back Rangers in identifying any idiots who bring disrepute to the club.
Now I support the courage and bluntness of that. But the truth is, the problem isn’t only lack of education, ill-informed history, ignorant prejudice – it is all of these fuelled by hatred. Let’s use the word. Those ‘party tunes’ and the ‘sectarian chants’ aren’t mildly offensive, or ignorant – they are howls of hate. A sectarian song, whether Rangers or Celtic, mixes the following ingredients. History revised to ensure that the enemy is known, defeated and humiliated; religious affiliation linked to the myth that somehow the present generation is part of that tradition of hate; a liturgy, of hymn and chant, sung in unison, articulating the emotional intensity of a perverted faith that survives by hating the OTHER; and all this complete with the liturgical colours of red, white and blue – or green white and orange – or whatever. The two current managers are pictured because they head up the teams – to my knowledge they are on public record as deploring sectarian behaviour and supporting every effort to stamp it out.
But lets not talk of idiots and stupidity – lets name sectarian chanting as hate. We aren’t dealing with a problem which is solved only by more information. This isn’t an offence committed by certain people below a certain IQ level. This is a matter of ethics, an issue of moral values, a question of how we view other human beings, an expression of socially shaped character in a sub-culture where hating the religiously other is the norm. Sectarian songs and sectarian language are abusive, corrosive, latently (at times blatantly) violent, intended to provoke and demean; and they are sung just as zealously in Glasgow whether the fans are waving Union Jacks or Irish Tricolours.
Now here’s a historical curiosity. As far as I can tell, the original refrain, "Follow, Follow", comes in the (horticulturally sentimental) Sankey hymn, ‘Down in the valley with my Saviour I will go’. (Check it out in Sankey’s Hymn Book, number 529). Irony of ironies it’s been hijacked by certain fans of a certain football team, for whom peacemaking is an activity that takes place in a separate universe. ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God’. As Jean Luc Picard used to say, ‘Make it so!’
PS. Rangers have just qualified tonight for the final knock out stage in the Champion’s League. I want them to do well – but more importantly, I want to not be embarassed as a Scotsman, by UEFA having to act against them because their fans were singing sectarian and offensive chants. As Solomon might have said, had he been Scottish, and from Glasgow, ‘Gonnae no dae that? Juist gonnae no?’
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