The age of ‘Old Firm’ politics

‘This is no longer the old world of left and right but groups of people with entirely different value systems, languages, objectives, and lifestyles that foster a dogmatic distrust and fear of the other.’

As any psychologist will tell you, the human mind depends heavily on forging analogies and comparisons when trying to make sense of the external stimuli which constantly surrounds our anatomy. Mind is needed over matter, as matter must be reduced to mind – what our senses detect in the wider environment become chemical signals fired to the brain for this organ to deconstruct and interpret. Politics is no exception to this rule, as its engagement and control is still subject to the human condition, no matter how undesirable this is.

As such, I wish to explain the current climate of toxic political partisanship and polarization the only way a young English man knows how when trying to understand anything: with football. A religion to many, it invokes intense passion in supporters and fierce tribal warfare between rival teams.

Perhaps the most infamous and volatile footballing rivalry on the British Isles is ominously dubbed ‘the Old Firm’, consisting of the top two teams of both the city of Glasgow and the Scottish football world in general. One team is Celtic, the other is Glasgow Rangers. Usually, supporting a football team as opposed to its rival often comes down to potluck, likely originating from who your parents support or the friends you had in school. This is all true for the Old Firm, but choosing sides is pre-ordained, cemented at birth based on identity factors such as national loyalties and religion.

Celtic was founded in 1887 as a method of raising money for the local impoverished Catholic community, which largely composed of Irish immigrants who had fled famine and hardship to try their luck in this Scottish city. Its club crest has explicit references to its Irish origins, such as its prominent colours being green and white, marking out the four-leaf clover which sits in the epicentre; the Republic of Ireland’s flag is frequently flown in the stadium by supporters over a hundred years after the club’s creation.

Rangers, on the other hand, was founded in 1872 by members of the Church of Scotland; devoutly Protestant and unionist, the Union Flag is the de facto war banner shown at games. Celtic and Rangers could not be any more distinct regarding their enduring loyalties, which have transcended the generations. Sectarianism is rife; the Troubles, plunging Northern Ireland into decades of militia terrorism and sectarian violence, passed over Glasgow like a storm.

Celtic fans routinely repeat songs associated with Irish independence and the Irish Republican Army, whereas Rangers prefer to sing anti-Catholic and anti-IRA melodies. If you are a Glaswegian Catholic descended from Irish immigrants, or a Scottish protestant, there is only one team to support – one team you can support without becoming an outcast.

The football team is a part and parcel of one’s own core identity. A resident of Glasgow can successfully calculate the football allegiance of the person they are talking to solely from factors such as their name (whether it is a stereotypically Irish or Scottish name), the neighbourhood they were brought up in, or the local pub where they socialise with friends. Walking into the wrong pub wearing a blue shirt, or vice versa, is a type of behaviour located somewhere between highly embarrassing and borderline risky.

So how does this translate to contemporary politics – or as I have termed it, ‘Old Firm Politics’? Well, as I am sure we have all become increasingly aware in recent times, that the people who possess strikingly differing political views to our own do not just simply have a difference of opinion, but inhabit a fundamentally different plain of existence.

We listen to and trust completely different news sources which resemble parallel universes in terms of the conclusions they reach; social media has enabled us to tune into our own manufactured echo chambers, cut off from any alternate viewpoints which may challenge and alter our pre-existing beliefs. This phenomenon has now spread to the realm of entertainment where it has become increasingly easy to predict the political beliefs of a person based on what aspect of this fractured culture they consume. For example, classic British sitcoms have entered the domain of the right due to their non-politically correct structure.

The concept of physiognomy, where a person’s physical appearance, from the general hygiene to the fashion trends they adopt, can be studied to determine their character, and consequently, their political beliefs, first sprouted up as a meme on right-wing corners of the internet, only to be taken seriously shortly after. Whilst we should not judge a book by its cover, the human mind runs on generalities that are too coincidental to dismiss.

Populist politicians may scream about the problem of parallel societies being forged by mass immigration and poor integration, yet parallel societies have split the native population just as destructively. It is now widely acknowledged that the political left and the political right literally speak a different language to each other. For example, the left has adopted the phrase ‘undocumented immigration’ when referring to illegal immigration, whereas the right continues to label it as illegal immigration.

As someone on the right, it seems to be that there is this ‘invisible dictionary’ the dominant leftist culture forgets to send to my email inbox so I know what terms to use so I can break the language barrier that prevents me from effectively communicating with my comrades on the left. The difficulty is heightened when I walk into the arena of political discourse blindfolded and the definitions seem to move in the darkness.

There have been a handful of times where I have thought I had been using the politically correct term, only to discover that it was no longer the politically correct term, losing its status as a safe word/phrase about five days ago, and I have been chastised for using bigoted or offensive language. I am sure second-wave gender critical feminists suffer the same fate when the chaos of time forgets to include them in the Overton window.

To conclude, political discourse now resembles the Old Firm, where division runs deep into the Earth’s very soil. I would say that this is no longer the old political world of left and right but groups of people with entirely different value systems, languages, objectives, and lifestyles that foster a dogmatic distrust and fear of the other. They hate each other, and it is not going to end well.