JABBA THE AGNIVORE

THE BIG LIE GOES ON AND ON AN ON AND ON......

As a fan of The Simpsons I tend to watch it whenever it's on. That means every night on Sky, where episodes are repeated time and again. I enjoy the programme so much that I don't mind seeing the same episode many times; I still laugh even though I know what's coming! I was thinking recently about one particular episode, where we discover that Principal Skinner is a fraud when the real Seymour Skinner turns up. Nobody likes the real Skinner and prefer the one they're used to. At the end the real Skinner is sent off while a judge pronounces that everyone is to forget all that's happened and go back to the counterfeit Skinner as being the one and only Principal Seymour Skinner. In subsequent episodes the whole tale is wiped from everyone's collective memory.

Does this sound familiar? It's been the same with Rangers. Old Rangers died and went into liquidation and Green bought the assets and started a new club called The Rangers. Some time afterwards it was decided, by our football authorities and our press, to do the same as was done in the Simpsons: pretend that Green's team is the same Rangers and that none of last year's events happened!

Despite the deranged assertions of Loony Leggat, and others, that our media and football authorities have it in for Rangers, the fact is that everybody has fallen over backwards to keep the Big Lie going. For example, in Monday's Daily Record one Neil McLeman (no, I'd never heard of him either) reported on Green's latest snake-oil sales pitch about moving to England within the next five years. McLeman resorts to the usual fawning attitude. He calls Green's team the 'most successful club in Scottish history,' and blames Rangers' woes on 'falling out with the Scottish authorities!'

The problem with this fawning self-delusion is that it plays right into the hands of Green and his merry band of bigots. Loony Leggat rants on practically every day about how Lawwell has taken over the SPL and SFA with the sole aim of destroying Rangers. Given how our powers-that-be and our media have erased what happened to Rangers from the history books, it is easy to see how the Sevilles lap up everything Leggat, Traynor etc say and actually believe that they have been wronged!

With their usual single-mindedness, (well, you can't expect more from a single brain cell) Rangers bloggers and posters on online media jump on the ridiculous idea that Celtic is a different team from the one that won the European Cup! This notion is based on all the jiggery-pokery about 'holding companies' that we've come to know and love. Their contention is that if Rangers is a new team then Celtic became a new team in 1994. Again, this is all down to the wide acceptance of the lie that Green 'bought' Rangers.

Does anybody else remember Victor Kiam? He was the guy that loved Remington so much that he bought the company. Many individuals buy over companies as going concerns and keep the company running as before, or even expand the operation. Corporate takeovers are also common, where companies buy over other companies. What happened in the case of Rangers is entirely different.

When Woolworth's was in administration some Donald Trump-like character could have bought the company as a going concern and kept it going as the same thing with an unbroken history. When the company was wound up the assets were all sold off to pay creditors. If somebody bought the shops and called them The Woolworth's they could hardly claim that it was the same company with all Woolworth's history intact!

It's the same with Celtic and Rangers. McCann bought Celtic as a going concern and kept the club running as usual. Green, on the other hand, did not buy Rangers; he bought the assets from Duff and Phelps, albeit in an underhand way that left the creditors with nothing. He called his new team The Rangers. And it is a new team, no matter what our media would have us believe. 

This fact, however, is unlikely to penetrate the skulls of the supporters of Green's team. They would prefer to believe that Rangers is the same club and have been punished unfairly by a gang of Taigs, Tarriers and Fenians!

Meanwhile, Loony Leggat is now telling us that the SPL, under the leadership of Celtic, is about to break the rules of UEFA. Cue all manner of teeth gnashing and hand wringing from the Peeppell. The irony is that UEFA's rules have already been broken. Allowing a team without three years audited accounts into the league ahead of others flies in the face of all the rules of UEFA and FIFA!