Last week the walking monotone drone that is James Kelly MSP lodged a motion (an inescapably appropriate term for his output, it must be said) at the Scottish Parliament instigating his private members’ bill to repeal the Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act, having announced his intention to do so in February after putting together a ludicrously bogus “consultation” on the subject last year.

As ever, Kelly trotted out a mixture of baseless assertions and flat-out lies about the Act in support of his move, because apparently the most pressing issue currently facing Scotland, in the view of Scottish Labour, is that bigoted thugs must once again be free to sing about being up to their knees in Fenian blood, or lionise murderous terrorists, at sporting events without fear of prosecution.

The Scottish media, which loves nothing more than selling papers off the back of juicy tales of sectarian hatred and violence, dutifully backed him up, as it always does.

The Sunday Herald ran a particularly despicable and hyperbolic piece full of appalling mistruths by some abysmally dreadful idiot, which made not being allowed to bellow malicious songs about religious slaughter at a football match sound like the gravest affront to human civilisation and liberty since the Holocaust.

The paper’s headline described the Act as “the Government’s most despised folly”, which we already knew not to be true. Poll after poll after poll has shown the Act to be overwhelmingly supported by an enormous majority of the public, spanning literally every single political and demographic boundary. It is in fact very probably the most universally popular piece of legislation any Scottish Government has ever passed.

But in fairness there hadn’t been a new poll on it for a while, so just to be sure, when Kelly made his announcement in February we (via Panelbase) asked the public yet again to make sure that we were right up to date with the feelings of voters.

This time we phrased the question in line with Kelly’s demand for repeal. The results were about as surprising as you’d expect.

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ALL VOTERS

The poll found continued unequivocal public support for the Act, by a more than 2:1 margin – bigger than the gap between Remain and Leave in the EU referendum. Excluding don’t knows the result was a landslide 71-29 in favour of the Act.

BY GENDER

Men supported keeping the Act by almost 2:1, and women by over 3:1.

BY SOCIAL CLASS

The wealthier ABC1 demographic were almost 3:1 in favour of keeping the Act, while the blue-collar C2DE group backed it by over 2:1. (Excluding don’t knows, the C2DEs who still make up the majority of match-attending football fans were 68-32 in favour of keeping the Act.)

BY COUNTRY OF BIRTH

Every group in this category backed keeping the Act by at least 2:1, and in the case of people in Scotland born in the rest of the UK, by over 4:1.

BY INDYREF VOTE

Yes voters backed the Act by 3:1, while No voters supported it by more than 2:1.

BY EU REFERENDUM VOTE

Remain voters support OBFA by almost 3:1, Leave voters by almost 2:1.

BY POLITICAL PARTY SUPPORT

Every single opposition party is going directly against the wishes of its own voters in backing Kelly’s repeal bill. Tories want the Act kept in place by a margin of 16 points, Labour voters by 21 points, and Lib Dems by a massive 55 points – more even than SNP voters.

All these margins are higher than that of the “decisive” independence referendum, but all of a sudden they don’t want the result respected any more.

BY FOOTBALL SUPPORT

The usual last desperate squeal of anti-OBFA campaigners when presented with incontrovertible poll evidence of the Act’s popularity with the general public is to protest that only the views of football supporters should count, as though the rest of society should just meekly put up with sectarian hatred in their streets unless they enjoy the sport.

But that argument is as useless as the others. Football fans actually support the Act by a margin of approaching 2:1, just like everyone else, while people who DON’T like football back it by almost 4:1.

(The combined results for all football fans come out at 32% for repeal and 56% for keeping the Act, 12% don’t know. Excluding the DKs it’s 63-37 in favour of the Act, with only “Rangers” supporters evenly divided.)

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So let there be no doubt. Everyone, whether in the opposition or the media (which has a view of the Act that’s startlingly even more uniform than its hatred of independence – not a single columnist we’ve EVER seen has penned an article in support of OBFA), committed to repealing the Act is flying in the face of public opinion.

Parties are contemptuously dismissing their own voters, and papers riding roughshod over the feelings of their own readers. An unholy alliance of quinoa-munching “free speech” liberals (most of whom would never be seen dead within 400 yards of a football ground), knuckle-dragging bigot scum and cynically opportunist politicians are telling the vast majority of Scotland to go to hell, purely so that they can try to score a meaningless point against the SNP.

We can think of nothing more incongruous in the modern world than sending out a message that says Scotland is willing to openly tolerate previously-outlawed hatreds again, or more reckless, or more depressing.

We already know that the Tories are trying to drag the country back to the 1950s, when Catholics (and every other kind of minority) knew their place, and we know that Labour will blindly do ANYTHING that they think might hurt the SNP. What the Liberal Democrats and the Greens are thinking, though, we can barely begin to imagine.

May the wretched consequences of this spite-driven insanity land squarely on all of their heads like the jagged wreckage of a broken chair hurled from an upper stand.