Politics in sport? It's not as new as wannabe culture warriors would have you think

In 1895, rugby clubs in the north of England made the decision to break away from the Rugby Football Union (RFU) to form the Northern Union. What they created became rugby league. And the reason for the split?

Well, most of the players worked for a living, in the mills and pits. To play rugby competitively, they had to forgo some of their wage.

The northern clubs wanted to make this up to them in the form of what were called broken-time payments. In other words, not some sort of profit, but compensation for wages lost.

 

However, the RFU was having none of it and in 1893, voted against a move to allow such payments.

 

Two years before that, Leeds president James Miller had noted: “It is unreasonable to expect the same ‘amateurism’ from the wage-earning classes as from public school men. It is unfair to expect working men to break time to play football without their being remunerated.”

But the cult of amateurism remained in place in rugby union until 1995 – a century of spiteful, vindictive, petty behaviour that saw players barred from union for as much as playing a single, unpaid game for an amateur rugby league club.

For instance, if someone had played the game recreationally in the north of England, while working as a doctor, and then moved to the south west of the country, they wouldn’t be allowed to play recreational rugby union.

I recall, from my own days as a sports editor (so pre-1999), a pompous ass of an ex-British Army officer defending this, intoning that if someone with such a past wanted to play recreational RU, they could jolly well ‘join the armed services’.

But the point of mentioning this now is that we find ourselves suddenly hearing the cries of ‘keep politics out of football!’ – including from, err, politicians trying to whip up a culture war in the UK.

The cult of amateurism was a political one, because class is political.

To be a successful amateur athlete, you needed time to train – and working-class people didn’t have that luxury since they had to do actual jobs in order, as old Charlie Marx might point out, to keep a roof over their (and their families’) heads and food in their bellies.

Amateurism was not exclusive to rugby. It was dominant in the UK (particularly England) in many sports. For instance, in rowing, Steve Redgrave’s achievements are all the more remarkable given that he came from a working-class background and didn’t go to public school.

In 1882, the Amateur Rowing Association (ARA) was founded and, a year later, it set out a definition of an amateur. To give just a single example of its exclusionary criteria, anyone who had ever been “employed in or around boats, or in manual labour for money or wages, was not an amateur”.

 

So you couldn’t row in ARA competitions if, for instance, you were a Thames lighterman as your job.

 

The issue around class and sport still features in the life of the UK today. How often do you see snotty newspaper stories about rugby union players or golfers or tennis players or F1 drivers – unless, in the case of the penultimate one, it’s snotty English stories about dodgy Scot Andy Murray or, in the last one, the rather non-white Lewis Hamilton?

 

Those sports are – in England at least (it’s particularly a different case in Scotland around golf) – seen as being for A Slightly Better Class of People. In other words, you probably need a bit of dosh and time to participate.

And goodness, look back at cricket and the entire concept of 'gentlemen and players' – amateurs and pros: the snobbery – and the politics – are enshrined in the language.

 

Football, however, remains culturally working class – for all the money coming into the English game from some exceptionally wealthy sources.

 

Think of the many times have there been negative stories about ‘wealthy footballers’ – the only group the UK’s Conservative government ever suggested should give up some of their pay because of COVID-19 – and also a group that routinely sees negative stories about them in the press.

 

And square that if the player in question is black – see the contrast between the Daily Mail’s reporting of how Manchester City duo Raheem Sterling and Phil Foden have spent some of the money they have been paid by their employer.

Today, the Sun, which has rubbished Sterling more than once for being 'flashy', 'unethical' etc, lauded him on its cover of Monday's edition for scoring the winning goal against Croatia in the European Championships. Glass houses spring to mind

 

Let’s be quite clear – racism and politics are interconnected.

 

Culture secretary Oliver Dowden and – of course – PM Boris Johnson are currently fannying around complaining about ‘politicising sport’. In the former’s case, commenting on the reaction of his employer to historic, racist tweets by an England cricketer, and about England players taking the knee, in the latter.

 

It took a passionate yet calm article from England’s football manager Gareth Southgate on the subject – and the reaction to it – to persuade Johnson that, oops-a-daisy, he should actually condemn those who were booing England players taking the knee.

 

Now, as Kenan Malik pointed out in today’s Observer, taking the knee might mean little – and it might mean virtue signalling – but the England team is not a bunch of Marxist anti-capitalists who want to end our way of life, blah blah blah.

 

Though to be fair, I doubt that anyone applauding the suggestion that they are, whichever cretinous Tory MP or shock jock suggests as much, actually has a great deal of a clue as to what ‘Marxism’ actually is. 

 

But there you go – that’s the constituency that this Conservative government’s culture war is being aimed at.

 

The reality is, that as long as sport has existed, politics has been entwined with it – and Malik’s article gives other examples.

 

Of course Dowden has dived in – this is an individual who now has himself pictured in his office, with a whopping big Union flag, much smaller flags of the constituent nations of the UK (watch out Ollie – your leader won’t like that) and a large portrait of the queen – presumably for the simple reason that he believes it to be convenient for his career.

 

He also has a similar relationship with facts as The Dear Leader. Apropos his tweet at the weekend – subsequently deleted – falsely claiming that the Minack Theatre in Cornwall (which hosted a G7 partners’ event) had received government financial aid during the pandemic.

 

It hadn’t. And he hasn’t apologised or made a correction. Just deleted the tweet.

 

But hey – taking the knee is ‘politics’.

 

For my parents, politics in sport was people trying to stop cricket tours to apartheid South Africa. Because somewhere along the line, they'd missed the idea that apartheid itself was ... ‘political’.

 

But that highlights a point: while the German Nobel literature laureate and anti-Nazi Thomas Mann said that “everything is politics”, for many, it doesn’t become so unless and until it challenges their view of the world.

 

It’s only ‘politics’ when women challenge the privileged role men have in society.

 

It’s only ‘politics’ when LGBT+ people dare to raise their heads about the parapet and demand equality.

 

It’s only ‘politics’ when black people call for meaningfully equal treatment.

 

It’s only ‘politics’ when disabled people dare to suggest that they might have their needs considered.

 

It’s only ‘politics’ when a museum wants to take down an external statue of an individual who profited from slavery.

 

But of course, it’s not ‘politics’ when the secretary of state responsible threatens the museum in question over that issue.

The status quo is never ‘politics’.

 

So, if you think that removing the statues of those who profited from selling other human beings for profit is ‘politics’, you probably don’t want to really think about the history of this country.

If you think that England players taking the knee is ‘politics’, you probably don't want to spend time learning about the actual, real history of this country.

 

You want to stay in a history comfort zone – because you perhaps need, for the sake of your own sense of self, to feel that the country of the accident of your birth, is brilliant and far superior to other countries, making you superior to lots of other people.

And if you think that, if some statues are removed, history will end, then you might need help.

 

If this is the case, then the NHS can still get you counselling – even in this time of COVID.

• The photo at the top is of protestors dumping a statue of Bristolian slave trade Edward Colston into the harbour in 2020, from Kier Gravil – ksagphotos.

 

Are you from the real world – or not?

Are you real? Do you live in the real world? In order that we might all be able to judge – what paper do you read?

I’m only asking because, on 7 May, just after the various elections across England, Scotland and Wales, I found myself deep in Twitterworld.

There, one (on the surface) quite coherent contributor was asking why, in the Hartlepool by-election, Labour had “put up a Remainer in a Brexit town?”

 

That was a coherent question and I was drawn in – more fool me, perhaps.

 

But then they continued: “Did they do that deliberately so Starmer could pin the blame for any defeat on the candidate rather than him? It was a gross error of judgement. But the fact is that the Lab party only represent Guardian readers, not real people.”

 

Oh dear. To which I responded by positing the obvious question (if you have a brain): “What are ‘real people’?”

 

Since I read the Guardian, does that make me ‘unreal’ – or is such ‘unrealness’ balanced out by my not only reading the Guardian, but a wide variety of other media too? After all, I still sometimes look at the Telegraph culture sections for the opera!

 

“If there is such a concept [as real people] and it isn’t ALL people, then what are ‘unreal people’?” I asked. “What would that actually mean?”

 

But then I found myself getting rather engaged. So I mused that it would be fun to try the concept “based on newspaper readership: what paper would the most ‘real people’ read ...? The Times? The Sun? The Mail? The Mirror? What newspaper makes you most ‘real’?

“What about FT readers? How real or unreal would they be? And as for the Express ...”

 

I have a subscription for Private Eye – where does that put me on the spectrum of real to unreal? Honestly, I’m wondering if I and Ian Hislop are about to fade away into unrealness.

 

The poster in question has still not responded.

 

The thing is, this all sounds like a bit of a laugh. But it isn’t. Earlier today, I looked back at the account that had tweeted this nonsense and discovered that it is currently lauding anti-lockdown demonstrators and similar idiots.

 

Such phrases have become a regular riposte from people with no actual argument. I’ll go further: it is almost a boast that they have no logical argument – and let’s face it, to have a proper argument would risk making them a “girly swot” and we know where that doesn’t get you.

 

At the most basic level, it ‘others’: it says that some people are not “real”. It promotes a sense that, if some people don’t share the same views as you do, then they are not as good as you. And it is widespread in social media.

 

It’s all part of – or at least connected to – a deeply anti-intellectual, anti-fact, anti-democratic and anti-free speech conspiracy culture. 

 

It’s also no distance from the similar comment heard for years of: ‘in the real world’.

 

Let’s ask the same questions: if there is a ‘real world’, then what is ‘the unreal world’?

 

Does ‘the real world’ include a favella in Brazil? Does it include astronauts in outer space? Does it include Trump’s gold lift? Does it include children scouring waste dumps for things to salvage and sell to survive? Does it include those with the dosh to live on board luxury private ships all year round, cruising the globe? Does it include people trying to flee persecution for whatever reason? Does it include the nurse using a food bank to help feed her children?

 

Of course, we all know what it means: select from the following word salad – ‘metropolitan, liberal, lefty, artsy, luvvie, elite’.

 

Whatevs.

 

But let’s take just one – that ‘luvvies’ tag. Actors and performers, who seem to be mostly quite politically/socially progressive – possibly because the trade actually demands an ability to empathise/put yourself in someone else’s shoes, though are rarely anywhere near as far left as, say, Vanessa Redgrave – come in for huge stick. And they are most certainly not of the ‘real world’.

 

One assumes that those in ‘the real world’ never watch any sort of thing that involves dodgy presenters – that’s Match of the Day out, then, given Gary ‘woke’ Lineker, but obviously not Top Gear, given the general views of petrolhead star and conservative media columnist Jeremy Clarkson – or almost all films and TV drama and sit-coms.

 

But then again, consistency has nothing to do with this.

 

In the last year of his life, I remember my father ranting that he couldn’t ‘respect anyone who doesn’t have the same beliefs I do!’

 

Having no knowledge at that stage of how it’s best to simply agree with those with dementia, I bridled and rasped back: “So, you don’t respect me, then?”

 

That confused him. Somehow, it’s different with family. Yet of course, that excludes logic, which goes down the toilet – victim to simplistic gammon-faced ranting.

 

The simplistic gammon-faced ranting wouldn’t be important – except that in recent years it has had, and continues to have – a massive influence over the public and political life of this country: across the UK as a whole, but particularly in England, where it seems to be endemic.

 

My parents, Brexit voters both, were not uneducated. My father in particular achieved way more than most of those with whom he grew up with in a tiny, rural Cornish outpost. Little more than a Cornish peasant, he became an ordained Methodist minister and spent his working life moving around England – an incredible achievement.

 

But as with my mother, who came from far less humble a background in east Lancashire, his education was very England-centric. And both maintained a lack of enquiry into anything outside the UK as a whole.

 

I recall, in my late thirties, my mother seeing me reading a book and asking what it was. Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, I replied. My father had never heard of it – my mother seemed almost to blanch in fear.

 

After my father retired, they travelled a little on the Continent – and actually enjoyed it, though it often, in their reports, seemed to have been a revelation that, for instance, Germany was so clean and the Germans so ... friendly.

 

The first time they went was just after my father retired. It was a retirement present from his congregations, a trip to see the 2000 the Oberammergau Passion Play. He was almost terrified beforehand – it was, after all, the land of “the Nazis”.

 

They were neither stupid nor uneducated – but they were ill-served by a very limited and limiting education that severely constrained their horizons. They could list kings and queens of England, but knew almost nothing of the world outside the UK, except where that involved the wonderfulness of the British (English) Empire. And note – that was the what they could cling to as the ‘good bits’.

 

I strongly suspect that, in terms of Brexit and where we are now on a wider scale, this is a situation that was not limited to two people, on an individual level, growing up and being educated at almost opposite ends of England and in quite different socio-economic situations.

 

The English, with their long-term distrust of ‘intellectualism’, have allowed a culture to grow where we now ‘have no more need of experts’. Add to that a sense among (largely) older generations of not knowing what their identity is in a context of devolution and the end of empire, and you have fertile ground for opportunists, nationalists and populists.

‘The real world’ is simply a psychologically monochrome world view, where everyone ‘real’ is a mental mirror image of oneself.

It cannot, therefore, allow for free speech, political plurality and democracy, and any kind of diversity.

 

And that is why ‘real people’ and ‘the real world’ are not simply jokes, but are symptomatic of the problems we face in the UK as a whole – and most particularly in England – and why they need challenging at every turn.

Hold my pint: Mentioning the 'B' word

It has been strictly avoided. A bit like the plague. Or COVID-19 (fingers crossed, until now at least, on a personal level). But there comes a time when the word must be spoken, when the reality must be faced. And that word is ... Brexit.

That’s right, people. Brexit. BREXIT. The absolute bloody clusterfuck that is Brexit.

 

‘Why now?’ you ask – perhaps warily, if you yourself are familiar with the shambles, and are aware that I have avoided it on this blog, choosing indeed to tread lightly because of the divisiveness of the issue.

I made no mention of it at the beginning of this year. I have not said a word here about the UK government having screwed UK fishing communities – and now preparing to screw UK farming communities (and the irony that both these are traditional parts of the constituency of the Conservative Party).

 

That avoidance has been five years in the making – not least because I have also spent a lot of that time trying to understand it through the prism of my Brexit-voting parents (who then died in 2017 and 2018, without hanging around to see the godawful mess that their votes had helped to create) and finding that my attempts to understand them (and myself) is still, even now, largely bound up in trying to understand Brexit and English exceptionalism.

 

So why now ... why today?

 

Because Tim ‘Not-Very-Nice-But-Definitely-Very-Dim’ Martin has decided that, in spite of having been one of businesses’ few high priests for the cult that is Brexit, he now needs EU economic migrants to pull the pints in Wetherspoons, the chain of pubs that he founded, and wants regulations ‘liberalised’ in order to allow that.

 

To be fair, he has a BA in law from the University of Nottingham and qualified as a barrister in 1979 (though has never practiced) so is clearly a Brain of Britain candidate.

 

Not.

 

In 2018, on Brexit, he said that his pubs would stop selling EU-sourced products ... because, well ... The EU! Nose, spite, fucking face.

 

But honestly, this is from an individual who was reported in The Guardian on 30 March this year as having recommitted to a massive, 10-year expansion of ’Spoons, including 75 projects, made up of 18 new pubs and 57 major extensions to existing venues, creating 20,000 jobs.

Oops ... what if you can't fill those jobs, Mr Martin?

 

So it’s hardly difficult to see why he’s suddenly had a change of heart about immigration – okay, less a “change of heart” and more an ‘OMG! My personal pocket!’ religious conversion.

 

And this, girls and boys, is just part of why Brexit is a clusterfuck – because it has been guided by imbeciles and private profiteers who aren’t even intelligent and/or self-aware enough to recognise the impact on their own businesses and profits. Never mind on anyone else. They can't even managed enlightened self interest!.

This is not written from a position ofsnobbery. ’Spoons often do really good cooked breakfasts at a really great price (I’ve enjoyed them before a match in Manchester more than once and in Cardiff during Millennium Magic). And the beer they sell isn’t just dross, such as that 'brewed' by Interbrew.

 

But Martin’s comments illustrate that, while Wetherspoons is essentially a (socially) working class brand, he doesn’t give a toss about that group of people (however you would categorise the working class) and only about his own pocket.

As is clear, given that this is an employer who refuses to pay his own staff extra for working on bank holidays or allow them to have a soft drink while working on really hot days (like today).

 

Brexit in a fucking nutshell.

Sign a petition too get Wetherspoons to pay its workforce for bank holidays