Kevin McKenna putting the boot into Celtic

I am one of those persistent lefties who become puce-faced fascists in matters concerning my chosen football club. It’s pathetic, really. You spend the week proclaiming the virtues of caring socialism and abjuring the ruthlessness of the free market and then Saturday comes. That’s when you turn into the lovechild of Margaret Thatcher and Augusto Pinochet.

There are no limits to your avarice in seeking an advantage for your team; your fury is terrible to behold when one of your own has under-performed. They must be jettisoned immediately and never be allowed to wear your shirt again. You are impervious to the possibility that his wife and children might be sitting in close proximity. It’s their fault too.

Where your closest rivals are concerned it’s not sufficient merely to gain the victory and collect the points: they must be humiliated and ground into the dust. In these games too, any questionable decision by the referee must be treated as a war crime.
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You seek out a weak player among your opponents and set about the task of undermining him at every opportunity. Very few aspects of his life are considered out of bounds: his relationships are exposed; his physical appearance and body shape are cruelly caricatured and any known personal habits are portrayed as hopeless addictions.
In normal life this kind of behaviour would render you unsuitable to be in charge of small children and very probably the subject of a social work inquiry. But this is football and football has always played by its own rules. It has evolved its own moral eco-structure. Irony and perspective flee; hypocrisy and petulance reside.
When you’re a Celtic supporter like me you can sometimes add sanctimony to this unholy mix. Owing to the origins of my club, which was established to lift our Irish forbears out of poverty we ascribe to it the virtues of Mother Theresa. We are on the right side (that is to say the Left) of the world’s political struggles and scour the planet seeking oppressed minorities with whom to make common cause.
At Parkhead during lulls in the action I become an amateur vexillologist trying to identify the flags of downtrodden states and small African republics and am filled with the glowing certainty of the righteous. I patronise my friends who support the ‘wee teams’ by telling them that we are bound by a higher moral code.
I insult their intelligence by claiming underdog status even as we use our economic muscle to hoover up their home-grown talent in our quest to win every major prize (ten and counting) on offer.
I still give this club my support even when it seems there are more Tories in the boardroom than the 1922 committee. Until recently, this board resisted paying the Living Wage to its lowest-paid employees. It refuses to tolerate any trade union activity.
Celtic has a few very rich employees who routinely earn more than £1m a year. At the other end of the wage structure they have many non-playing employees who are paid as little as the board think they can get away with. This week it chose to exploit the UK Government’s coronavirus bail-out scheme which will pay grants covering up to 80% of the salary of workers if companies keep them on their payroll.
The scheme is primarily intended to help small and vulnerable firms survive without having to make their workers redundant. I doubt very much if it was intended to be used by cash-rich sporting giants like several in the English Premiership, the richest football franchise in the world. Like Celtic, they too feel they must dip their beaks in the state’s largesse at a time of economic crisis.
It would be difficult for Celtic to impose arbitrarily a wage cut upon their highest paid players, but I’d like to think that some of the millionaires on their payroll might volunteer to accept a modest levy to guarantee the jobs and wages of the non-playing staff.
Celtic’s last set of annual results showed they had nearly £40m to play with, excluding £25m from the sale of Kieran Tierney. They have just concluded the richest sponsorship deal in Scottish sports history which won’t be far off £50m. Celtic can afford not to take advantage of the Government wages scheme and leave it for much more deserving causes.
READ MORE: Kevin McKenna: Could compassion unlocked by this mortal threat change our politics and society forever?
I understand too that it might seem unfair to be singling out Celtic. I’d like to know, for instance, how many of those working in our richest financial institutions – those whom we bailed out in 2008 to save the economy – will forgo their massive bonuses in order to guarantee the wages of their most financially vulnerable employees.
And the decision by senior executives of the Scottish Rugby Union merely to ‘defer’ part of their ridiculously huge salaries is also astonishing. Rugby is a minority sport in Scotland and over the last decade or so, in a very small pool, Scotland have not been very good at it. But I’m a Celtic supporter and I’m simply examining the conduct of my own club.
In matters of finance Celtic always insist they must deliver their fiduciary duty to shareholders, a phrase that has become so synonymous with its directors that I expect it soon to be nailed above the entrance and translated into Latin.
Celtic is the richest, most successful and best-supported sporting organisation in the country. It exerts an influence on Scottish culture that goes well beyond football. The club itself ceaselessly proclaims it’s ‘more than just a football club’. It’s meant to convey a sense that they really are bound by higher values than mere profit, but they really aren’t.
Celtic borrowed the slogan from Barcelona who showed last week that they really are more than just a football club when their first team squad volunteered to make significant cuts in their salaries to protect the jobs and wages of non-playing staff.

The decisions Celtic and other rich sporting organisations make and the attitudes they adopt at times like this matter. People look to them seeking signs of humanity and good leadership. Coronavirus is asking us all to be the best versions of ourselves. This applies to the capricious, grasping world of football too.
 
“It exerts an influence on Scottish culture that goes well beyond football.”

The only thing that disgusting club exerts on Scotland beyond football is bigotry, Irish republican bile and a disgusting hatred of the nation and government that they are now shamelessly taking handouts from.

They contribute absolutely nothing to Scottish culture.

Horrible scumbag bastards.
 
Do people still not actually understand what this is for.

If companies were not allowed to do this then people would be getting laid off, because their employer does not have work for them to do when they were staying at home, which the Government is asking everyone to do.

There must be quite a few people on this site who have been furloughed for that very reason. Would they prefer their employer to have to spend every penny they have before they could use the system. Then fold the business because they had spent all of the money and there was no business left. So no job any more.

If companies had to wait until they had no money left then the economy would collapse. More companies would fold and more jobs would be lost.

This is about saving lives, businesses and jobs.
 
They need the money for the compensation claims let’s not kid ourselves on Kev you know that’s the reason for minimum wage at the den of aniquity you call paradise
 
Where to start.

1. The bogus claim that Celtc were founded to help the immigrant Irish Catholic poor and not the fact that it was to keep them from the philanthropy of the indigenous Christian churches.
2. The Mother Theresa myth of selfless charity when in fact she was a prune faced fascist who directed millions of charity donated dollars to the Vatican during the Banco Ambrosiano scandal.
3. The preposterous claim that the Roman Catholic Church was or is on the "right side(that is to say the Left)" when it was in fact the Faith of Fascism and the midwife to Nazism all through the twentieth century.

If McKenna and his ilk are the love child of any historical characters, I would suggest General Franco and Bloody Mary would be more accurate, and that he spends every waking moment of his life as the "puce-faced fascist" that he is.
 
bearspakora said:
It seems the coginitive dissonance is finally sinking into that thick cretin McKenna. They've had more Sirs and Lords at that dump that ever sat at King Arthur's Round Table, yet similarly play the poor and victimised oppression card. :D
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I like this one from him where he has a swipe at private schooling and rich 19th Century Terrorists.



Education
The public untruths about private schools
Kevin McKenna
The Tories happily promote an insidious lie – that comprehensive schools don't work
Sun 17 Jan 2010 00.10 GMTFirst published on Sun 17 Jan 2010 00.10 GMT
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My narrow escape from a private education occurred in 1975 when my otherwise exemplary parents made me sit the entrance exam for St Aloysius College. The school occupies a lofty position in Glasgow education, sitting atop one of the highest of the hills in the heart of the city. It is where affluent and aspirational Catholics send their children and as you wander around the city centre of a lunchtime, little Sebastians and Julias in their lovely green blazers traipse desultorily among Sauchiehall Street's gaudy emporiums. For around £9,000 a year, they are exposed to the dubious rigours of a Jesuit education.

A place on Glasgow University's law course is the least of their expectations and a position in Docherty, Docherty and O'Hanlon, solicitors and notaries to the archdiocese and the security industry beckons. Happily, my ability at maths was scarcely better than an HBOS trader's and so I was spared several years of short trousers, rugby and an annoying accent. The Jesuits, when they are not casting out demons and even atheists, are good at education. They have also undertaken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience so that they can dedicate themselves to the spiritual and pastoral care of we, the 19th Century Terrorist proletariat.

Glasgow's Jesuits though, are exempt from such privations and are given leave to impart their wisdom only to families with an income of around 120k and those, like my parents, who are prepared to eat Spam fritters for a decade. It's a curiously exclusive Christianity and not perhaps what St Ignatius of Loyola had in mind when he founded his great order.

So I spent five happy years at two decent but unspectacular comprehensives where, thanks to the efforts of some splendid teachers, I achieved more or less what I would have at an independent school. In Scotland, we are obsessive about the quality of our education and this is not unhealthy. For a few centuries now, we have been justly proud of our schools and, consequently, our expectations of them are mighty. They inspired a freedom of thought and expression and a rigorous pursuit of knowledge across arts and sciences.

In such a crucible, ideas and formulas were wrought that helped improve the world. Yet one of the most popular parlour debates among the middle classes after climate change and disciplining children is the state of our comprehensive schools. There is a collective whine as you walk through Newton Mearns and Morningside at 10 on a Saturday night after a pert chablis from the Sunday Times wine club has just been served and it goes like this: Scottish education was once envied throughout the world, but the comprehensive system has destroyed it.

The refrain will have been given an airing once more this weekend. For the Tories, in their endless quest for relevance in Scotland, are proposing a bizarre voucher system that will strengthen parents' rights to have their child educated at the school of their choice. Under this system, parents would be able to cash in vouchers for the cost of their child's education at the state school of their choice. At a stroke, it would create a three-tier state secondary education structure, consigning already faltering schools to sink status.

Let's get something straight about the Tories and education. They've never really forgiven the rest of us for imposing comprehensive schools on them. Any system where every child is given an equal opportunity to shine, according to his gifts, was bound to end in the nightmare of even more working-class brats storming the citadels of higher education which the Tories once regarded as their exclusive finishing schools. Since then, they have caused an insidious lie to proliferate among the political classes: comprehensives don't work; they stifle children with ability; they encourage hooded tops from Asda; they don't teach English. Or history…

Some comprehensive schools in Scotland are failing, but are not beyond recovery. The majority continue to produce heroic results, sometimes in almost impossible social circumstances. Those that need the most help are all to be found in Scotland's most deprived areas. If the government was serious about tackling this problem they should pursue the affirmative action route, where the best education graduates and most gifted headteachers are paid a premium to spend a minimum period of time, say five years, at those schools that serve our poorest areas. If the concept of all-women political shortlists can be justified to increase their representation in Parliament then so can this.

Any masterplan to improve our comprehensives, though, must also address the unhealthy influence of the all-powerful teaching unions. According to these bodies, there has never been a bad teacher in Scotland. The McCrone agreement, Higher Still, the Curriculum for Excellence, the last four education ministers: it's all their fault. There are hundreds of teachers in Scotland who ought never to have been allowed within miles of a classroom. Yet parents are never given access to the car crash CVs of these people and thus will never know that their child's chances of achievement in some subjects is compromised from the first minute they set foot in the classrooms of these misfits.
Any attempt to get beyond the hand-wringing over failing comprehensives, though, must also limit the unfair privileges enjoyed by the independent sector. How sickening can it be for parents on low incomes to watch graduates, whose education they have helped fund, choose to work in a private school whose fees are out of their reach?

The ultimate iniquity, though, is that independent, fee-paying schools are allowed to exist at all. In democratic, equal, fair and inclusive Scotland, not enough of us find it strange that a cartel of elite schools exists solely for those privileged children born into wealth and power… and the few dozen proles they deign to admit for the purpose of preserving their wretched charitable status.
 
A celtc supporting journo in the mhedia press...who'd have thought.....what a load of shite Kevin 19th Century Terrorist mckenna
 
Jan Wyck said:
Where to start.

1. The bogus claim that Celtc were founded to help the immigrant Irish Catholic poor and not the fact that it was to keep them from the philanthropy of the indigenous Christian churches.
2. The Mother Theresa myth of selfless charity when in fact she was a prune faced fascist who directed millions of charity donated dollars to the Vatican during the Banco Ambrosiano scandal.
3. The preposterous claim that the Roman Catholic Church was or is on the "right side(that is to say the Left)" when it was in fact the Faith of Fascism and the midwife to Nazism all through the twentieth century.

If McKenna and his ilk are the love child of any historical characters, I would suggest General Franco and Bloody Mary would be more accurate, and that he spends every waking moment of his life as the "puce-faced fascist" that he is.
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100% on the money mate.
 
What a shitebag of a journalist. Bordering on parody, that. He's clearly pissed off about Celtic's actions but is too much of a bitter bastard to hold them properly to account. You can actually hear his tortured inner monologue when reading it, qualifying each bit of criticism with some gratuitous line about they're supposedly different.

That article perfectly encapsulates why so many people find hardcore Celtic fans weird - and I don't just mean Rangers fans — fans of other clubs as well. Even when they're confronting the fact their whole benevolent ethos schtick is a myth, they still can't help but propagate it at the same time. It's a bizarre kind of ingrained delusion.
 
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Even when trying to sully their own name, they never forget the whataboutery and attempt to rope in every other entity imaginable. Then, to cream it off, they spin the romanticised shite about their club being the beloved saviour and triumphant king of mankind....... there is certainly nothing more pathetic than a filthy 19th Century Terrorist bastard!
 
Owing to the origins of my club, which was established to lift our Irish forbears out of poverty we ascribe to it the virtues of Mother Theresa. We are on the right side (that is to say the Left) of the world’s political struggles and scour the planet seeking oppressed minorities with whom to make common cause.
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Genuinely stopped at that sanctimonious shite
 
c@nt can write what he wishes from his wee liberal catholic mind, but the truth of it is ,every morning he wakes up ,he knows suck showed everyone just what this c@nt is all about,the mask well and truly slipped that evening and suck played him like a fiddle,it says a lot about journalistic values and integrity that this piece of shit has made a career and decent living despite being shown up as a knuckle dragging anti protestant scumbag, the very mention or thought of suck must bring him out in cold sweats, a thoroughly nasty piece of work is mckenna
 
Brick_Top said:
“It exerts an influence on Scottish culture that goes well beyond football.”

The only thing that disgusting club exerts on Scotland beyond football is bigotry, Irish republican bile and a disgusting hatred of the nation and government that they are now shamelessly taking handouts from.

They contribute absolutely nothing to Scottish culture.

Horrible scumbag bastards.
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Bang on the money.
 
I absolutely cannot stop laughing at that stream of utter pish from McKenna.

A club whose support want, no scrap that, demand others see them as some sort of gold standard bearer for morality and ethics...whilst holding aloft pro terrorist banners, hanging effigies from their stands and singing about killing protestants.

Fúck off Kevin you hypocritical skid mark.
 
Greebo said:
Do people still not actually understand what this is for.

If companies were not allowed to do this then people would be getting laid off, because their employer does not have work for them to do when they were staying at home, which the Government is asking everyone to do.

There must be quite a few people on this site who have been furloughed for that very reason. Would they prefer their employer to have to spend every penny they have before they could use the system. Then fold the business because they had spent all of the money and there was no business left. So no job any more.

If companies had to wait until they had no money left then the economy would collapse. More companies would fold and more jobs would be lost.

This is about saving lives, businesses and jobs.
Click to expand...

Yes but is the point not that football clubs are relying on this scheme for their low paid employees while continuing to pay mega salaries to the footballers. They could survive without this scheme if the players did the right thing and took temporary pay cuts.
 
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Family bam said:
The man who thought the Enniskillen atrocity was a justifiable act of war.

So forgive me in not giving one single fu.ck what that terrorist loving scumbag has to say about anything.
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Fucking scumbag.
he can shove his poor me piece right up his mentally challenged arse.
These fucks are almost all the same. Pity party all the time with this mob.
that club should not be using a furlough scheme from the British government, but it shows the rancid club for what it really is and always has been. A club like no other, and only in it for itself and certainly not for charitable causes. It’s only ever looked after itself, and chooses to brainwash it’s dutiful followers.
If they knew it’s history right enough.
 
yosser hughes said:
c@nt can write what he wishes from his wee liberal catholic mind, but the truth of it is ,every morning he wakes up ,he knows suck showed everyone just what this c@nt is all about,the mask well and truly slipped that evening and suck played him like a fiddle,it says a lot about journalistic values and integrity that this piece of shit has made a career and decent living despite being shown up as a knuckle dragging anti protestant scumbag, the very mention or thought of suck must bring him out in cold sweats, a thoroughly nasty piece of work is mckenna
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What’s this mate?
 
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