Born Under A Union Flag: Rangers, Britain and Scottish Independence by Alan Bissett & Alasdair McKillop

Author:Alan Bissett & Alasdair McKillop [McKillop, Alan Bissett and Alasdair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sport & Politics
Publisher: Luath Press Ltd
Published: 2014-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

7

Two Rangers Fans Debate National Identity

ALAN BISSETT and JOHN DC GOW

ALAN

We’ve probably all used the shorthand when describing the Old Firm to the uninitiated: Rangers are the ‘Protestant’ club and Celtic are ‘Catholic’. But we also know that this is a limiting and, in many respects, inaccurate description. While Rangers were operating a policy of not signing Catholics they were undeniably a sectarian outfit, and it would be disingenuous to suggest that all traces of this have left the support. In the post-Maurice Johnston age, however, it is clear that neither Old Firm clubs as organisations are still guilty of religious discrimination. Rangers’ ‘Protestant’ identity may have diminished in recent decades, but their Unionism – their loyalty to the British state – has, if anything, grown stronger.

Better historians than I, on both sides of the Old Firm, have detailed already the ways in which Rangers evolved into the ‘establishment’ club in their early years. Some Celtic-minded scholars assert that Scotland needed a symbolic challenge to the coalescing of an Irish immigrant consciousness, as represented by Celtic FC. Rangers became this reaction. Given the very real discrimination Irish Catholics faced in the West of Scotland in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and Rangers’ subsequent signing policy, I’m not going to dispute this. But we might ask why Rangers developed a distinctly ‘British’ identity, based around the colours and values of the Union Jack, rather than a Scottish one, per se.

We can perhaps explain this with a glance at Scotland’s secure political and cultural absorption into the United Kingdom at the time, and our active part in administering the Empire. Scottishness was, in many ways, more synonymous with Britishness then than it is now. Secondly, Ireland in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was agitating for Home Rule, much to the irritation of the British state, so it is perhaps little wonder that reaction to the presence of Irish Catholics in the West of Scotland – and in Scottish football – should have taken on such a prevailing air of Protestant Unionism. The trappings of the Rangers’ identity, which continue to this day – the colour of the strip, the waving of the Union Jack, visible support for the monarchy and armed forces – can all be explained as reactions to Irish nationalism, a mini parallel of the Troubles that somehow found its way into the West of Scotland.

Rangers stayed the same thereafter, but Scotland changed around it, with the 1960s as a crucial turning point. The Second World War, what the journalist Iain Macwhirter has called the ‘high tide of Unionism,’ was by that point two decades in the past. Post-Suez, the British Empire was in disarray, with 30 colonies declaring independence in the 1960s alone. Radical changes in the culture – more Beatles and mind-altering drugs, less deference to authority – caused Scotland to throw off its Calvinist past and move towards secularism. Gradually, the ‘religious’ aspects of the Old Firm made less and less sense to the rest of Scotland.

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