THE complaint was more frivolous than vexatious but the point was certainly serious: Scotland's new football laws have the potential for utter absurdity.
An allegation that the minister responsible for the legislation, Roseanna Cunningham, may herself have breached the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act following her "evil Tories" outburst at the Scottish Parliament's bar found she hadn't.
A football match shown in the bar at the time involved teams with no connection with Scotland and was therefore outside the parameters of the law. But had, say, BBC Alba been showing Dunfermline versus Alloa in the bar at the time it may have been different. The act, if you didn't know, covers televised football. And "offensive" is pretty broad. "The SNP can't say it wasn't warned", one commentator said at the weekend.
Of equal ridiculousness to increasing numbers of the legal profession is the flood of press releases from the Crown Office on individuals prosecuted under the act. A look at the 10 news items on the Crown Office's website shows half related to males fined between £60 and £375 for singing, shouting or even uttering something sectarian or offensive at lower league football matches.
Other news items involved a knife murderer jailed for life, £65,000 confiscated from a drug dealer, benefit fraud involving tens of thousands of pounds and animal cruelty.
Last month, two men were given Football Banning Orders and fines of £200 and £350 for singing "a religiously offensive song followed by another proclaiming support of a paramilitary organisation". On the same date there were 13 breach of the peace convictions in Scotland. None was heralded with a press release despite, as one leading QC told me, practically all Offensive Behaviour breaches reported by the media would have been a crime before the act.
As the same QC said: "The idea that the prosecution service deem it worthy to publish the fact that someone has had a £200 fine is frankly astonishing given the seriousness of other crimes which are being prosecuted and the results of which are more relevant to society at large. That's on top of any number of crimes which end up not prosecuted."
Are some crimes given undue prominence? Why, like the Crackerjack klaxon of yesteryear, are they becoming synonymous with a Friday afternoon? Is a resource-poor prosecution service creating folk devils in pursuit of a hobby horse?
In exploring the enactment and enforcement of the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act, lawyers distil it down to their own idee fixe: allegations the prosecution service and police have been politicised.
The act has been one of the Scottish Government's flagship policies and the vigour with which it is being pursued by the Crown is evidenced by its appetite to publicise prosecutions. It has, of course, a specialist unit on football to justify as well. Worth also noting that not one lawyer or politician has sought to discount sectarianism as a societal problem in Scotland.
It seems as long time since the Crown Office admitted to destroying years of data on sectarian crimes in a bureaucratic housekeeping exercise.
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