Michael Kelly: Such a poor attempt to cure a historical blight

The 1834 Poor Law was wildly unhistoric. That was the question that I was faced with in my economic history degree exam. Without being sure exactly what it meant I managed to construct an answer that saw me through. I’ve been thinking about that question off and on ever since. So naturally it jumped into my mind at a time when one of the most flawed pieces of legislation had just passed through Holyrood.

Sectarianism raised its ugly head yet again last year in the narrow and least harmful way of singing at football matches.

The ensuing police calls for action, and the subsequent media frenzy, offered politicians the chance to examine the fundamentals of Scotland’s shame and to come up with a detailed long-term plan, including possibly legislation. This was the chance to bring it gradually but inexorably to an end. Instead, led by a First Minister looking for headlines, we got the irrelevant Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Bill.

For a start, although it is popularly referred to as the government’s anti-sectarian bill, nowhere in it is sectarianism mentioned. We’ve moved from that to “offensiveness”– a new, broader and far different concept, the banning of which, with its gross restrictions on freedom of speech, breaches the European Convention on Human Rights. And, when the law is enacted there will be some brave fan setting out on the long road to challenging it in the European Court

Worse, the way this has been handled has set back the cause of anti-sectarianism. It is understood that the Scottish civil service has a whole package of measures that they were ready to introduce. However, they were persuaded by politicians that if they took on football first and “parked it” with a new law they would then be freer to look at more deep-seated causes. That has backfired spectacularly.

First, popularly, the issue will have been thought to have been dealt with. Secondly, the way the bill was pushed through against the wishes of so many vested interests including the Catholic Church (telling Catholics that blessing themselves in public would become a crime was not likely to win votes there) is going to make progress on other fronts even more difficult. Salmond called for a consensus. There is one – against the bill.

Yesterday we moved that little bit closer to being a police state. When the Scottish Government used its majority to ram through its bill, our civil liberties were pared back a bit and the police got a few more powers to repress the citizenery.

And yet these powers are completely unnecessary to tackle the alleged crimes. That’s what recent police action demonstrates. A few weeks ago, under old legislation, the police raided the home of a 17-year-old boy and held him in custody for singing at Celtic Park.

Others accused of knife crimes walked from the same court which remanded him. Another boy is being held on remand for six weeks for the same offence, again before the new law was introduced.

The police, who called for new powers, still cannot explain why they needed them. Indeed, since the Chief Constable of Strathclyde made his plea last year it has been extremely difficult to get an official police view.

They rarely put up official spokespeople. Instead, when these issues are debated it is Les Gray, a police trade union representative who appears. He rightly reflects the view of the ordinary police officer, but he certainly doesn’t represent any police authority.

But it is in his views that we detect what is the driving force behind the determination to acquire new powers. This week he stated that he wanted them because the offence of breach of the peace had been “watered down by clever lawyers” going to court and demonstrating that what the police considered crimes weren’t crimes at all.

The police want to reverse the trend towards greater liberty for the individual. They are looking to criminalise people that our courts have found innocent.

Even more subversively, the offending words that might constitute a crime are not to be listed. It’s to be left to the reasonable policeman to find them shocking or not.

The same Les Gray is so reasonable that he had to turn down the sound on his telly so sickened was he by the chants (incidentally, this same sensitive soul also added that he expected arrests to be made, again, without any new powers needed). Les Gray is also the man who said : “I’ve been in homes with King Billy on the wall and on the other side with the Pope on the wall, and both sides are just as bad.”

Well, I have two photos of the Pope in my home. Following this confession I shall expect a visit from one of Les’s Govan colleagues. If he is an example of the reasonable officer who will judge theses things then there are going to be some volume of arrests.

Of all the sectarian offences recorded last year only a third were committed at football matches and only 10 per cent inside stadia. This bill, by concentrating on the minor part of the problem, will do little to remove the sectarianism that blights part of Scottish society.

Instead of examining and understanding the many threads in our convoluted religious past that have created the social attitudes we have to live with, this misguided initiative has trivialised the problem and suggested glib solutions.

Such is the confused thinking over sectarianism that even some of the proposed broader answers themselves smack of discrimination. Thus the question of separate Catholics schools is always raised as if somehow a Catholic identity is in itself problematic and forcing Catholics to make an effort to merge their attitudes and behaviour into some sort of non-controversial blandness is part of the solution.

Wildly unhistoric, this tawdry piece of confused and deficient legislation will not be itself the topic of academic discussion 50 years from now.

The First Minister might think it sees him through, but, if nothing more fundamental is done we could still then be talking of a sectarian Scotland.