Is taking a knee taking the piss?

Woke Watch PC UK! {Case 3}

Published: 26 July 2021

Now, I hate football with a vengeance and always have. I have hated it for as long as I can remember and from my earliest childhood, especially at secondary school level. There was something so odiously, if not inclusively, masculine about having to interrupt your academic day by running up and down a muddy field in your silly little short shorts booting a ball about, accompanied by a gaggle of inane whoops and shouts under the kindly ministrations of a retarded bully-boy games master.

In those days wearing rainbow colours in support of all kinds of deviant practices was unheard of and, besides, had it otherwise been the case it would hardly have been encouraged. You only had to say, “I don’t like football”, to be immediately on the receiving end of ‘poof!’, ‘queer!’, ‘homo!’.

Football was a masculine game; it was all about manly men, both on and off the pitch; it was a case par excellence of male camaraderie, of muddy and sweaty male bonding but strictly of the non-rainbow kind.

So, it is not without some curiosity that we arrive in the 21^st century to find that under the guise and guile of racism traditional notions of masculinity are as much under attack on and off the football pitch as they are in almost every other UK walk of life.

I take as my lead on this treatise a recent article, ‘On racism and football, it’s England vs. their fans’, published online by Politico, a media resource described by AllSides media-bias rater as ‘Left Leaning’. Don’t take a spirit level to it, you will only tax your bubble.

The article in question is one of a plethora launched amidst the media-hyped hysteria about the so-called racist behaviour of a section of the England fans during the Euro 2020 final, which took place at Wembley Stadium in London recently (I haven’t a clue when exactly, as I don’t follow football?). But let’s leave that article for the moment and cut to the chase.

Keep Woke out of Football

The politically correct storm in a liberal-left teacup is all about  ‘taking a knee’ (No, not in the groin. Don’t be silly. You all know what ‘taking a knee’ means. It’s so everywhere that it wouldn’t surprise me if Brits are not soon wearing builders’ knee pads to go with their facemask fashion accessory ~ isn’t the 21st century fun!!). Apparently, when the English team took a knee, some of the fans took to booing. At the end of the game, when England lost, allegedly certain members of the English team were subjected to racial abuse.

When Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, denounced the ‘vile racist abuse’, (I believe she was referring to the verbal offence not the act of booing) she was accused by black player Tyrone Mings of hypocrisy. Because Priti Patel had once described ‘taking a knee’ as ‘gesture politics’, and when asked if she would criticise fans who booed England players taking the knee, she had replied that it was their choice, Mings felt justified in saying “You don’t get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as ‘Gesture Politics’ and then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing we’re campaigning against, happens.”

Whatever you might say about Mings’ game, joining the dots obviously isn’t it. He should stick to football, and possibly hone his skills, and Priti Patel should conduct herself in a manner befitting that of a home secretary, which is exactly what she is doing.

The problem with ‘taking a knee’ is that whilst some postulate that it as an anti-racism message, others see it as the political salute of an organisation described by The Telegraph as ‘a radical neo-Marxist political movement’. I refer, of course, to Black Lives Matter (BLM).

Patently, it is not within the remit of the British Home Secretary to endorse controversial brands.

The Politico article also alludes to Priti Patel’s refusal to endorse ‘taking a knee’ but at least has the decency to acknowledge that the reason one takes the knee is “in support of Black Lives Matter protesters”, which does not entirely dovetail with Mings’ vocalising of it as an “anti-racism message”.

The same article also offers an alternative, acceptable reason as to why some of the England supporters felt the need to boo, which is to “keep politics out of football”.

Booing for all the right reasons is not such a bad thing.

If only more people would boo for keeping politics out of wherever it is they do not belong, life might inch up a notch. We could certainly do with people standing outside our schools and booing and, if not exactly booing, demanding that we keep politics out of the UK education system, where it operates at every level subversively and with grievous intent to indoctrinate.

I booed, latently, when in the opening paragraphs of that article ‘On racism and football, it’s England vs. their fans’, I learnt for the first time that football, the game that I loved to hate, was, or was expected to be, as mixed up, convoluted and Woke-obsessed as British society itself. Why was the author of this piece rambling on about the virtuous things that some of the players did, were doing or had done when they were not booting a ball around and getting paid too much for it? It was not until I got to the bit about Jordan Henderson embracing LGBTQ+ laces and armband that the article raised a smile, a sigh of relief and a sense of where this was going. I checked the article’s attribution: aahh, ‘activist and editor at the New Socialist’ ~ mystery solved.

It would be naïve of me to suggest that LGBTQ has nothing to do with football and everything to do with people’s personal sexual proclivities, because some would Woke me up with, no it is all to do with inclusivity, others that is a gender equality message and still others a case of ‘gesture politics’, but, be this as it may, football, I would argue, is two teams of 11 men, 10 of them running around a  field in pursuit of a plastic ball and the eleventh stood there like a dummy surrounded by three metal poles.  

The Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries defines football as “a game played by two teams of 11 players, using a round ball which players kick up and down the playing field. Teams try to kick the ball into the other team’s goal”. There is nothing in this definition about sexual deviations, taking knees, knees up mother brown, or mother white, or one or other of the players giving sixpence a week from his not insubstantial salary to the local home for stray migrants ~ please send all donations to The Ritz …

Then comes the dogma and bigotry, the ironclad implication that if you do not wish to align yourself with a neo-Marxist group and believe that politics should be kept out of football then as sure as night follows day you must be far rightist. In fact, anyone who refuses to join in with the Riverdance foot-stamping and tantrum-inclined politics of the left, whether it manifests itself on the football pitch or anywhere else, can only be motivated by far-right sympathies. Like the game of football itself, you are either with us or against us, there is no middle way.

Thus, it comes as no surprise that the Politico article, as with many other on the left, links the ‘mindless violence of hooliganism with far-right sympathies’ ~ no mention here then of weeks of street rampaging, public disorder and the mindless vandalism against civic statues and Britain’s heritage that characterised the ‘mostly peaceful’ riots of BLM. You disagree? Go home and take the liberal tablet and whilst you are at it, take a knee.

Now spitting tar and feathers the Politico article navigates safely into familiar territory. Having satisfied itself that the disinclined knee-takers and stadium booers are far-right extremists, it full steams ahead up Shit Creek postulating on the way that “the far right have always preyed upon …  forgotten working-class communities”. So, who are the football fans who dare go ‘boo’, warriors of the mythical far right or working-class victims that the far right have duped? Two considerations arise from the victim statement: one, that the majority of football fans are from working-class communities, which they are; and two, yes, they have been forgotten ~ forgotten systematically over the years by the very people who egregiously pretend that they are the champions of the working-class, call them the left, call them socialists, call them new socialists, call them what you want, this putty vocalist clan have almost always one thing in common, which is that the majority of their kind are bourgeois-emulating lush-living liberals who talk the talk but do not walk the walk.

These are they who have an awful lot to say about racism and about equality in our working-class communities whilst advancing and enforcing ideological doctrines, such as globalism and mass immigration, that are tailor-made to undermine cultural identity and social stability. Globalism, mass immigration, open borders, political correctness and Wokism serve nothing but an elitist liberal club and as such are no friends of England’s working-class communities.

But take heart! All is not lost! The article goes on to suggest that the naughty element tarnishing the otherwise good behaviouralist fans appear to be suffering from that strange malady that most people tend to contract after the age of 14, anachronism: they belong to “another era” and “struggle to find a way to adapt to the modern world”.

Oh, brave new world that has such creatures innit!

What ‘modern world’ is it to which we must adapt to earn ourselves our browny points? Presumably the world of Woke, where all and everything has to be subsumed into the importance of rainbow colours and the virtue-signalling of ‘taking a knee’.

“Most of the team’s supporters have spent the last few years going through an attitude change that they should be given credit for.”

This is like saying, ‘I’ve kicked your arse, now I’ll pat your head, you good sheep you”. Such delusive nonsense might make the writer sleep better at night, but in reality, it will take a lot more condescension than that to rub out the fact that the majority of legacy Brits will never cave in, not to accepting politics in football and in any other part of their lives where politics should not be. If the English majority had wanted Wokism, they would never have voted for Brexit and the Labour party would not have collapsed in the last general election.

Oh, and if you are left wondering, so to speak, of course Brexit has been blamed for the malodorous actions of those ‘far-right’ fans! Cue a nursery full of bawlin’ babies: “We want a people’s vote!”

True to liberal or ‘new socialist’ form the tone of this article then becomes more rabid and froth foamy as it implodes towards conclusion. Brexit, as I have said, has already joined the ranks of the ‘usual suspects’, but there are a lot of other liberal-lefty hobbyhorses that are still unaccounted for. And then, just when you are asking yourself why you have not been mugged by the usual neuroticisms and enrichment blandishments, your faith in liberal bias is restored. In profusion, as if the writer is worried that he (she/it?) forgot to include them ~ and inclusivity is a very serious matter ~ comes ‘right-wing’, ‘populism’, ‘borders’, ‘immigration’, and ‘gender fluidity’ (I don’t much care for the liquid sound of that last one, do you?).

And so, we end up with what the writer no doubt believes is much of a ‘tan-ta-rar’ but is really little more than a sorry descent into cliché, that “right-wing populist politicians, including those in the government, continue to sow the seeds of division and stoke the fires of hatred”. Rather than admit that it is our socially engineered society with all its isms, virtue-signalling and Wokeness that is sowing the seeds and stoking the fires.

But now, of course, it is all going terribly wrong. The architects have the divisions for which they have been working but are perplexed and frustrated that they have gone no deeper than the thin end of the wedge and what is more disturbing for them is that as society grows more ‘populist’ the more exposed their handy work becomes.

As with all fanatical idealogues they have overestimated their own capabilities and underestimated the strength of the resistance. The days when legacy Brits could be cowed into submission by accusations of racism and other PC nonsense never really happened, at least not beyond the sold-on delusion, and as it never happened in the hey days of Tony Blair when liberals were living the dream, they might as well accept that it is never going to happen, no matter how many toys they toss from the three-wheeled liberal pram.

Time was once that football was a man’s game. The players all wore shorts that were far too long for them, had skinny legs and nobly knees. The football was a big brown lump of leather inflated by a blow-up pig’s bladder, a vegetarian’s nightmare. The players were rewarded with three and thruppence a match, and nobody fell over and cradled their leg unless they really had to. In the days of manly football the stands were full of working-class white men in long brown macs and flat caps. They did boo, even though politics was nowhere to be seen, but the only people taking a knee were players who got one accidently in the centre forwards. But still they played the game. “Come on now, play the white man!”, would come the roar from the crowds, and no one criticised because no one cared, back in those bad old real days.

Football! It has about as much appeal to me as keeping racing pigeons whilst ferreting during opening hours.

I think real socialists, the old kind, possibly loved it, but not so it would seem new socialists, as the writer of the Politico article decries football, “as a sport that has always lent itself well to toxic masculinity, a staunch ally of right-wing populism”.

What to do! What to do! Presumably the only way to deal with this ‘toxic masculinity’ is to shirt-lift it out of existence and, whilst you’re at it, for pity’s sake don’t forget to take that knee!

😉Woke Watch PC UK ~ An introduction to UK Woke

Image attributions:
Football: OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay (https://pixabay.com/vectors/football-ball-sport-soccer-round-157930/)
Rainbow above landscape:  Karson on Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/photos/dJJNeuQGcpc)
Silhouette of man: chandra chandra on Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/photos/ctwjcRnIU2Y)

Copyright [Text & Cat] © 2018-2022 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.