On the rare occasions when this site discusses football, and in particular if we mention the three-year-old Championship club known as “Rangers”, we get complaints on two grounds: one, that football has nothing to do with politics, and two, that we risk alienating supporters of the club who also back independence, of which there are unquestionably a significant number.

The second complaint is one we’ve dealt with in detail here. But the first one is more important. Because whether you’re talking about the original club which died in 2012 and was put into liquidation or the new one currently challenging for promotion to the top division for the first time, “Rangers” is a totem of the Unionist establishment in Scotland, and the way it’s treated by the media tells us at least as much about that establishment and that media as any amount of political journalism.

Today the Herald newspaper group sacked Sunday Herald columnist Angela Haggerty – who’s also the editor of Common Space – after just eight articles.

Haggerty, a Catholic of Irish descent who’s been targeted for years by hundreds if not thousands of abusive and bigoted “Rangers” fans – including one who was imprisoned for six months for threatening her – had tweeted support for a fellow Herald columnist, sports reporter Graham Spiers after the paper published an apology to the club over a column he wrote on 30 December.

The column had included the allegation that a current (unnamed) “Rangers” director was fond of the sectarian song “The Billy Boys”, which rejoices in the lyrics “We’re up to our knees in Fenian blood”, and is sometimes sung by a tiny unrepresentative minority of the club’s support, as seen here at the Scottish League Cup semi-final in February 2015. If you listen really closely you may be able to pick them out.

Haggerty had specifically been commenting on a post by the Rangers Supporters Trust, a belligerent fan group with significant financial resources which had expressed its glee at the Herald’s response to what the RST called “lies” in Spiers’ column – though to the best of anyone’s knowledge the RST was not present at the meeting between Spiers and the unnamed director.

Spiers subsequently published a statement disassociating himself from the apology, saying that “My opinion – as expressed in my column – was based on a truthful account of my meeting with a Rangers director”, and was backed up by former Herald colleague Robbie Dinwoodie, who noted a claim by another belligerent “Rangers” fan group that the apology had been secured via threats to withdraw advertising revenue.

According to Haggerty, “representatives of the Rangers board” threatened to reinstate legal action against the Herald over the Spiers column unless she was sacked for daring to express support for Spiers on her personal Twitter account. Showing the great journalistic integrity for which he’s fast becoming famed, the editor-in-chief of the Herald group, Magnus Llewellin, immediately caved to their demands.

The group alleging the advertising blackmail threat describes itself as “DEFENDING OUR TRADITIONS” and “our people, our culture, our way of life”, concluding on the sectarian exhortation “No Surrender!”

Its Twitter page leaves little doubt as to precisely which people, culture and traditions it’s talking about – the same ones referenced in “The Billy Boys”, and those upheld by the people who regularly abuse and threaten Angela Haggerty with violence, rape and murder, while also constantly demanding her sacking and threatening boycotts of newspapers employing her.

(Scottish journalists stoutly ignore such campaigns, despite thousands of signatures, focusing instead on two or three nationalist loonies boycotting Tunnock’s Teacakes.)

The bigotry, open politicisation and bullying of the “Vanguard Bears”, done in the guise of support for “Rangers” and tacitly tolerated by the club (which allows their banners to be displayed at Ibrox and has never to our knowledge condemned their activities), are the traditions of the Unionist, Protestant, militarist, Loyalist establishment. For the Herald to bow so cravenly to their threats tells us about a lot more than football.

“Rangers” – which stridently insists it’s a continuation of the old club, which carried out a strict “No Catholics” signing policy for over 80 years – is the last big institution of those traditions. In flexing its muscle against Angela Haggerty it demonstrates its continued determination to impose its values on wider Scottish society and to silence entirely legitimate criticism and comment with a sledgehammer.

While politics ought to have no place in sport, it’s the height of naivety to pretend that there aren’t those determined to use the latter to political ends. Freedom will always be under attack from thugs and bullies, and Wings Over Scotland supports Angela Haggerty (with whom we disagree on very many things) unreservedly. The Herald and its editor-in-chief are a cowardly disgrace to journalism and decency.

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In the interests of news reporting, below is the deleted Graham Spiers column from the Herald in its entirety. (As retrieved from the source code of the cached page here.) “Rangers” are free to sue us over it if they wish.