I AM ABOUT AS FAR as you could get from being a football fan. I’ve never been to a game nor ever wanted to attend one. Once I shared a railway carriage from Edinburgh with drunken young men returning from a victorious match and I feared for my pretty young niece’s safety: that was plenty.
So when I say the scenes outside Ibrox yesterday of fans celebrating Rangers’ imminent victory, and the images exploding on social media this afternoon of the same fans in George Square, lifted my heart, you will know it is from no allegiance to football. I think if I’d been there I might have cried.
After a year in different modulations of lockdown, where social contact has been constrained to the nth degree, where people having fun together has been criminalised, it is almost unbelievable to see people come together to whoop it up.
I have felt desolate at the silent compliance of so much of the population, cowed by fear and social pressure into appearing to abide by rules that many privately criticised and quietly broke. Demonstrations against the Scottish Government’s lockdown measures have been sparsely attended, and very heavily policed.
One protest yesterday in Edinburgh, at which organisers and speakers were arrested and people in the vicinity of Holyrood were harassed by the police, presented a striking contrast to the Ibrox crowd. Police there were thin on the ground, and people weren’t hanging back from each other, scared of arrest. Instead they were singing and hugging and letting off flares.
But in a way, the spontaneous crowds in Glasgow – although they may be occasioned by Rangers’ first Premiership win in a decade – are popular uprisings against the Covid misery of the last year. Even now, as virtually everyone vulnerable has been vaccinated and infections, hospitalisations and deaths are nose-diving, the First Minister still cannot bring herself to set an imminent end date for these killjoy restrictions on ordinary human interaction.
Thanks to this weekend’s Rangers fans, a very Scottish joie de vivre and anarchic spirit bubbled up and declared the end of lockdown – whatever Chief Mammy might say. The First Minister has wasted no time tweeting:
“I congratulate @RangersFC on the title win & recognise what a moment this is for fans. But gathering in crowds just now risks lives, and could delay exit from lockdown for everyone else. If those gathering care at all about the safety of others & the country, they will go home.”
Justice Minister Humza Yousaf has also put in his two penneth worth. He denounced the “unforgivable” scenes at Ibrox, threatening attendees with retrospective action from the police
and warning that “UEFA are watching”, so they are putting “that tournament coming to Scotland into jeopardy”.
Judging by the number of people in Glasgow today who decided they’d had enough of staying at home, that message fell on deaf ears. Personal Twitter feeds are notoriously biased, but I was nonetheless struck by how little support Nicola Sturgeon’s finger-wagging received.
The First Minister’s grasp of national feeling about the pandemic may be slipping. She can hardly dare argue that all those celebrating this weekend just don’t care whether they, their families or the wider community die of Covid. The problem is they’ve cared for far too long and now they no longer believe her scare-mongering.
Linda Holt is a councillor for East Neuk & Landward in Fife and a prospective candidate for All for Unity in the coming Holyrood elections. lindaholt.org.uk
