The Billy Boys are Back in Town

Neil Lennon, the Celtic manager, is not normally an especially sympathetic figure. But so what? Here’s the big news from Scotland today:

Three prominent figures associated with Celtic Football Club have been sent potentially lethal home-made letter bombs.

Celtic manager Neil Lennon, his QC Paul McBride and the politician Trish Godman, a Celtic supporter, were each sent a package containing improvised explosives with the power to kill or severely wound the recipient.

Can we agree that this is getting out of hand? Assassination attempts – which is what this is – open a new front in football’s most depressing rivalry. At this point it’s customary to blame both sides and appear above the fray. But no-one’s sending bullets and parcel bombs to Walter Smith are they?

No doubt people will again argue that the existence of Catholic schools is somehow responsible for this senseless sectarianism. If only protestant neds were schooled [sic] in the company of their Roman Catholic counterparts they’d appreciate they have more in common with them than they realise! Something like that anyway. And so it follows that parents’ perfectly reasonable desire to choose their childrens’ education must be forfeited to assuage the lowest, basest elements of Scottish society. If in doubt, blame the victims and shift attention from the real problem which is, in this instance, the ridiculous pathologies of a certain strand of West of Scotland* masculinity.

When it comes to the ghastliness of Old Firm football, it seems that matters are getting worse, not better. I suspect this is a consequence of the Scottish league being less competitive than at any point since the Second World War. It’s as bad as the inter-war period when the pair harvested all but one championship. Such an uncompetitive league helps ensure that the four Old Firm games – the “greatest derby in the world” don’t you know? – will essentially decide the title, giving the fixture an importance that would be diluted were each to lose to other teams more frequently.

Meanwhile, the Daily Mash has a splendidly sardonic reaction to this latest escalation:

Scottish football’s premier league is to award three points for a successful bombing campaign.

From next season teams will be encouraged to pick off each other’s players and management with sniper rifles, land mines and grenades

[A league spokesman added]: “Scottish football has never really been about football, as anyone who has seen one of the matches would almost certainly agree.”

[…] The move has been welcomed by other clubs who say that competitive murder could finally end the domination of Rangers and Celtic.

A spokesman for Dundee United said: “They will be able to afford bigger bombs and guns and bring in expensive foreign assassins who want the chance to kill people in Europe, but we will focus on guerilla tactics and the element of surprise.”

Quite.

Solve the Glasgow Problem and you solve most of Scotland’s problems. If one felt Holyrood could do this there’d be a decent case for giving the city its own dedicated department and cabinet minister.

*Not an exclusively western problem but largely so.