Glasgow - Scotland with…

Being a fairly left-wing, anti-racist, liberal, homosexual atheist hasn't been easy these past few days here in Glasgow.

I am envious of the Muslims, the Pakistanis and the Indians - at least they know they need to watch out for themselves and can expect to be discriminated against, shunned, ignored or worse in the street.

Envious too am I of the idiots that have made a certain baggage handler a hero. For they know who to cheer for and who to boo for like children of the 40s and 50s watching a Western at the cinema.

From my perspective I really don't know who or what to cheer for - in fact I suspect there is no-one who deserves to be cheered and there is much more to be booed in the wake of the shoddy attempt at a terror attack last weekend in Glasgow.

I shall start with John Smeaton, the arsehole baggage handler, who now very much gets my sympathy for he knew not what he created when he opened his trap on Saturday evening.

He may well now regret his exaggeration of events on Saturday afternoon. I am convinced this tale of his own heroism was that of a blowhard. I am as certain as someone can be he did not hear either of the two attackers shout "Allah." I look forward to finding out if Strathclyde Police will put Mr Smeaton forward to the London Metropolitan Police's enquiry as a chief witness to the events of Saturday afternoon at Glasgow Airport - somehow I very much doubt it.

As a former journalist I personally wouldn't have touched Smeaton's quotes with a barge pole until I could have got them corroborated and to date no one has.

The mass wave of praise for Smeaton that has followed is bizarre but typical of our age. I believe Mark Tortolano who launched the original Smeaton fan-site did so with his tongue firmly placed in cheek, having recognised the arsehole element to Smeaton's over dramatisation of events.

Now Mr Tortolano seems to be awkwardly playing along on TV that the setting up of the website was an act of genuine appreciation and sentiment as he now has a battalion of readers on his site who clearly missed the irony - or rather chose to.

The reason for Smeaton's popularity is two fold and appeals to two different types of Glaswegians.

Smeaton is a useful caricature. He is what certain Glaswegians have as a romanticised view of themselves or at least where they think they came from. An ordinary working class guy in a job that requires manual work that gets your hands dirty - real work. A guy that likes to think he can handle himself, is willing to have a go, someone with a bit of schtick and swagger (or "gallus" as Glaswegians would say) and can be fairly humorous - whether intended or not.

Rather than acknowledge what Smeaton is - someone who fancied blowing their own trumpet or bum their chat on the telly - there has been a clamour to laud him, hold him up as your typical Glaswegian - as a warning to the world that Glasgow is still a bit mental - when really it's not anymore.

To hail Smeaton gives the suited and booted Southside Glaswegian guy sipping a nice Starbucks' tall skinny latte, working in the city centre as an inbound sales agent in a call centre some of his masculinity back.

The other Glaswegian who is happy to call Smeaton their hero is the worst of all. It is the Glaswegian who has always lived with a bubbling undercurrent of racism who has now found new justification to air their views freely.

These people believed Smeaton's tale unquestioningly, and joke about how lucky he was that he got to "smack a Paki" not only "while the cunt was burning" but also "right in front of the polis." And best of all he's a hero for it. The quotes are from an over heard bus conversation.

Since Saturday Strathclyde Police have had reports of 38 racially motivated crimes - apparently a huge surge in what they would normally have dealt with in four days. Eight of these crimes the police have been able to say occurred directly as a result of the Airport attack.

On Sunday, I myself witnessed an Asian door steward, who was wearing a turban, having to refuse some punters entry to the Glasgow Carling Academy and then call the police due to the level of racist abuse he was subjected to. Later that night I saw three Asian lads being refused entry, without question, to a gay nightclub too.

This is not mentioning some of the racist bile, snide comments and generally racist jokes that have been pouring fourth quite unashamedly over the past few days. I had believed for quite a while there was a horribly racist underbelly to Glasgow. Now I fear the city's lying on it's back letting anyone see it's true colours at the minute.

My awareness of how racist this city could be was whilst I went out with a Muslim lad for around six months - we were an odd looking couple, granted, I'm 6'4" and he was a whole foot shorter than I so we did attract some attention - being both mixed height and mixed race.

Out on Glasgow's gay scene there were constant sniggers, jibes and conversations stopping whenever you approached a bar as folk failed to change the subject in time. It was horrible and hurtful but obviously more so for my partner at the time because at the end of the day - it was him they were talking about - I just happened to be with him.

I realise this type of latent and overt racism exists throughout the UK and at all levels. The Celebrity Big Brother scandal earlier this year proved that - sadly - I think that was an opportunity missed. Had C4 shown the whole nasty affair in graphic detail we might actually have got a proper debate on race in this country - rather than everyone having their conscience salved by the fact Shilpa Shetty won. "See we're not racist - our favourite reality TV contestant is Asian."

To air your non-racist views in Glasgow at the minute - you do get a kind of curious look. Almost as if I'd just confessed to driving the Jeep Cherokee myself. Then - imagine, if you will, trying to explain the next part to the John Smeatons and fans of this world.

"I'm anti-racist but I'm anti-Islam too." The assumption is that if you don't hate the skin colour you don't reject the religion - which is of course tosh.

But then I'm living in a city where people can still be beaten or killed because of a divide within the shared religion of Christianity. So if many Glaswegians can't see they are pretty much exactly the same - then someone with a different skin colour and different religion has no chance.

Even though Scots Asians are doing their very best to fit in by picking up habits which are a source of great national pride. Seems male Scots of South Asian descent are 45 per cent more likely to suffer a heart attack than your average male of the same age in Scotland. How's that for integration - out doing the deep-fried Mars bar and Irn-Bru brigade. (Source BBC Scotland http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/6271786.stm)

But being anti-racist and anti-Islam, or more accurately anti-religion, makes you feel like you have few allies and sometimes don't know who you should be debating with first.

Do you debate with the racists so as to make sure an innocent Muslim doesn't get a kicking because it is believed they might be linked to al Qa'ida and terror plots? Or do you debate with the Muslims and the nasty, vindictive and cruel edge to their religion (as there is with nearly all religions) which readily preaches against me and my sexuality?

A religion that saw my young Muslim partner blackmailed into his second arranged marriage aged just 24 when his mother refused treatment for breast cancer until he agreed to go ahead and "stop all this gay nonsense."

As I said at the start there are more folk to be booed in the present scenario than cheered. Scotland, and particularly Glasgow, needs to look at its' race relations and figure out how to eradicate some deeply nasty and strongly held attitudes on race.

Racism seems to have been allowed to fester away throughout the generations in the West of Scotland as the Catholic community and Protestant community struggled to get along together.

The Catholic Church's outrageous stance against Catholic and Protestant children being educated together surely can't have helped to build an inclusive society in any way, perhaps not just exacerbating sectarianism it may well have distracted from the problems of race relations and for that they must hang their heads in shame.

The Muslim community and it's leaders need to look at teaching a softer, diet version of its religion which perhaps doesn't call judgement so harshly on those that do not conform to Islam.

Strangely there is a common bond between many racists, followers of Islam and the Christians - both Catholic and Protestant - each would all happily condemn me and my sexuality.

It is ludicrous for any sector of society to ask for protection from discrimination whilst it continues to preach against others itself.

The Glasgow Arsehole Attack

Yesterday's news filled me with fear and alarm as I watched that green Jeep Cherokee burn at the entrance to Terminal 1 of Glasgow Airport. Yes, it was inevitable - at some point over the course of the next 24 hours there would be some of my fellow Glaswegians appearing undistilled on the telly giving eyewitness accounts.

For a while we were spared. It seemed to take an age for the big rolling news channels to get cameras anywhere near the Airport. STV's two camcorders were at the opening of the Scottish Parliament where the Queen was. So they had to rely on library footage of the airport - shortly followed up with Biro scribbles on the back of a beer mat of what Bernard Ponsonby thought a terrorist attack at the airport might look like.

By about 6pm the news crews were there - not the decent reporters mind - just the ones that cover on the weekends - looking a bit rough, wearing bobbled fleeces and with unkempt hair.

They coped manfully and both on BBC News 24 and Sky News there were eyewitness accounts piling in - and wee pixelated leaping flames dancing over our screens from folks' mobile phones. Glasgow was doing quite well as most of the eyewitnesses were mainly from England - so the viewers could understand what was being said you see.

Then a couple of Weegies phoned in - and to my astonishment they made a decent fist of their reports on what they had seen - only stumbling every time it came to describing the people that had been in the Jeep. In fact, I was impressed they managed to replace "a Paki bastard" with "eh, eh, eh, eh… an Asian filla" at every turn.

Clearly they had remembered what the BBC staff had coached them on minutes earlier before getting on live telly.

Now the BBC's Peter Cissons, a grumpy bastard these days, was quite forceful in his questioning of each of the callers and forensically quizzed the eyewitnesses about what the two "eh, eh, eh, eh…Asian fillas" were like; what expression they had on their faces; and if they were saying anything while all the shenanigans with burning cars and assaulting police officers and flinging about of Molotov cocktails was going on.

Each eyewitness agreed not a thing was said by our friendly terrorists. I'd put the count of eyewitnesses who agreed to this at about nine; maybe a few more. Unity between Glaswegians, English, Irish and some other odd accent I could not account for, who claimed they had been in close proximity to the burning Jeep.

I was watching the early parts of the news broadcast with my mother and we instantly exclaimed the same thing when this man opened his mouth. It was what I had dreaded since the news first broke.

"Areshole!"

My mother and I cried in unison.

Now I don't know if the rest of the UK spotted that John Smeaton, baggage handler, was an arsehole or whether it was only fellow Glaswegians that could spot it's own particular brand of arsehole - but if you are reading from any other part of Britain and you picked this ginger eejit out as an arsehole do let me know.

I watched the man interviewed several times, the first time on the BBC. His tale was so wild that the wee Glesga wummin, Jacqui Kennedy - who looked like she'd been too close to the burny Jeep given how dry her Peroxide white hair was and how leathery her toasted skin appeared - was visibly laughing at his side as he told it.

"Did the assailants say anything?" Said Weekend Wummin for the BBC.

"Yeah, they were shouting "Allah!" They were throwing punches at the Police and shouting Allah, Allah, Allah!" said the Glasgow Arsehole John Smeaton.

Wisely the BBC cut him off at this stage only for the numpty to appear minutes later spouting the same tosh on Sky News. Murdoch's channel seemed to actively encourage him to keep reciting this twaddle about "Allah!" in their pursuit of ever more sensationalist and exciting rolling news.

Other than the "Allah!" bit I never heard this fool recite the same story twice. He realised why he was popular with the "Allah!" thing, it was going well for him. But he went from being round a corner having a fag and not seeing the initial impact to being 20 yards away. From watching Police officers getting a slap from burning terrorists to being involved in fisticuffs with the terrorists themselves and assisting the Police. But always, always hearing them shouting, definitely, shouting "Allah! Allah! Allah!"

My mother and I concluded he was a typical Glasgow walloper who, you can imagine, nobody in the local boozer takes seriously and probably scoff and rip the piss behind his back.

By early evening Liverpool's John Lennon Airport confirmed they were to be the only other airport in the whole of the UK that would shut as a result of the terror attack in Glasgow. Heaven forbid something awful should happen to this country that the Scouse can't add to the chip on their shoulder.

Sky, unsurprisingly, had persisted with Glasgow arsehole Smeaton's clearly ludicrous claim that no one could corroborate all day - whilst the BBC had dropped it altogether. Then a weird thing happened.

Strathclyde Police's Chief Constable Willie Rae gave his Press conference at 9.30pm and confirmed the men that were being held were Asian and that they suspected there was a link between the Glasgow Airport attack and the failed bombs in London a couple of days earlier.

Suddenly the Glasgow arsehole's claims of "Allah!" were being broadcast by the BBC yet again. Bizarre. Why did the confirmation of the attackers' ethnicity suddenly make what was clearly a bollocks, unsubstantiated claim okay?

Smeaton is now on a loop on the telly on both 24 hour news channels with the least reliable of all the reports that I had heard over the course of the day.

The Home Office - to use Glasgow parlance - have now upped the nation's defence state of alert from "keep the edgy" to "pure shiting it" even thought there's no real evidence why we should be.

Call me a cynic but it does smack of being rather handy for Mr Brown that days after taking over as PM he has two "terrorist" alerts and one attack in which no one got hurt. He gets to look serious, tough and capable whilst assisting in running controversial legislation through Westminster he's been rather keen on for a while. The 90 day detention of suspects and ID cards to name but two. And a nice early boost to approval ratings too.

On taking office as PM outside number 10 on Wednesday, Mr Brown said: "At all times I will be strong in purpose, steadfast in will, resolute in action in the service of what matters to the British people."

After his meeting with C.O.B.R.A. on Saturday evening he got be all those things and then asked the British people to do the same, saying: "I know the British people will stand together, united and resolute."

I particularly don't like it when politicians keep on using the same words - I get worried. A bit like Tony's "It's the right thing to do" mantra.

Will Gordon's catch-all argument be that we must be "resolute" in the face of anything that challenges his Premiership? The Clunking Iron Fist indeed.

And as an aside - what better way to bring a people which has just voted against your party and installed a nationalist government into line than a wee terrorist attack?

Certainly an interesting way to shut up a possible rabble rousing SNP First Minister like Alex Salmond.