I am no great football fan. It is very telling that Attlee attended precisely one football match in his life.
But the worst thing that ever happened to football was the abolition of the maximum wage.
Having thus established its view that any sane person would want to leave the working class as far behind as possible, and to do so as rapidly as possible, it duly turned itself into what it is today, with season tickets far beyond the means of the working man, with very low pay and poor treatment of “menial” staff, with routine “do you know who I am?” behaviour of the most outrageous kind, and so forth.
A pay cap would, at least, be a small step in the right direction.
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"I am no great football fan. It is very telling that Attlee attended precisely one football match in his life."
ReplyDeleteWhat is the link between these two sentences?
It is very New Labour to affect an interest in football. Back when there was a Labour Party, it was too busy helping the workers materially to have time to colonise their culture, even if it had had any such inclination, which it didn't.
ReplyDeleteSo it was never part of "their culture", then?
ReplyDeleteWell, thereby hangs a tale.
ReplyDeletePublic school educated Anglican clergy did in fact introduce football to working-class areas in order to keep youths off the streets. It remains, I am told, much more popular at Eton than rugby is.
But well before and well after, say, 1966, the middle classes had no interest in it, and indeed made a point of not having: there are still minor public schools that forbid it outright, and Melvin Bragg tells of his great disappointment at getting into grammar school, because they played rugby instead of football there.
But something shifted in relation to the European Championiship of 1990, and the rest is history. New Labour have always affected an interest in football in order to make them look like men of the people. Blair used to pretend to be a Newcastle United supporter in order to ingratiate himself with his constituents at Sedgefiled, who would almost all be either Sunderland or Middlesbrough. They never had the heart to tell him.
You're no great football fan, so mistakes are probably inevitable here, as elsewhere in your work - you do write a lot, after all. But there was no European Championship in 1990. You are presumably thinking of the World Cup.
ReplyDeleteYes, that'll be it.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, it wa sone of the great socio-cultural changes in Britain in the Nineties, and a key part of the culture of New Labour.