This morning, Paulina wrote a superb piece about Celtic’s plans for fan engagement, which they’re calling Celtic Connect.

I urge everyone who reads this piece to go and read that one, because it is worth your time to read her rebuttal of that atrocity of a proposal.

I am personally offended by the idea and the concept, and I was ready to have a 4,000-word rant on it.

Paulina has been much more circumspect than me, much less ranting and much more forensic in her distillation of why it is the worst possible idea, and she’s done it in far fewer words than it would have taken me.

I may still do a piece on it, but I honestly don’t know what I can say that she hasn’t already said.

That’s why I want to talk about something else for the moment.

Because if you want to know how much this club really values engagement with supporters, you only have to look at the AGM, the motions which have been put down and, in particular, the way the club has responded to one specific motion from the Celtic Trust.

Look at that response carefully and you will see exactly what this club’s commitment to good communication and good relations with supporters actually looks like.

You will see what all the fine words about engagement really amount to when supporters ask for something concrete.

Last month, the Celtic Trust proposed a series of motions, including one calling on the club to apologise to shareholders and supporters for allowing a non-Board member to address the AGM in what was, in effect, an attack on fans for having opinions.

Celtic has, of course, announced that it intends to recommend voting against that motion.

Which means they will vote against it.

They will reject out of hand any suggestion that supporters are owed an apology for the comments made by Ross Desmond at the last AGM, comments which sparked outrage in the room, and rightly so.

That is this club’s true face.

That is this club’s real commitment to positive discussion.

That is what Celtic’s version of honest, constructive engagement looks like when it is tested against something tangible.

The club can talk all it likes about dialogue, openness and rebuilding relationships. But when presented with a straightforward opportunity to acknowledge that supporters were spoken to in a way which caused genuine anger and offence, the answer is apparently no.

No apology.

No admission.

No recognition that anything was done wrong.

And that tells you far more about the reality of Celtic’s engagement strategy than any glossy announcement ever could.

Why should we trust that Celtic Connect is being done in good faith?

Why should we believe the club is serious about honest engagement when this is its response to a perfectly reasonable request from the Celtic Trust?

Ross Desmond should never have been permitted to make that speech.

It was a disgrace.

It permanently toxified his name with a vast swathe of the Celtic support, and I do not believe there is any realistic prospect of those supporters ever giving him the benefit of the doubt.

But the damage goes beyond Ross Desmond himself.

By allowing that intervention to happen, the club damaged its own relationship with the supporters and shareholders who turned up that day to ask questions of the Board and instead found themselves being spoken down to and insulted by the son of the club’s principal shareholder, while Dermot Desmond himself did not attend.

That matters.

Because you cannot subject supporters to that sort of treatment, refuse to apologise for it afterwards and then turn around months later talking about constructive engagement and improved relations as though none of it happened.

If Celtic really wanted to demonstrate that it had learned something, this motion would have been an easy place to start.

Acknowledge the mistake.

Accept that the intervention should not have happened.

Apologise to the people who were there.

Instead, the club intends to recommend that shareholders vote the motion down.

And then it expects us to believe that Celtic Connect represents some brave new era of openness and constructive dialogue?

Don’t make me laugh.

The people who run this club seem to think they are being terribly clever by putting forward Celtic Connect, going to meet with the Greenock Supporters Club and embarking on what amounts to a PR offensive.

The problem is that there is no consistency to any of it.

The image they are trying to create is constantly being contradicted by their own behaviour. And it is in those contradictions that you see the true face of what they are doing.

They have never learned that if you are going to pull this trick off, everything has to complement everything else. Every action has to reinforce the message you are trying to send.

You cannot, on the one hand, tell supporters, “We are taking you seriously. We are listening to what you say. We want constructive talks and dialogue,” and then, on the other hand, effectively tell them, “We’ve listened to you. We don’t care what your opinion is.”

It rather undercuts the message.

As I’ve said before, I don’t think these are evil people. I think they are woefully out of their depth at this stuff.

And that is the perception problem they cannot seem to solve.

They take one step forward and then two steps back, and those two steps back usually end with them lying twisted on the ground with one foot firmly in their mouth.

Just as they have done here.

As I’ve said before, the way to judge these people is not by the words they use, but by the choices they make.

Because talk is easy.

It is easy to present yourself as reasonable. It is easy to make sweeping statements about listening, dialogue and constructive engagement. It is easy to make promises about better communication.

But these people passed the point a long time ago where supporters could simply take them at their word.

The only realistic barometer we have is to watch what they actually do, and to compare that with what they have done before.

And when you do that, what you find is a glaring inconsistency between the apparently sincere language and the actual behaviour.

No apology to shareholders.

Fan engagement dressed up as progress, but conducted solely on their terms.

A refusal to acknowledge legitimate grievances while simultaneously asking supporters to believe that a new era of openness has begun.

This is the club presenting its true face to us.

It is arrogant. It is elitist. It is out of touch. And above all, it is completely devoid of strategic sense or message discipline.

That is why these attempts at communication keep failing.

It is not enough to say the right things if every meaningful decision contradicts the message.

At some point, people stop listening to the words and start watching the actions.

And once you reach that point, credibility becomes very difficult to recover.

That is where Celtic are now.

And it is impossible to take this latest outreach seriously as a consequence.

Choose The CelticBlog as a Preferred Source on Google News…