Kakistocracy XVI:Brassy Monsters (And Unctuous Freaks).

"The socialism I believe in is everybody working for the same goal and everybody having a share in the rewards. That's how I see football, that's how I see life" - Bill Shankly 

The Huish Athletic Ground, where Yeovil Town FC played their home games from 1920 to 1990 and is now the car park of a Tesco Extra, was infamous for having an eight foot slope from one side of the pitch to the other. It made for both an uneven surface and the odd uneven match and it was one of the main barriers preventing Yeovil from entering the Football League, something they finally did in 2003 after they'd moved to a new, even, ground.

But at least Yeovil Town switched ends at half time, and at least they accepted the need for relegation and promotion to keep football a competitive sport rather than a demonstration event or a circus. The recent proposals for a European Super League (which Man Utd, Man City, Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal, and, quite bizarrely, Tottenham Hotspur who have not won the league in sixty years signed up to and then, almost immediately, retreated from) was a far greater affront to the supposedly beautiful game than an uneven pitch in Somerset.

There would be, effectively, no relegation or promotion for the big English, Spanish, and Italian clubs and the likes of Leicester and Blackburn Rovers (who, unlike Spurs, have won the league in living memory) as well as Aston Villa and Nottingham Forest (unlike the North London rivals, European League champions at least once) would have virtually no hope of competing unless they raised both their wealth and their brand awareness.

The European Super League was a disgusting, insulting, and craven plan that, quite rightly, appalled everyone from fans to players to managers to club owners to politicians of every stripe and even on to members of the Royal Family. It would have meant the end of competitive football as we know it and it was, obvious to all, both indefensible and unworkable but don't think the idea is over yet.

Think of it as a kind of football Brexit. A wicked and terrible idea designed purely to make rich people even richer at the expense of the poor. To make Brexit happen, the rich people it would enrich further needed to convince those it would impoverish that it would work for them. Or if not for them, would at least hurt their enemies. Even if those enemies were merely imagined or created by the very people who sought to benefit from that imagining or creating. In the case of Brexit, immigrants. In the case of the ESL, we'll find out soon enough I suspect.

The fact that so many people rose up in anger about the ESL proposals gave us all hope this week. As did the news of Derek Chauvin being found, correctly - as anyone with eyes and a conscience could see, guilty of murdering George Floyd in Minneapolis. But much as nobody expects institutionalised racism to disappear from the US (or UK) police, surely nobody in their right mind thinks this ESL plan is gone forever.

Football fans will remain vigilant I'm sure. But what about society as a whole, where the sort of corruption and sleaze we've seen badmouthed in football has been allowed to run freer than ever in recent years, exacerbated by the pandemic which also proved a handy smokescreen to some of the more nefarious actions carried out by Johnson's gang of crooks and cronies?

Since I last wrote, a fortnight ago, the Tories have been very busy making enemies and dividing people. Gavin Williamson wrote, in Tory mouthpiece the Telegraph, that if children "haven't learned the importance of basic good manners, of courtesy and of respect for others, they will certainly struggle when it comes to making their way in adult society" and said they lacked "discipline and order".

Where do you even start with that? Do you start with the very fact that Gavin Williamson has done so well in adult society that he has, remarkably, become Secretary of State for Education despite lacking good manners, courtesy, or respect or do you start with the undeniable proof that there is no evidence whatsoever that children have behaved worse during lockdown. In fact, quite the contrary. 

Children, and their parents, have on the whole behaved in an exemplary fashion in very difficult times. It seems a harsh, and cruel, way to treat a generation who have sacrificed a whole year of their normal youth to save the lives of their grandparents and people their grandparents age they will never know. That they did that, to me, would be a perfect example of basic good manners, courtesy, and respect for others. All things that Gavin Williamson is performatively incapable of.

When Alan Duncan, the former Conservative minister, wrote in his recent memoir, In The Thick Of It, that Williamson is a "venomous self-seeking little shit", going on to add that Priti Patel is a "brassy monster" and Michael Gove an "unctuous freak" - giving me a clunky Bowie pun for this blog's title, it may have been score settling but it was written by someone with personal experience, and knowledge, of Williamson and it was written by someone who, nominally at least, plays for the same team.

Duncan writes about being Boris Johnson's deputy (or "pooper scooper", tasked with clearing up the mess behind his boss) at the Foreign Office and describes Johnson as an "embarrassing buffoon with an untidy mind" whose comments are, quite knowingly, "simplistic nonsense - designed to appeal to Tory activists" to serve Johnson's own ambition. Never the country he was elected to govern.

 

It's worth pointing out, again, that Alan Duncan is in the same party as Boris Johnson. It's also worth pointing out that this simplistic nonsense has, often very serious, consequences. The attacks by loyalists and/or unionists on the police in Belfast were, of course, forged over years of historical divide and resentment, exacerbated by the lack of action taken following the large crowds that gathered for the funeral of former IRA volunteer and senior Sinn Fein member Bobby Storey last summer, but we should not ignore the significant part that Johnson's botched Brexit deal has done to fan the flames of this resentment.

When he lied to the Northern Irish people that there would be no border in the sea between Britain and Ireland it wasn't an unfortunate accident. It was a lie typical of the man. When he told that lie he had already signed into effect that very border. Those who believed the lie believed it because they wanted to believe it. With Johnson (as his various wives and mistresses have found out, as well as colleagues like Duncan) this is an idiotic and dangerous policy.

These weren't promises he was sadly unable to keep. They were out and out lies and he knew they were even as they left his mouth. As the Tory party has found itself further embroiled in sleaze and corruption over the last week, this story has been sidelined. The kids rioting, at the behest of elder provocateurs, on the streets of Belfast may have gone quiet following the death of Prince Philip, rioting's not a good look for a unionist during a period of enforced national mourning, but it seems unlikely that they will remain so.

And what of HRH Prince Philip? A ninety-nine year old man, consort of the Queen for over seven decades, famed for both his racist gaffes and his admirable Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme to help youngsters improve themselves? Of course, every death is sad, even that of a man who nearly reached one hundred years old - not least to the Queen and the rest of his family, but to me, a person who would rather be a citizen than a subject, it is no more or less sad than the death of anyone else.

Cowed by rampant nationalist flag waving Tories and still with a flea in their ear after Peter Sissons wore a dark purple, rather than black, tie to announce the death of the Queen Mother back in 2002, the BBC decided that everything should stop so that we could mourn the death of Philip. Something they didn't feel necessary to do when over one thousand people per day were dying of Covid.

I've long defended the BBC for maintaining, or at least trying to maintain, impartiality in the wake of constant attacks from the far right, often emboldened by some on the left - but this time they struck a very wrong chord - and one that didn't even make sense. Do children's cartoons really need to be taken off air so they can mourn the death of a person they've never met and have no interest in whatsoever?

Of course not. Why did Six Music replace shows like Late Junction and The Craig Charles Funk and Soul Show with Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie playing inoffensive acoustic ballads and instrumental tracks? Are we to believe that Sigur Ros, Paul Weller, and The XX are deemed appropriate music to mourn the death of a royal but Al Green and Frank Zappa are not? Are we to believe Prince Philip knew who any of these people, or bands, even are? Are we to believe Prince Philip ever once listened to Six Music?

Or that he would so much as give a toss about any of this? Every single channel on the BBC was either taken off air or had its entire Friday night, and a lot of Saturday morning and afternoon, coverage given over to the death of a duke and while I'm not disputing it was a big news story and worthy of an hour long news special, did we really need so many fawning, obsequious toadies lining up to relay their utterly unfunny anecdotes about how they once met Philip and he said something to them?

Nicholas Witchell must have taken home some good overtime pay. With that amount of footage you'd think there would have been room for at least some moderately dissenting voices. No wonder huge numbers of people switched over to streaming services and to Gogglebox on Channel 4. By the end of the evening the BBC news website was reporting more people reading about the death of the fifty year old American rapper DMX than Prince Philip.

As the weekend continued, news broke that there had been over one hundred thousand complaints to the BBC about the OTT coverage of Philip's death, the highest ever number of complaints they have ever received, almost double the number received about Jerry Springer:The Opera back in 2005. Some even complained that the BBC made it too easy to complain which does, at least, illustrate how the BBC can never win.

This one though, they undoubtedly lost. If the pubs had been open I suspect they'd have been packed full of people escaping the relentless grovelling tedium of the news but, of course, the pubs weren't open. They are now though. Lockdown is slowly but surely easing and we're emerging, blinking, from our hibernation. I've even made a visit. Of course I have. Following a 135 day hiatus. The longest in my adult life, I'm fairly sure.

On Saturday night, me and Ian (after a lovely day in Burgess Park with Darren, Cheryl, Tommy, and Luca in which we even witnessed a mariachi band playing a socially distanced version of La Bamba at a quincinera) had a drink or four in the garden of The Elephant & Castle pub in, er, Elephant & Castle, and it was bloody lovely. I'd missed draught beer, of course, but I'd also missed that general feeling of hubbub you get in a busy pub. Smiles and laughter from other tables. A feeling of possibility on a night out rather than the certainty we've grown accustomed to.

I waited nearly a week, although I did squeeze in a haircut beforehand (see below) and even went clothes shopping, but many were in the pub the day they opened. My local, Watson's General Telegraph, was busier on that Monday than it would normally be on a weekend. I was pleased. Pubs, like many other sectors, have struggled badly during the pandemic and they are vital community hubs as well as sources of joy for millions of people.

Britain without pubs is unimaginable and we've lost far too many in recent years already. I'm going again on Saturday, I've got a table at an undisclosed location booked for a few friends following a short walk we're planning, and I'm really looking forward to it but I have been doing other things. I've attended Skeptics online talks about hunting Russian spies and the Big Bang (theory) and I did Matt's Kahoot quiz in which I returned to winning ways, Ian and Mike completing the podium.

I've watched season three of Narcos, season two of Grayson's Art Club, Too Close on ITV, and the first season of The Terror, I've walked in Camberwell Old Cemetery, One Tree Hill, and Peckham Rye where I met Simon for a quick latte and a catch up. I've chatted to my parents, Ben, Vicki, Adam, Shep, and Michelle (with Evie joining in briefly to tell us she was hungry and wanted a burrito) and all of these things have been as life affirming as the continued existence of Johnson's administration is soul destroying.

As with every one of these blogs I balance the positives of my personal life with the unfortunate situation of having to live in a country with such an amoral and corrupt government. I've lost most of my interest in football in recent years (it's too ubiquitous, too full of blowhards, too bloody expensive, and I have a belief that making your own entertainment is better than the bread and circuses served up by football) but, like Bill Shankly (who would have turned in his grave this last week), and unlike Boris Johnson and his Conservative Party, I firmly believe that everyone does the work and everyone shares in the rewards. When that stops happening in football you can no longer call it a sport. The question we need to ask ourselves is if that stops happening in a democracy, can we still truly call it a democracy?