Fly The Flag

[Guest billmcmurdo]

http://billmcmurdo.wordpress.com/2012/12/15/fly-the-flag/

[Max Rebo's Big Blue Nose 0]

Have a day off Bill for goodness sake.

[EDGE 0]

Absolutely bonkers, Bill.

 

Far from bringing unity to the support, you drive a wedge between those who think that football and politics should not mix.

 

You make the paranoid Tims seem sane compared to some of the language used in your article.

 

You're our "Tommy from Glasgow".

[BEARGER 1,829]

Dearie me, the drugs don't work. Anyway keep Rangers out of your politics.

[bossy 0]

The problem, of course, is that politics and sport do mix ... whether we like it or not. Celtic have understood this and have manipulated it to our detriment. The whole 'anti-sectarianism' drive of the last 10 years have been anti-Rangers. It had very little to do with sectarianism and even less to do with bigotry. It had everything to do with an attack on many of those values that Ranger's supporters have in common.

 

So we do need to become a lot more politically savvy and, dare I say it, politically active when it comes to defending ourselves. But we also need to remember that the Rangers support is a broad church and not a uniquely protestant one. We are protestants and atheists and muslims and even catholics. We are labour, tory and nationalist. And we are unionists and nationalists, republicans and royalists.

 

We are much more representative of the 'average' Scot than any other club. We need to learn to capitalise on this.

[The Real PapaBear 0]

Eehhhmm...slow down there, Bald Eagle..."more representative of the 'average' Scot than any other club"? Really?

Are we more representative than Motherwell fans? Or Montrose? or Dunfermline or Kilmarnock?

 

I think the Rangers support is a fairly accurate microcosm of Scotland, - much as the mhedia would like to portray us as unionist, protestant anti-everything reactionary bigots -, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that we are more representative than others.

 

Of the 7 Rangers fans closest to me, there are 3 SNP voters (one committed, 2 floating), 2 Labour, 1 Lib Dem and one Tory.

We have different views on employment laws and the re-nationalisation of the railways, Trident and gay marriage, Palestine and NHS reform.

3 are left wing, one is right wing and three are in the middle, somewhere over the fuel tank.

One is an anti- catholic bigot (guess which one) one is married to a catholic, two are married to non scots, two are divorced, one is separated, two have remarried and one is single. 6 are heterosexual, one may be gay.

One is a commercial go-getter, one is a bit of a misfit; we're all workers. Every one of the 7 is worth having a drink with although one can get a bit repetitive after his third pint.

 

And I'll bet just about everybody on this forum could have said the same thing, more or less - but more to the point, so could a fan of every other club.

 

Except one.

 

I do agree, however, that we need to start making the case that we *are* Scotland in microcosm - we're not a freak show of frothy mouthed, union jack waving bigots and we need to start meeting mhedia character assassination head-on. And I'd suggest starting with the BhBC and motor-mouth Cosgrove, whose anti-Rangers obsession has long since metamorphosed from normal small team jealousy into a much more sinister bigotry. Now his party piece is that Rangers may be innocent of wrong doing but their fans blame everyone but the club for its own demise - despite the fact that nobody has done any such thing. In short, he's spreading just more and more falsehoods and slander about the club and its fans - and we're paying for him to slander us.

[GovanAllan 0]

It's not the Union Jack ffs unless we all think we are ships.

[EDGE 0]

How did the protest go anyway?

 

I was in George Square from 3ish onwards and never saw any of these people.

 

Did it go ahead or was the notion of protesting about a piece of cloth being removed from a building in another city whilst standing outside a building which flies a different coloured piece of cloth, just become too bizarre?

[GovanAllan 0]

Might seem crazy to get so heat up about a flag, but taken in context of the the endless concessions the loyalist community has had to give to the republicans without a thing in return, I can understand how they must feel.

[blueflag 378]

and yes there was a protest in Glasgow.....