Deeply Saddening and Frankly Embarrassing

When 'absolutely everyone' doesn't mean absolutely everyone

The barbarian…is somebody who can be understood, characterised and defined only in relation to a civilization, and to the fact that he exists outside of it.

-Michel Foucault

It has become increasingly common in internet commentary to describe the British state as having taken on a colonial mindset towards its own population. No longer identifying closely with the people they govern, and often indeed thinking of them as backwards, ill-educated, fractious and unreliable, the members of our political class treat us largely as a set of potential problems to be managed rather than a citizenry as such. This, the reasoning goes, is something more akin to the attitude of imperial administrators than it is that of democratically elected leaders.

This analogy can be over-egged, but in some respects it is useful. One example is that it helps us draw out a concept from postcolonial theory which explains certain aspects of our predicament rather well. This is the notion of the ‘subaltern’, the word used in Gramsci-inflected theory to refer to a member of the ‘native’ population under colonial administration who is excluded from politics per se. In such circumstances, the theory goes, the ruling class, possessed of certain values, preferences and ideas, exert a ‘cultural hegemony’ that presents those values, preferences and ideas as inevitable, benign, and normal. Those who hold different values, preferences and ideas - i.e., that would challenge the status quo - are, necessarily, therefore cast as being abnormal, malevolent, untrustworthy, irrational, and so on. This serves as justification for excluding them from political participation altogether - they are construed as lacking the necessary agency, and as being in any case likely to use said political participation to do foolish and objectionable things. All things considered, it’s better if they just keep their traps shut and labour in quiet obscurity: their values, preferences and ideas are thus prevented from intruding into the world of politics altogether.

Antonio Gramsci was almost certainly not thinking about the Glaswegian football team Rangers FC when writing his Prison Notebooks. But a recent incident involving Rangers fans provides a curious illustration of how this dynamic plays out in a non-colonial context.

First, though, a little background for those who are not familiar with the ins-and-outs of football in Scotland’s largest city. Gather round, children: it’s story time.

Greater Glasgow is home to a number of football clubs. But the two biggest by far are Celtic and Rangers, who are indeed among the best-supported clubs in the world. (Rangers have the world record for taking the largest away contingent to a fixture - 200,000 Rangers fans went to the UEFA Cup Final against Zenit St Petersburg in Manchester in 2008.) In the interests of full disclosure, I am a Celtic fan, having inherited this congenital sickness from my Glaswegian father.

You can think of Celtic and Rangers as something like the Robin Hood and Sheriff of Nottingham of Scottish football. Whereas Celtic represent what is culturally ‘up’ in 2025 at least in the mainstream, BBC-watching middle-class sense (Irish republicanism; anti-monarchist sentiments; Scottish independence; Palestinian activism; internationalism; and so on), Rangers represent everything that is culturally cringeworthy in the eyes of that caste (unionism - which, to clarify, in Scotland means the movement against Scottish independence; monarchism, British patriotism; Northern Irish loyalism; support for Israel; etc.).

The history of all of this is a little too detailed to go into here, but the differences are basically driven by sectarianism. Glasgow, like that other great Irish Sea port, Liverpool, faces Ireland and to a surprisingly large extent looks across the water for its identity rather than to the British mainland. Its very large Irish immigrant population early on split between Celtic and Rangers along Catholic/Protestant lines, and though most fans of either club are nowadays as merrily agnostic and secularised as the rest of the British population, the differences have remained as a kind of mimetic rivalry or cosplay. But, as one would expect, given the way things are nowadays, the two clubs also have become somewhat left/right coded in recent years in the culture war sense - and their fans have tended to divide along with that coding with respect to any given hot-button issue you might care to name.

Anyway, on 18th March 2025 a group of Rangers fans associated with the Union Bears supporters’ group (Union = against Scottish independence; Bears = rhyming slang for ‘Gers’, itself a corruption of an abbreviation of ‘Rangers’) held up a banner in the stadium during a UEFA Europa League fixture at Rangers’ home stadium, Ibrox, against Fenerbahçe. The banner - wait for it - read in its entirety:

KEEP WOKE FOREIGN IDEOLOGIES OUT - DEFEND EUROPE

The reaction to this was swift. The fans were straight away declared by UEFA, European football’s governing body, to have hoisted a ‘racist and/or discriminatory’ banner. Rangers were charged with a breach of UEFA rules - presumably Article 11 of its Disciplinary Regulations, which when read through Article 8 permits UEFA to sanction clubs whose supporters ‘bring the sport of football…into disrepute’ or ‘[use] sporting events for manifestations of a non-sporting nature’.

And Rangers FC made its own official position very clear not long afterwards. It is ‘deeply saddening and frankly embarrassing’, the club’s official statement says, ‘that the club is now set to face significant sanctions for the actions of a very small minority.’ The statement continued by insisting that ‘Rangers is a modern, progressive football club’ that is ‘fiercely proud’ of its ‘diverse playing squads, workforce and support’. And the club closed its comments on the matter with a curiously self-contradictory flourish:

For the avoidance of doubt, if you do not believe in 2025 that absolutely everyone is welcome to follow Rangers whether at Ibrox or away, then Rangers is not the club for you, and you should disassociate yourself with the club immediately.

The curious reader may ask whether this statement disqualifies the authors themselves from supporting Rangers, since they themselves apparently do not believe that absolutely everyone is welcome. But in any event it seems the matter has been treated with the utmost seriousness: the fans in question will be identified and recieve lifetime - yes, lifetime - stadium bans. They are no longer, in other words, in the category of ‘absolutely everyone’. They are in a different category: that of the people who are no longer permitted to follow Rangers and, as it were, ought just to get themsel’ right tae f*ck instead. They are not ‘absolutely anyone’. They are now, as it were, ‘no-one’.

The incident is in itself instructive, for reasons which I will come to, but it becomes even more so when compared with a fairly recent, and on its face similar, event involving Celtic fans.

You will recall that on the 7th of October 2023 members of various Palestinian terrorist organisations, chiefly of Hamas, invaded Israel from the Gaza strip to take part in a project of mass rape, torture, murder and hostage-taking. Within hours of these attacks, and while they were still indeed ongoing, a group of Celtic ‘Green Brigade’ ultras, the equivalents of Rangers’ Union Bears, put up a display in Celtic Park at a match against Kilmarnock that was taking place that afternoon, trumpeting ‘the resistance’:

The club, as did Rangers in response to the ‘racist and/or discriminatory’ banner of 18th March 2025, duly issued a statement:

Banners displayed in a section of Celtic Park prior to Saturday's game do not represent the views of Celtic Football Club and we disassociate ourselves from them. We condemn the display of such messages at Celtic Park.

Celtic is a football club and not a political organisation. One of our core values from inception is to be open to all regardless of race, colour, politics or creed.

And both UEFA and Celtic have subsequently endeavoured to undertake a tut-tutting response to the Green Brigade’s continued insistence on public support for Hamas’s cause. The club briefly banned Green Brigade members from attending away fixtures not long after the Kilmarnock incident as long as they insisted on bringing Palestinian flags along, and UEFA fined the club when a huge pro-Palestinian display was put on at Celtic Park in a Champions League match against Atletico Madrid a few weeks after 7th October (as indeed it did when a group of Celtic fans, clearly not in the mood to win friends or influence people, displayed an offensive message about the Royal Family at a match shortly after the Queen’s death in 2022).

But you will no doubt have noticed that, while UEFA and the clubs involved have made a game show of being fair, there is an important difference between the way the sets of fans in the two incidents have been treated. For all that Celtic, and UEFA, have huffed and puffed and wagged their fingers about the Palestinian flag-waving that goes on at Celtic Park (if you are curious about the reason for this, it stems back to the common cause that was made between the IRA and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in the 1970s), there is a sense of going through the motions about their condemnation. But when it came to the reaction to the ‘keep woke foreign ideologies out’ banner there was real feeling. Compare and contrast the language used by Rangers (‘For the avoidance of doubt…Rangers is not the club for you, and you should disassociate yourself with the club immediately’) and that used by Celtic (‘we disassociate ourselves from [these messages]…[w]e condemn the display of such messages at Celtic Park’). And compare and contrast the consequences: lifetime stadium bans versus some restrictions on away support.

Now, I do not wish to be misunderstood here. I am not in favour of the politicisation of sport, from any direction. I am a great believer in Sir Michael Parkinson’s description of sport as being ‘not war and death and famine [but] the opposite of that - to persuade us there’s a world outside of that’. And, as such a believer, I would put myself alongside the great majority of football fans who just want to go along to participate in 90 minutes of mindless escapism and venting every other week, without having to read asinine political messaging of any description.

But the inconsistency is obvious. And it says something important about cultural hegemony in the UK in 2025. You will remember that cultural hegemony manifests itself in the construction of the values of the hegemonic or elite class as normal and good, and the construction of the values of the subaltern class as abnormal and malign. And you will no doubt in your daily life have noticed that, while our societies still make a game attempt at commitment to freedom of expression and cultural and political openness, they are increasingly characterised by a hegemon/subaltern dynamic, with certain opinions, outlooks and beliefs being cast simply as not fit to enter the public arena at all. It is not only that some values are construed as wrong or dangerous, in other words; it is that they are not permitted to be political in the first place. They are shut out and excluded from having any sort of political life, simply by dint of their being counter-hegemonic.

And the reason why this makes the term ‘subaltern’ useful is that it emphasises that the exclusion in question is really about problematising people, not ideas. Ideas which are not espoused by the cultural hegemon are bad enough, of course, in its own eyes, but the point about colonial government was that it worked through a process of rendering entire classes of persons irrational or incapable - as lacking in some necessary quality or other to be permitted to engage in politics. It is not that the cultural hegemon just restricts speech, in other words: it is that it excludes people altogether. It identifies certain classes of people as simply being politically exempt, and shuts them out from democratic participation.

The fact that all of the decision-makers involved in the incidents which I have discussed - UEFA officials, Rangers and Celtic high-ups - all seemed to behave as if they were working from a script is in this regard highly apposite. It is difficult to discern what exactly was racist or discriminatory about the Union Bears’ banner except in a yeah-but-you-know-what-they-meant sort of a way, but that didn’t matter. The point is that in our societies, characterised by cultural hegemony, everybody knows what the values of the hegemon are and that they are the values which are right, normal and obvious. And everybody by extension knows which values are wrong, abnormal and perverse. It follows from this that everybody also knows that the class of person who is likely to hold wrong, abnormal and perverse views - that is, working-class ‘gammons’ - should ideally not be permitted to participate in politics at all.

And from that starting position the reaction to the KEEP WOKE FOREIGN IDEOLOGIES OUT was inevitable. It was like an immune response: those responsible were not just quietened or suppressed but forcibly ejected and indeed unpersoned, outlawed, exiled. There was no reasoned analysis of what the banner might mean and no debate about whether it was actually racist or discriminatory; reasoned analysis and debate are what goes on in the realm of politics, and the whole point of cultural hegemony is that it determines what is or is not, and who is or is not, permitted to enter the political domain in the first place. Challenging the values of the hegemon does not entitle one to reasoned analysis and debate; it entitles one to nothing at all except indeed the withdrawal of all entitlements.

Correspondingly, of course, while the Green Brigade’s pro-Palestinian displays are construed as undesirable by both UEFA itself and Celtic, they are not treated with the same powerful drive to exclude. And the reason for this is not difficult to parse: while saying something like KEEP WOKE FOREIGN IDEOLOGIES OUT ticks all of the right boxes with regard to what is counter-hegemonic in 2025, Palestinian activism simply does not, and indeed it might be said to align much more closely with the set of values - that strange soup of disconnected ‘current thing’ preferences - which are dominant in the public square.

There was therefore no question of permanent exclusion of those Celtic fans who declared support for what took place in southern Israel on October 7th, because those ideas are within the realm of what is known to be accepted as political. Since those who subscribe to those ideas include most of the people who occupy elite status in Britain in 2025, one can’t very well imagine that football fans would be treated harshly for simply echoing them. And that is indeed precisely what we see in the response to the Green Brigade’s behaviour. To repeat: everyone in a position of authority - UEFA and the club itself - behaved as though it knew the script. And that is in the end what cultural hegemony really means at the coalface. It is the unconscious reaction to events within the framing of the values of the hegemon.

It is not a coincidence that we should see all this playing out in Glasgow, the city on the British mainland that is most closely tied to Ireland, which is itself where British colonialism was incepted. The history of the relationship between Britain and the areas of Ireland subject to its rule (at one time the whole island, of course) is in many ways one long case study in cultural hegemony, and it is no accident that we should hear in Glasgow specifically the echoes of that history. In this respect what is happening there can be thought of as something of a harbinger for what is likely to come throughout the rest of the country as we shift from an open, pluralistic, mature democracy into something much cruder, more violent, more divided and more politically debased. That shift will be accompanied by a different emphasis in government - not so much acting in the national interest as managing conflict and minimising unrest, in a pseudo-colonial mould. Realistically it is not a question of whether that happens, but when and in what form: Glasgow is perhaps worth keeping an eye on for some clues.