It's Coming Home?

I cannot tell you how much I want the Lionesses to win the World Cup. At that point, if it did not happen last year, then English football would become primarily a sport for girls. I have waited 41 years, since the day that I started school, for the fun that I would have with that.

Saint George's Flag is out again. 30 years ago, although almost everyone incorrectly called it something else, the English regarded the Union Flag as their national flag without any complication. It was not even a question. In my childhood, no one outside certain ecclesiastical circles (which were obscure even in the 1980s, but around which I did happen to grow up) would have had any idea what Saint George's Flag was. The 1966 World Cup Final is probably on YouTube or something. Check which flag the English fans were waving.

What we have now was made up in the 1990s to sell bad beer to football's new middle-class audience, the only people who could still afford the tickets. Or the beer. It predates devolution or anything like that. But we do have it now. It is mostly harmless. Though not entirely so. And it can be used to advantage.

There is a legend about Saint George, but he himself is not a purely legendary figure. His tomb at his birthplace, which is now known as Lod, was once a major focus of unity between Christians and Muslims in devotion to the Patron Saint of Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt before, and as much as, the Patron Saint of England. But three quarters of those who practised that devotion were violently expelled at the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948.

In similar vein, it is proposed to expand Jerusalem Walls National Park to include the Mount of Olives, under the control of Elad, a militant Israeli settler organisation. Benjamin Netanyahu depends for his parliamentary majority on people who actively believe that there is a religious obligation to burn down churches, since they hold the Divinity of Christ to be an idolatrous assertion. They recently desecrated the Protestant cemetery on Mount Zion, where it is maintained by the local Anglican diocese on behalf of a British owner.

While fourth generation Israelis could not possibly be told to “go home”, the State of Israel’s having been founded in the same year that the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, it is clear from the Bible that the pre-Israelite population, the founders of Jerusalem, never went away. They never have. They became Christian when or before the Roman Empire did, and they adopted the use of Arabic at the time of a Muslim Conquest contemporaneous with the Saxon Conquest of what is now England. Those ancient indigenous Christians are still there. The founders of modern Palestinian identity, they are the people of Shireen Abu Akleh, the people of Saint George. Parties that burn down their churches are now in government in Israel, and are about to take control of the Mount of Olives.

I doubt that Mason Greenwood and I would have much to say to each other, but nothing could match my indifference towards the opinion of a game show hostess, a mere glamorous assistant, a glorified lap dancer, who had been given the MBE because she had sued small media outlets that had failed to curtsy low enough to her, and because she had at least condoned physical violence against the then Leader of the Opposition. She must have known what the reaction would be, but that reaction was still libellous because she was on the telly and thus a Very Important Person, apparently more so than an elected Member of Parliament and a Privy Councillor.

In what specific way has Rachel Riley ever supported Manchester United? What would it be losing by its loss of her? But if she cared about the wider issue of violence against women, then she would use her undeserved prominence to confront the daily violence against the women of the people of Saint George.