Woke Nil: The same papers who attacked taking the knee are now claiming England's success proves them right
A football match is an unresistable metaphor to newspaper columnists.
What does England’s success so far in the Euros mean? A person free from the brain worms required to work as a top tier columnist in the British media might simply conclude that it means the players have played well and managed to score more goals than their opponents; the sardonic refrain of Fat Les’ Vindaloo made reality: “We’re gonna score one more than you…”
But that’s not good enough if you’re a columnist in search of something to fill your word count. A football match must signify something more and, if possible, prove you right and your ‘enemies’ comprehensively wrong. For a media that was desperate to destroy the England team for “taking the knee” and refusing to offer up easily splashed scandals, there has to be something else to the wins.
And that’s why The Daily Telegraph has turned Camilla Tominey1, usually focused on writing endless match reports in the traumatic tournament of recrimination among the royals, onto the topic of England’s triumph and why it proves that the dastardly Left that hates Britain is wrong about… everything.
Under the headline, The Euros have destroyed the Leftist myth of backward, racist England, Tominey delivers a column that could have been written by a remedial AI trained on a corpus of previous reactionary columns and a dictionary of obvious insults about ‘lefties’. It begins:
The woke Left’s hatred of this country and everything it stands for has always been misplaced, but never has it looked more out of kilter than in the face of England’s Euro semi-final win.
As Gareth Southgate prepares to field a squad of living, breathing, human men on Sunday, Tominey settles for a team of strawmen, all the better to scythe down with the cheap two-footed tackles of a tabloid cynic. She continues:
We have known what the liberal metropolitan elite really thinks of George Cross wavers ever since the Labour shadow minister Emily Thornberry posted that “image from Rochester”. To them, anyone remotely patriotic is “probably” also a racist. But must we really have to put up with the hypocrisy of hand-wringing Lefties accusing anyone with three lions on their shirt of jingoism while purporting to be on the side of working class people?
Tominey is a columnist for The Daily Telegraph and one of its Associate Editors. If that’s not “metropolitan elite”, what is? The addition of the word “liberal” is the trick used to separate her from the Islington dinner tables thronged by strawmen and women who despise England and boo the football team for being avatars of all that is objectionable.
But while there were all manner of FBPE melts in the comments of that creepy fundraising campaign allegedly to get cash for the crying Germany girl2, they are a fringe element. So too are the people on the left who go overboard with performative support for whoever England is playing.
Tominey makes big play of the fact that ‘Tom Daley’ trended on Twitter after England’s win against Denmark, implying that it could only have been English left-wingers that drove that conversation, rather than say Italians or any of the other nationalities that have plenty of good reasons to have disdain for England.
When she rails against the apparitions she conjures up — “hand wringing Lefties accusing anyone with three lions on their shirt of jingoism while purporting to be on the side of working-class people” — she’s indulging in the usual casual stereotyping of “the working class” that newspapers columnists delight in. Her vision of the ‘working class’ is of horny-handed sons of the soil and soot-caked men emerging from the mines rather than some poor sod cycling through the pouring rain with a cumbersome Deliveroo box on their back.
The prawn sandwich-driven progress of the Premier League and the endlessly soaring costs of tickets, shirts, and all the other accoutrements of fandom have pushed football further and further from a ‘working class’ pursuit since the late-80s onwards. Tominey attempts the laughable rhetorical high-wire act of presenting herself as the tribune of the worker from her lofty perch as a Telegraph columnist. It’s especially bold if you remember the moment she castigated a cleaner at the Royal Overseas League for inadvertently walking into shot while she was appearing on Politics Live last year:
Before going on to argue that England’s team represents a post-racial Britain, Tominey takes the time to single out perpetual newspaper pinata Diane Abbott for criticism. While hundreds of people — me included — criticised Priti Patel for her opportunistic England shirt photo, given her previous comments about the team, it’s Abbott who gets it from Tominey:
Seemingly in tune with the Danish press, who claimed their country had been “cheated” by the awarding of the soft penalty, 13 minutes into extra time, the Anglophobia continued in earnest with the questioning of our “strangely aggressive” celebrations in central London and whether England shirt-wearing Priti Patel had any right to congratulate the team when she seemingly opposed players taking the knee.
Even Diane Abbott, that self-styled “anti-misogynoirist”, got in on the act by calling the home secretary a “hypocrite,” initiating yet another virtual pile-on against the MP for Witham. It seems Ms Abbott is all for promoting women of colour and ensuring they don’t fall victim to online hate, provided they agree with her.
It seems that her notion of feminism and anti-racism is that Abbott cannot criticise another woman of colour ever, whatever the gulf between their politics, without invalidating all of her campaigning and principles. The notion that Priti Patel, a Home Secretary who is currently engaged in the biggest effort in decades to suppress protest and turn away people in desperate need, is a “victim” of “online hate” is vomit-inducing.
After expending hundreds of words on how the dreadful Lefties cannot accept that England’s footballing success shows how united the country is, Tominey turns the whole thing into a rerun of the Brexit game, which Leave won in extra time after some of the dirtiest play this side of Portugal on a bad night. She says:
Remainers have talked lots of nonsense about post-Brexit Britain going backwards. But in fact, as far as football is concerned, while member states like Italy, France and Bulgaria continue to have regular incidents of racism, England has led the way in attempting to kick it out, for good.
Of course, there is still work to be done, and that must continue in earnest.
But we should revel in England’s Euros triumph because that all-encompassing, considered and quietly confident team of young talents gives rise to the hope that our best days are still ahead of us.
Let’s jump back to her mention of Priti Patel “seemingly [opposing] players taking the knee”. Firstly, there was no seemingly about it, but secondly, Tominey and The Daily Telegraph more widely are being just as opportunistic as the Home Secretary. The paper raged in piece after piece about the England team taking the knee and how terrible the whole exercise was, certain that it would be able to howl “we told you so” when the team crashed out just after the group stages.
But England kept on winning and The Telegraph now has to reverse ferret, while also sticking to its certain belief that there is nothing wrong with Britain besides the machinations of ‘the Left’. A trip through The Telegraph’s archives delivers a plentiful pile of receipts…
Taking a knee has gone from an important gesture of deference and defiance to a grimly tokenistic ritual (Oliver Brown, Chief Sports Writer, 4 August 2020)
What a relief taking the knee will be banned at the Olympics (Oliver Brown, Chief Sports Writer, 22 April 2021)
Footballers taking the knee has lost its potency and should be shelved (Oliver Brown, Chief Sports Writer, 24 May 2021)
Toxic stand-off over taking the knee cannot be helping England (Oliver Brown, Chief Sports Writer, 6 June 2021)
Taking the knee alone won't make a difference in battle against racism - but equal opportunities will (John Barnes, 9 June 2021)
Woke companies must stop taking the knee (Matthew Lyn, 13 June 2021)
… and that’s far from a complete list.
Curiously, Oliver Brown who had been delivering one column a month about the horrors of England taking the knee hasn’t filed one since they hit their stride at the Euros. It’s almost as if it’s suddenly a lot harder to slide in on a side who are actually winning.
Brown’s most recent piece — On a profoundly moving evening, England transformed the nation's sporting psyche — is another slice of journalistic hyperbole, turning the game into a therapy session for 30 million people, as if much of the psychic damage over the years wasn’t delivered by the media itself.
I should point out that there was a lone dissenting voice among the Telegraph pieces criticising ‘taking the knee’ and framing it as a sign of England’s capitulation to Marxist infiltrators. Bryony Gordon wrote on 12 June that
… we should be behind those players taking the knee. Because the football pitch is the only place in the country – and perhaps the world – where young black men have equality. Only on that hallowed turf are they seen as equals. Not in the stands above it, where racism is still rife. Not in the tunnels leading out of it, where they can pick up their phones and see the racist abuse they have just received on Twitter. Just on the pitch, for the 90 minutes they are playing. If they can’t make a stand – or kneel – there, where, exactly, can they?
It’s a strikingly different tone to the one taken by Tominey in the same paper’s pages today. Perhaps she considers Gordon part of the hateful woke Left.
In The Times, Giles Coren goes for the cheap gag with a hyperbolically counter-intuitive column (Victory would be a disaster: I hope we lose) while ‘Chuckling’ Matt Chorley actually lands a decent hit on Priti Patel:
But I’d take any of them over today’s crop of U-turning culture warriors. Three weeks ago Priti Patel said it was fine to boo England for the “gesture politics” of taking the knee. Now she’s pulling an England shirt over her home secretary-branded stab vest and cheering like she’s deported the sort of people who come over here and raise successful young footballers. That’s gesture politics.
Camilla Tominey will be adding him to her list. Meanwhile, The Times’ leader column mentions Brexit but thinks it got away with it:
… it is not jingoistic to submit that the drama due to unfold at Wembley means even more to England supporters. And not just because the final act of the splendidly anachronistically named Euro 2020 is taking place on their turf.
Nor because success would go some way towards alleviating the tragedy and tedium of the past 18 months. Almost every country in the world, England’s opponents foremost among them, has suffered the depredations of coronavirus. Nor because getting behind the national team is an excellent balm to the enduring scars left by the Brexit referendum five summers ago. The temptation to freight football with more meaning than it can bear should be avoided. Football matters. But it is not, to contradict the great Bill Shankly, more important than life and death. Although, as benign expressions of patriotism go, celebrating sporting success takes some beating.
The Guardian goes for analysis of Gareth Southgate’s qualities within the storm of political squabbles that surround English football and a look at whether a win would be good for the economy. Again, a match can never just be a match. In an excellent piece, Barney Ronay writes:
Watching Southgate commune with Deep Flag England, it was hard to equate this bellicose former professional footballer from Crawley, Gareth who once had a massive stand-up row with his best mate because he wouldn’t take off his cap in a restaurant, with the idea, floated around the place in the last few days, that England and Southgate might not accept an invite to meet the prime minister at No 10 Downing Street should they win Euro 2020.
Gareth is a voice for tolerance. Gareth is a tool of “deep woke”. Gareth also loves the flag and reveres the military. And whatever you say he is, that is, most likely, what he’s not.
… Southgate has become a target and general straw man of the right, accused in odd parts of the internet of “wokery” and traitorous multiculturalisms. The toxic, divisive and ludicrous Rod Liddle called him toxic, divisive and ludicrous (also “thick”). This week the Boris Johnson-backing Daily Telegraph published a Southgate article condemning Gary Neville’s Boris Johnson-bashing Southgate TV rant, a nuclear-scale meltdown of ideas and oppositions that should probably just be interred beneath 4,000 tonnes of concrete and left to degrade for the next 500 years.
That brings us full circle back to The Telegraph. The article referenced by Ronay was a piece published on Thursday, headlined Gary Neville's tedious political rants are getting in the way of English unity and written by failed Tory parliamentary candidate Ben Obese-Jecty (who tried to unseat Diane Abbott in the 2019 general election). The article, which fails to mention that Neville has written for The Telegraph in the past, gets hundreds of words out of castigating the pundit for a single line.
The comment — more of an aside than the “Boris Johnson-bashing Southgate TV rant” that Ronay dubbed it — came during the post-match analysis after England’s game against Denmark. Neville remarked, in reference to Southgate:
The standards of leaders in this country over the last couple of years has been poor and looking at that man there [Southgate], that’s everything a leader should be”
The implication that Boris Johson is one of those poor standard leaders was clear and Obese-Jecty went off:
The joy of sport and of getting behind the national team at a major tournament is that it is a unifying experience, a time to celebrate success or collectively commiserate, whatever your place on the political spectrum. The England team has never been viewed as a political vehicle and it matters not where the political opinion of the players lies, but the team is supposed to be representative of the nation. Taking the knee has simultaneously proved ineffective in tackling the issue it clumsily attempts to challenge whilst fuelling division from a team that should be uniting the nation, as its performances this tournament undoubtedly have.
But it is apparent that ever since the England Team chose to take the knee the political left has identified the team as being on their “side” in the supposed culture war. Through their adoption of a gesture that symbolises the campaigning synonymous with the left they have, perhaps unwittingly, aligned themselves to the zealots who are happy to promulgate a narrative that targets those they disagree with; hardly practising what they preach when it comes to eradicating online abuse.
So on Thursday, it was appalling that the “political left [had] identified the team as being on their ‘side’” but now we’ve reached Saturday, The Telegraph has put out Tominey’s column claiming their victories for the Right.
A football game is usually done in 90 minutes — with extra time and penalties at a push — but the columnist game is never done. Their mouths keep running and running, and the right-wing claim that sport shouldn’t be political, while they make every single moment as political as possible, will never be substituted.
When is a football game more than a match? When it’s a culture war. And the whistles they use can only be heard by some of the players…
This week’s paid-subscriber only recommendations email will be out on Sunday. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, hit the button above to get it.
Camilla subtweeted furiously when I last mentioned her in this newsletter, livid that I hadn’t given her a right-to-reply. Consider this edition a right-to-reply on behalf of the ‘Left’ that she castigates in her own column.
This week’s newsletter from The Fence was good on this particular horror-show.