Now Mr Blobby, the Bisto chairman, is trying to claim that they weren't asking the players to take a pay cut at all; it was merely a suggestion that was being mooted. There is no danger of administration, he says. Of course there isn't; not yet anyway. The two hedge-fund operators that have got their claws in will want their pound of flesh first. You've got to laugh at Mr Blobby, wanting to slash costs when they've just hired another snout for the trough, in the shape of 'Financial Guru' Philip Nash.
So what are they going to do now? If the players won't take a pay cut then Bisto is going to have to offload some of them, for free probably. The main thing is to get them off the payroll. Then we come to next season's Championship campaign. Is a depleted Bisto FC going to be able to manage? After all, they won't be playing against teachers, policemen and social workers any more. Season books are going to have to jump substantially in price but will the Bisto Kids be willing to pay full whack to watch a struggling team?
Remember why Sooperally wanted to sign all those players in the first place? He hardly needed them to win the lower leagues but that wasn't why he signed them. The real reason was, as he said himself, to build up a team to stop Celtic winning 10 in a row. That's all that matters to Sooper and The Peeppell; they're willing to bankrupt their club as long as they stop the enemy setting a new record. There is also the fear that Celtic might surpass Rangers' 'world record' 54 titles. That's what keeps all the Bisto Kids, including Ally, awake at night and they'll do anything to stop it happening. The old club went into liquidation trying to surpass Celtic and the new one looks like going the same way in a desperate attempt to stop Celtic putting the dead club into the shade. It looks like they never learn.
The Daily Record, meanwhile, continues with its desperate attempts to lay the groundwork for Bisto getting help. It runs a poll today asking 'Are Scotland's young footballers in danger of burning out?' They're trying to make the case for young players to be rested. How this is going to achieved they don't say but it would certainly involve bending the rules, if not breaking them completely. The emphasis in the article is all on Dundee Utd and Hearts but we all know where this is going. If, as seems likely, Bisto has to offload its high-earners then it will be left with its younger players to hold the fort. The help that the DR is bleating about is really, as is always the case, help for Bisto FC. It's so easy to see through their agenda!
Further to the stuff I was saying yesterday about the Ku Klux Klan, McMurdo has decided to throw away his mask of respectability and get straight down to the bigoted agenda. Apparently, Catholics have wormed their way into positions of power and are effectively running the country according to the dictates of the Vatican. He says that the PUL (Protestant, Unionist and Loyalist) community is being demonised. Unfortunately he equates this PUL community with the Protestant community at large when, in reality, it is actually only the Orange Order that comes under this heading.
He, like a lot of those that post on his blog, cannot see the essential difference between a Protestant and an Orangeman. For one thing, I'd be entirely welcome at any Protestant service, with the possible exception of those of the Wee Frees. I've been to many Church of Scotland services, as a child when in the Boys' Brigade and as an adult when going to services with the school or attending the weddings of friends and family. I have never been made anything but welcome. Would I be as welcome at a meeting of the local Orange Lodge?
Two occasions stick out in my mind of my years as a teacher. The first is when my class was studying places of worship. We visited different churches, where we were made extremely welcome. We were going to visit a mosque, but our visit had been organised for the middle of September 2001 and, understandably, many parents were too scared to send their children after the events of the 11th. We did, however, visit a Catholic church. Again, we were made welcome and the children had a great time, tasting the communion wafers, dipping their hands in the holy water and dressing up in the altar servers' outfits. One child's parents actually have a picture of their daughter dressed in this outfit up on their wall. Only one pupil did not attend that day. No prizes for guessing which organisation his father belonged to!
The other occasion was when each class was to sing a carol at the Christmas service. My class was learning about the Romans so I taught them Adeste Fideles. (They liked it so much that they even sang it on the bus later that year on our summer trip!) The minister thought it was great and congratulated the children on their hard work and was impressed when they were able to translate it for him exactly. Can you imagine how that would have gone down at an Orange Christmas party?
The thing is that the majority of Protestants in this country are happy enough getting on with their lives, and their worship if they attend church, and don't really care what anyone else is doing. Why should they? Nobody is posing any threat to them. The way McMurdo bangs on you'd think that believing in Justification by Faith Alone had been outlawed and that government ministers turn up at the General Assembly every year to tell them which motions they can and can't pass.
The real fact is that what McMurdo and his disciples are bemoaning is not the loss of Protestantism in this country but the Protestant Ascendancy. The Church of Scotland has apologised for its racist comments and behaviour of the past but the Orangemen can't stand that. To them even one Catholic in the government, or on the council or running a business is one Catholic too many. Like the Ku Klux Klan, they see a fairer society as being a huge conspiracy by their enemies to undermine their superiority.
A lot of them yesterday were discussing the possibility of Protestants standing for election qua Protestants. No decent member of any Protestant faith would have any time for this so, effectively, what they are proposing is the Orange Order fielding political candidates to look after its own. Or maybe they want to resurrect the old racist and sectarian Scottish Protestant League, which turned down overtures from Oswald Mosley because he was not bigoted enough!
In keeping with the KKK theme, McMurdo, rather unfortunately, decides to play the victim card in the shape of saying that all Protestants will have to wear yellow stars soon. Of course, this panders to the usual element among the Orangemen, who point to Adolf Hitler being brough up a Catholic to somehow prove that the whole Nazi and Fascist phenomenon was a product of the Catholic Church. This, of course, ignores the millions of Frenchmen and Poles, Catholics all, who suffered under the Nazis. Cetainly there were Catholics, like the Croatians, the Italians and the Spanish, who embraced the ideologies of Nazism and Fascism. Equally, however, the Lutheran Church in Germany was complicit and the Dutch Presbyterians in South Africa ran a terrorist campaign in support of the Nazis. And it was the British and American governments that helped many leading Nazis to escape capture.
The leader of the Scottish Protestant League, moreover, became a fervent supporter of the Nazis during the war and was under the constant surveillance of the security services. Even after the war he never wavered from his beliefs and was a Holocaust denier until his dying day. Speaking of Holocaust deniers, McMurdo has a link to one, Alistair McConnachie, on his blog.
The fact is that the majority of people in Scotland don't care which, if any, church you attend. We all have freedom of choice these days and can go and do the shopping, go to the beach with the kids or even go to the pub on a Sunday if we so wish. McMurdo and his fellow bigots would like to see this freedom disappear. They want a return to the totalitarianism of the days when the Church of Scotland was the Established Church and poked its nose into every aspect of people's lives. McMurdo says that Protestantism stands for freedom. Maybe it does but what he is advocating is not Protestantism; it's a one-party, Orange state where you'll do what you're told or suffer the consequences. The Dead Kennedys' song 'Holiday In Cambodia' springs to mind!
Anyway, enough of all this seriousness. Let's finish with a joke. The problem is I can't remember if I posted this one before. I'm sure somebody will let me know.
How many Bisto Kids does it take to change a light bulb?
Just one. And thousands more to swear it's the same bulb!
The Pope takes time out from organising the agenda for this year's General Assembly of the Church of Scotland to say,
"It's gonny be ten in a row!"
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