Old Firm football matches in the 1980s always carried a brisk challenge for me and my friends: how to partake of a four-hour drinking session before the match and remain upright enough to gain admittance and avoid trouble.

Once, before the 1982 Scottish League Cup final, a student friend won £100 on a slot machine and so the task of remaining sensible became ever more difficult. Yet the only discordant note of an otherwise splendid day occurred at the Strathclyde University disco later that night, when some of us were refused entry to a Martha and the Muffins concert on account of our dishevelled apparel and unsteady gait.

The following day we learned of the customary arrests for public drunkenness and acts of casual violence that are the usual aftermath of a Celtic-Rangers game, and we were thankful that we hadn't been caught up in any of it.

It's on occasions such as these that your gran's Hail Marys come in handy, I suppose. And we read, too, about the pious outrage of assorted local politicians and police chiefs, which, yet again, betrayed a disturbing level of ignorance and stupidity about the nature of drinking in parts of Glasgow and its link to poverty and lack of education.

The latest in the unbroken, 123-year series of Celtic-Rangers games occurred last Wednesday evening. When the dust had settled, after an admittedly towsy encounter, three Rangers players were dismissed for dangerous tackles and many others were booked for clumsy challenges. The Ibrox club had gone into this game under a great deal of pressure, as Celtic had outplayed them in each of their previous three encounters. It was hardly surprising that they would deploy a more robust approach on this occasion.

There was a mild kerfuffle on the touchline as the game ended, when Neil Lennon, the Celtic manager, and Ally McCoist, the Rangers manager-elect, momentarily snarled at each other. There may even have been some admonitory finger-waving.

These scenes so horrified Strathclyde's permanently agitated chief constable, Stephen House, that he thought it necessary to disturb Alex Salmond over his breakfast the next day. Within hours the first minister was making a statement to Holyrood about these "shameful" scenes and calling for a "summit" where selected cops, representatives of Celtic and Rangers and some football bureaucrats could hammer out the "issues".

I was surprised that Celtic, in particular, didn't tell Salmond to stick to serious politics and tell the police to behave themselves. For this is nothing other than a political stunt. You can tell when a first minister is struggling in the opinion polls; they decide to "do something" about the Old Firm, confident that it will give them some breathing space from the travails of properly running the country. Salmond's predecessor, Jack McConnell, did the same with his sectarianism "summit" in 2005, which, predictably, achieved absolutely nothing.

There is a police agenda at work behind this latest outbreak of hand-wringing by civic Scotland about the "Old Firm problem". And when there is a police agenda in a democracy we must all be very wary.

For weeks prior to Wednesday's encounter between Scotland's two largest clubs, there had been a high-profile press campaign highlighting apparently depressing increases in street violence and domestic incidents when Celtic and Rangers play.

At the previous game, on 20 February, more than 200 arrests were made in Glasgow; police sources claimed that their cells were full up and that prisoners had to be bussed outside Glasgow. The police, who are always steadfast and honest, must be challenged on this claim and asked to provide empirical and documented evidence for it.

The clear implication by the police is that Old Firm games cause all of this. It's a depressingly simplistic attitude from an outfit whose role is to remain at the end of a very short leash held by our democratically elected institutions.

Scotland has a ruinous relationship with alcohol, and this is heightened in very poor and deprived urban areas. A postcode analysis of all the crimes and misdemeanours following Old Firm games will reveal that the majority of perpetrators reside in a handful of postal districts. These will be among the most socially deprived neighbourhoods in Europe. Very few residents of Bearsden, Giffnock and Bishopbriggs will have been apprehended.

Old Firm games possess an almost sacred intensity that has to be savoured at least once in a lifetime. People treat them as special events, and those who are inclined to drink will drink rather more in the hours that surround these games.

The rivalry is a tribal one, based on centuries of religious, cultural and political differences. Tie it up with conflicting ideas of nationhood and you possess a combustible concoction.

It is typical of middle-class atheists to scorn the role that religion and national identity play in these conflicts. Yet while they are denied many other opportunities in life, associations and friendships based on tribal and neighbourhood loyalty will always prevail.

When the chief executives of Celtic and Rangers dutifully attend this pantomime summit, they must ask some questions of the police and politicians. Here are three: why has Glasgow city centre become a no-go area for women on Friday and Saturday nights? Why is knife crime still increasing despite your high-profile campaigns? And why are you, first minister, not convening a summit about these issues?

Our political chiefs and assorted executive plods should stop wasting our time and money posturing at their bogus "Old Firm" summit. Instead, they should be holding a poverty summit to look seriously at the issue of deprivation, which in turn leads to alcoholism, drug addiction, violent crime and domestic abuse. This is the apocalypse that stalks the needy in our midst, not Celtic versus Rangers.