Entertainment For Lively Minds
An OG from Wee Eck?
I and just about everyone else think so...
In a rare example of the law of unintended consequences working positively, the Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications Bill has managed the remarkable feat of uniting Rangers and Celtic fans, albeit perhaps in a marriage of convenience, but still...
The Government has tagged a feeble "freedom of speech" clause to the Bill which only underlines the extent to which this is in violation of it. The Lord Advocate insists that jokes and satire will not be actionable. But who is to decide? The law has a notoriously tin ear when it comes to irony, and is incapable of distinguishing between banter and abuse. Yet now, calling someone a "Hun", a "Fenian" or a "bluenose" could lead to imprisonment and a hefty fine if the words are uttered while footie is on the TV. Well, if my experience is anything to go by the police will be prosecuting workplaces and homes throughout Scotland. One of the ways in which people have sought to defuse sectarianism is by lampooning it, parodying it, satirising it. Many Celtic supporters call themselves Tims. Are they now to be prosecuted if someone overhearing these remarks feels threatened? Pity the publicans who are required to enforce this nonsense.
Nonsense it surely is. It's a major bugbear of mine that the kind of language uttered by Old Firm fans, because it can be labelled with the weighty term 'sectarian', is deemed to be on a higher plane of offensiveness than ordinary, common or garden bile such as, oh I don't know, celebrating the deadly gun attack on the Togo team bus which Emmanuel Adebayor survived and god knows what was said about Harry Redknapp in return.
On the scale of offensiveness, I would say that calling someone a 'Hun' or a 'Fenian' comes some way short of calling people paedophiles, saying their wives are on the game, questioning the legitimacy of their children etc.
Hubris from Salmond, undoubtedly. But understandable perhaps given the astonishing lack of effective opposition in Holyrood. I say that as someone broadly sympathetic to independence, although absolutely not if it takes the form of the kind of micro-management that the SNP administration seems to have an appetite for.
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Don;'t know anything about the ins and outs...
....of Scottish sectarianism but I do agree that the law shouldn't get involved in the words that people use or in working out which forms of offensive language are on such a different plane as to require legal action.
I'm thinking this even more this week when the FA (and presumably lots of highly paid lawyers) are taking days to work out what two players allegedly said to each other on a football pitch a few weeks ago.
Yes.
If I might take the liberty of posting an extract from a Rangers site at this point (Celtic sites are without doubt posting similarly):
Alex Salmond
is a twat. Said it before, now saying it again.
The SNP has the majority, and they will push through any legistlation that they wish.
The latest "idea" that they have is that it will be illegal to buy alcohol with any other purchase..ie should you go into your local Bettabuys for the weeks shopping and you fancy a bottle of Pinot Grigot and a few cans of Tennents to go with your Sunday roast, you will have to make a separate purchase, at a designated alcohol only till. More: if all you fancy is a bottle of plonk and a packet of McCoys beef chargrilled crisps, two separate purchases will need to be made. Madness.
Madness indeed.
But let's not get carried away with the idea that the SNP has a monopoly on hubristic, silly and unworkable ideas. Strikes me this is an epidemic which has infected most UK and European governments for (insert time frame according to preference here).
Inevitable
This is what happens when populism is your only guide - you really can't fool all of the people all of the time.
That said, I found myself thinking somewhat more kindly of Eck last week. I have given my views on political nationalism before - at best, it's just a bit backward and pathetic; at worst, downright evil. The conundrum that is currently twisting my melon though is how an independent Scotland in the EU would compare on that scale to a UK that leaves the EU.
Well now...
Where to start...
I've always felt that the SNP's 'Independence in Europe' stance was an oxymoron, although a very useful slogan for those fearful of 'separatism'.
That said, there are those who feel the current situation in Europe is an opportunity for Salmond and those who feel it is a weakness. You pays your money...
You and I will never agree, Lando, on the overall subject of Scottish independence. I am open to the idea in principle, although as I've said I feel it would be far preferable on the lines of the Scottish Enlightenment rather than the Big State that, sadly, this ridiculous piece of legislation epitomises. You do seem to have, if I may say, quite a strange belief in the idea that once a union/partnership/trading arrangement/call it what you will is made it cannot and should never be dissolved, which I can't subscribe to.
We can, however, find common ground on the pretensions of government. Never forget, though, that this applies just as much to big, supra-national governments as small.
Loyalty is indeed
one of my virtues/vices (delete to taste). I cheerfully acknowledge that persevering to eventual success and a blind refusal to stop flogging a dead horse can be two sides of the same coin. Thankfully, Mrs Cakes is a useful corrective on such matters. But I digress.
If I can add to the common ground above, I'm all for a society based on the principles of the Scottish Enlightenment* That doesn't preclude a servant state though. There's a danger, I think, in all organisations, state or otherwise, that they become an end in themselves, rather than a means to an end. Not sure what the answer is, though the cleansing breeze of democracy often provides a useful corrective.
*though my enthusiasm is tempered by reading Paul Johnston's series of dystopian novels about an Edinburgh run by the Enlightenment Party.
national shame
There are many things to be said on the topic of this idiotic piece of legislation, but the bottom line is that I now live in a country where teenagers can be jailed for singing a song or for posting an idiotic opinion online (see recent examples).
I'm ashamed of what these fuckwits are doing in my name. In any sane society, people like this would, at best, have been allocated a job looking after the coloured pencils.
Have we really
run out of golf clubs for them to run?
Send in the clowns, again
Following the debacle of their ill-considered 'let's make alcohol harder to buy' legislation, in which they demonstrated that they weren’t even smart enough to anticipate (and therefore prepare for) even the most glaring loopholes in their cunning plan, they have now acted to ‘solve’ the ‘problem’ of sectarianism in Scotland.
The new legislation will, according to Community Safety Minister Roseanna Cunningham, catch any songs that create or risk public disorder. There is one tiny flaw, in the sense that some chants or songs that fall short of the ‘public disorder’ benchmark might not actually breach the law. In cases like this, it will be up to individual police officers to decide whether the songs and chants are offensive enough to incite wider disorder.
So, to summarise: What you’re singing at a football match might be likely to get you thrown into jail. Or it might not. It all depends upon who is on duty at the time.
The very idea of this legislation makes some big statements about how the political class view the people they purport to represent. They have placed us all on a continuum that has name-calling at one end and attempted murder at the other. We are not, in their eyes, a nation of rational or resilient individuals; rather, we are a collection of fragile, damaged, volatile morons in need -above all else- of protection from ourselves.
They will see this legislation as ‘necessary’ because they believe that we are all either potential victims or potential perpetrators; we’ll either suffer psychological damage by being called a ‘fenian’ or a ‘hun’, or we’ll be the kind of person who will start by using those words and then take a few tiny steps along the continuum to the point where we’ll be sending parcel bombs to celebrities.
There might well be a connection between shouting something inappropriate at a football match and sending someone a parcel bomb, but it's the same kind of connection that exists between having a knife in your kitchen drawer and actually stabbing someone.