Meanwhile, At The Bus Stop...

Paul Larkin published these fine words in this post on his blog, thefrontofthebus.blogspot.co.uk.

I was all for commenting but I can't get through the filters so I'll put my thoughts down here for just now.



Well said, Paul.  Those are exactly my sentiments.
It's not just that what that shower did was morally wrong, unfair and totally contrary to the spirit of sport; it's the fact that nothing pleased them more than the idea of winning at any cost.  Most sports fans draw a line at how far it is acceptable to go in order to win but not that lot.
Nothing could embarrass them about the methods they used to chalk up victories and tournament successes. Suggestions that they had cheated or that Hun-friendly officials were always ready to assist them actually made them gloat even more heartily.

Their victory celebrations have always been centred on their delight at being able to taunt their rivals, to show nothing but contempt for other supporters while trying to intimidate everyone and anyone who was not in step with their triumphalism.

That is why they are different. That is why they are despised by decent fans of all clubs and none. And that is why nothing short of the maximum redress is required in order to show these bullies, once and for all, that they have been rumbled, faced down and unequivocally routed on every front.

Nothing short of completely wiping out their standing in the game will be good enough.
This was not about a few minor oversights or indiscretions. This was, and to a large extent still is, institutionalised corruption, calculated maladministration, wholesale cheating and shameless hypocrisy on an industrial scale. It has to be completely discredited without equivocation.

For the greatest scandal in the history of the game, only the ultimate punishment is appropriate.

Are Laws Only For The Little People?

Sir Isaac Newton told us why
An apple falls down from the sky
And from this fact it's very plain
That other objects do the same...

But.
If it was up to the courts to rule on the Laws of Gravity, we'd probably spend years hearing legal arguments that an apple falls from the ground up to the tree.

Up until recently I thought that I was more or less keeping in touch with the general shape of the developments as Rangers FC heads into perdition as a well-deserved consequence of the scandalous running of the club for at least the last twenty years. The charge sheet includes three separate instances of tax fraud which could total nearly one hundred million pounds in unpaid monies to the Treasury. It also includes routinely running up a preposterous level of debt with no serious prospects of repaying it other than by adding it to the already over-extended overdraft of Murray International Holdings, a liability which eventually exceeded one billion pounds and played its part in the collapse of the Bank of Scotland and its subsequent bail-out, funded by the UK tax-payers. We're looking at one of the biggest corporate scandals in Scottish business history. One would be forgiven for expecting jail sentences to have been handed down to the guilty parties long before now.

And yet I'm beginning to feel that this whole case is becoming too Pythonesque to make any sense. The latest bizarre twist is the surreal sight of the Administrators of Rangers FC applying to the Court of Session to be appointed ... the Administrators of Rangers!
It's particularly frustrating to me that there seems to be very little overlap between easily understood, natural justice and the immensely complicated procedures of the Law.

Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of pounds have been ripped off by various parties involved with Rangers FC and MIH and it looks increasingly likely that those responsible for these scams are still in with a shout of getting something out of it, even if Rangers itself goes down the pan.
Every time that it looks as if anyone is going to get their comeuppance, another bizarre legal wheeze appears out of thin air, in defiance of all common sense, which muddies the waters and makes it appear that there is always a possible escape route for the shameless and the dishonourable. Amidst the carnage of the revelations about how Rangers FC has been conducting its business, one of the club's former directors is still proposing that he will play a leading role in taking the wreckage for which he is partly responsible and turning it into a successful business after it has been liquidated. There has not been one word from Mr Paul Murray about his moral duty to repay the colossal debts which the club ran up under his stewardship; not a single syllable to suggest that he feels the slightest shame about his part in the reckless business practice of the directors' board of which he was a member. No repentance, no remorse, no sign of a guilty conscience.

I have got more money than the likes of David Murray, who was knighted for services to business. Unlike Sir David, I am not in debt to the tune of six hundred million pounds. Yet he is the one who is still living like a king. An entire bank went to the wall to enable that man to enjoy the luxurious lifestyle to which he has accustomed himself. And he's not even in the picture yet, as far as the Law is concerned!

The Law is taking an eternity to get its act together. Somehow, when tasked with a case in which somebody pursues his own objectives by spending hundreds of millions of pounds of other people's money, m'learned friends spend months and years dragging out a tortuously slow series of procedures. They forensically examine every conceivable interpretation of every obscure contention. It is as if their primary objective is to find the route by which the most blatant wrongdoing can turn out to be perfectly legal. And to charge by the hour as they proceed at a glacial pace.
Now, for the first time, I'm genuinely beginning to fear that a fix is in whereby there will once again be no punishment for the villains of the piece while the decent, honest little guys will be the only victims (cf bonuses for bankers).

Something stinks very badly here. The media, on an industrial scale, have relentlessly covered up as much of the criminality as they possibly could, even after much of it was already public knowledge. They have weakly claimed in their defence that libel laws prevented them from publishing known facts about the affairs of Rangers and its various directors, even when these facts were already matters of public record.
To take but one example: it would clearly be in the public interest for journalists to regularly scrutinise the ongoing, chaotic tax affairs of Mr. Dave King, Rangers' second largest shareholder and until very recently a member of the board of directors. The South African Revenue Service is pursuing literally hundreds of charges of tax irregularities against Mr. King and yet I can think of no example of a single journalist asking the obvious question: why has such a man been a senior director of what we are often told is Scotland's second biggest institution?

This is not an unreasonable question for a decent investigative journalist to ask, nor would it require much research to pad out. Merely to copy half of what has already been published in South African newspapers would raise the question. What is it that prevents the editors of our national newspapers from pursuing this story? Could it be that their experience in their profession tells them that, no matter how grievous the fraud, the Law will usually find a way to give psychopathic predators a free pass so long as they wear suits and ties? And therefore, in their judgement, it is always safer to back rogues who have a place in the Establishment rather than trust in the Law's ability to ensure that justice is done in major scandals?

Strong Rangers

There’s a recurring myth which needs to be addressed, viz, the myth that Scottish football needs a “strong” Rangers.

Let us see first of all how this “strong” Rangers has worked in practice.

For the best part of the last quarter of a century, Rangers’ “strength” and apparent success lay in their ability and determination to outspend every other team in Scotland.

They fully played their part in contributing to the collapse of the Bank of Scotland in order to finance transfers and wages for players which no other Scottish team could even countenance.

Using tens of millions of pounds from a bank which would ultimately collapse and pass on its debts to every man, woman and child in the nation, “Strong” Rangers signed prominent internationalists from England, Holland, Denmark, France, Scotland and elsewhere to fill every place in their starting eleven.

After SDM took control of the club, Strong Rangers went on to win 16 titles. Five of these went to the last game of the season – strongly, I’m sure – even though Rangers, uniquely, were allowed to use fortunes of the doomed bank’s zombie assets to boost their “strength”.

And despite the media propaganda that tells us otherwise, Strong Rangers’ recent title successes were still claimed by the most expensively assembled squad in the country, underwritten by tax-payers who have been saddled with the tab for the reckless practices of the failed banks.

Question One: How many titles might Strong Aberdeen, Strong Dundee United, Strong Hibs or even Strong Partick Thistle win if a tax-payer owned bank now decided to give one of those clubs a credit line that would allow them to outspend their nearest challengers by a ration of “ten pounds for every fiver”?

Strong Rangers, not content with having used everyone else’s money to buy their nine-in-a-row (which was obviously a Good Thing for Scottish football) then apparently decided that having to waste money paying the income tax of their expensively assembled international mercenaries was too much of a handicap to their future ambitions. So they strongly rejected this practice and availed themselves of more tens of millions of pounds which the rest of their competitors were too honest (“weak”) to steal from the nation.

Question Two: How many titles might Strong Aberdeen, Strong Dundee United, Strong Hibs or even Strong Partick Thistle win if any one of them was allowed to compete for the signings of top players without the inconvenience of having to give millions of pounds to the taxman each time they offered a contract to their potential employees?

If Scottish football needs this kind of “Strong” club, let’s be absolutely honest about it in unequivocal terms.

Let the government propose the formation of a new club for the good of Scottish football.

Its name doesn’t matter much but let’s not actually call it Strong State Supported Football Club For The Good Of Scottish Football.

Let it simply be called Babylon Establishment FC.

For the good of Scottish football, Babylon Establishment FC must have a line of credit with the nationalised bank of its choice.

The credit limit must be raised if Babylon Establishment FC struggle to dominate the Scottish league.

For the good of Scottish football, Babylon FC will not have to pay taxes on the wages which it offers to its players. Otherwise those players might choose to sign for another club.

For the good of Scottish football, there must also be some kind of constitutional arrangement in place which guarantees that Babylon FC will always play in the top division of the Scottish league, even if other clubs have to go to the wall as a consequence.

And for the good of Scottish football, the press must clear all of their copy about Babylon FC with the government before it is published.

The alternative is unthinkable; it might herald a return to the dark days when Weak Rangers languished in mid-table while Dundee Utd, Aberdeen, Hearts and Celtic were competing for the championship title. Clearly, that was a Bad Thing for Scottish football.

Who would want a return to the misery of watching Scottish clubs horsing Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Hamburg, Sporting Lisbon and others out of European tournaments, year after year. That was self-evidently a Bad Thing for Scottish football.

And heaven forbid that Scottish international teams might ever again go head to head with the likes of Brazil, Germany and Holland in the World Cup Finals or the Euro championships.

So let’s not accept the false paradigm of the need for a Strong Rangers. If there is to be a debate on the principle, let’s be clear and honest about the terms and parameters which pertain.

Let there simply be a Babylon Establishment FC which is exactly what it says it is on the tin instead of straining to maintain the pretence that Strong Rangers was anything other than Babylon FC by another name.