DID you read the screeds upon screeds of news stories and comment on the European Commission offering the UK government €60m from the EU Solidarity Fund to help pay for the floods of last winter?

Apart from The National, not one single daily or Sunday newspaper circulating in Scotland gave the story any prominent coverage, despite the fact that Aberdeenshire in particular stands to benefit from the funding.

That’s how it works in modern British journalism. The EC is Satan to our right-wing press, and for the Commission to be seen to be doing anything good is just not going to get the slightest coverage as Brexit-addicted editors do everything they can to batter our European links.

So what’s that got to do with sport, I hear you say? Well, I am about to try and defend a much-misunderstood and put-upon species, the Scottish sportswriter, particularly in regard to a football team called Rangers.

You’ll note I use the word ‘team’. That’s because I want to avoid the whole administration-liquidation-sevco-club argument, not because I don’t understand it, but because those people who push the argument pick on Rangers alone when other clubs have suffered similar fates and not received anything like the opprobrium. Google ‘Hibernians’ and ‘Hibernian 1890.’ for a start.

Let me make my opinion on one Rangers subject clear: if the Supreme Court decides that the Court of Session was right to overturn the Tax Tribunals’ previous judgements that Rangers – specifically Sir David Murray’s Rangers – were legally okay to use Employee Benefit Trusts to avoid paying tax, then the Rangers of that era will finally be proven to have cheated both the taxman and the rest of Scottish football.

The consequences should be inevitable. The Scottish Football Association and the Scottish Professional Football League should convene a new inquiry into the nature of EBTs and their usage, then punish all those who used them illegally, if necessary by removing trophies and titles. Remember that Lord Nimmo Smith’s Commission proceeded on the basis that EBTs were legitimate – if the Supreme Court says otherwise then a new Commission has to judge the football case again, because cheating the taxman is cheating football, too.

If the Supreme Court finds against him, Sir David Murray also should be stripped of his knighthood.

The current incarnation of Rangers say they will fight any title-stripping, though presumably not David Murray’s. Their stance is illogical and hypocritical: you can’t claim to inherit the history of a club if you do not accept all the consequences of that history.

Dave King and co are only in charge of Rangers because Murray sold the club to Craig Whyte for £1 before Charles Green arrived on the scene. And wasn’t King involved in the Murray era? That will be the same Dave King who promised tens of millions to get Rangers competitive against Celtic again. Mmmm… To believe some people who opine, usually anonymously on social media and the blogosphere, the Scottish sportswriting mob ignored all this ‘Rangers in trouble’ stuff right through the Murray era and into Green’s bonkers time at Ibrox.

I can assure you, they did not. I was part of that ‘mob’ at the time, and can roughly say that we divided into three parts – those who hadn’t a clue what was going on as they came from a pure sports background and couldn’t tell the difference between a balance sheet and a team sheet; those who were intimidated and bullied by a Rangers that did everything it could to put a lid on scandals; and those whose editors did not want to know, because they feared the loss of Rangers-supporting readers and court action – I’d say the vast majority of us were in that category, as The National wasn’t around to work for back then.

We were silenced because newspaper editors and managers did not want a big legal fight with Rangers who made it clear they would resort to their lawyers, a threat I thought was groundless but which was taken very seriously indeed by the high heid-yins.

There are no doubt some of those anonymous non-traditional media types who think we are all still in thrall to Rangers. Oh really?

Have you read Tom English’s stuff on the BBC – who are still banned from Ibrox – or Gordon Waddell’s piece in the Sunday Mail at the weekend? Graham Spiers gets death threats for his stuff, Bill Leckie in The Sun regularly has a pop, and I like to think I’ve done my bit, always from the viewpoint of the fans who, though they often disgrace themselves, are the real story of Rangers’ survival.

Here’s a startling fact the anons will probably ignore – newspapers just cannot say and do what they want. They never could, and in these post-Leveson days, they cannot even print hearsay. Which is why most important calls and interviews carried out by journalists are automatically recorded with the big clubs’ press officers ostentatiously taping interviews, too, as if to say ‘don’t dare misquote us’.

It also comes back to the point I made at the beginning, which was that it is editors and owners who set the policies for newspapers, and that is why under founder Richard Walker and Callum Baird, The National has set a distinctive tone in Scottish journalism, encouraging writers to dig for stories and state opinions that would not see the light of day in other newspapers.

In the end, the big decisions are for the officers and not the infantry. That goes for the back pages as well as the front.