For those who insist that sportspeople just want to practise
a profession that has nothing to do with politics, and that politics should be
kept entirely separate from sport, consider this. As “England”, the football
team, exited the World Cup last night, one of the many overpaid football gobshites
who substitute verbal diarrhoea for clarity of speech, told 37 million ITV
viewers that, despite losing, they had done “the nation” proud and that “the
nation” will honour their achievement etc etc. Be in no doubt that the main match
commentator, Clive Tyldesley, was being archly political in his propagandist
nonsense, whether he quite realised it or not.
There is no nation called England. The nation that he was mixing
it up with was one that rejoices under the internationally recognised, legal,
title of the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”. That’s the
UK, for short, not Britain and most certainly not England. Only the spatch-cock
nation that is the UK could concoct a situation where it doesn’t have a
national football team. Instead three constituent countries and one “province”
(Northern Ireland) compete against each other on the international football
stage as if they are nations.
Of course nations are subjective things, some exist only in
the fact that some people feel an affinity to them, whether a “nation” has
national independence, statehood, or not e.g. Palestine, Kurdistan etc. In the
same sense Scotland is arguably a nation: there are enough Scots who profess to
be Scottish (whether they actually want their country to leave the UK or not).
The Welsh ditto, most of whom most definitely do not want to leave the bosom of
the UK family. Northern Ireland is most definitely not a nation, nor can you give the term 'country' to an artificially concocted place that nearly a century
ago was carved out of Ireland to appease a then overwhelming majority who wanted
to continue to politically identify with the British state against the wishes
of a minority who identified with a nation called Ireland.
That leaves us with the “nation” that the ITV football commentator
may have thought he was referring to: England.
England has no political or governmental status, within the UK or
internationally. Unlike Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, it has no
government, no formal national apparatus. There are laws that apply only to the
territory of England, and there is definitely a legal corpus known as English
law. But that’s it.
At the start of the match you could hear the Russian stadium
commentator, whose serial verbosity periodically interrupted every live World
Cup game, say “and now the English national anthem”. The England football team almost sung along as they once again appropriated the UK’s turgid national paen to political quiescence and
anti-democratic sentiment. There is no English national anthem. How could there
be? ‘English nation’ is an oxymoron. Despite the proliferating born-again Cross
of St George enthusiasts, whose empty-headed embrace of the ultimate imagined
nation has boomed since England’s second greatest World Cup performance (1990),
and a little thing called Brexit (2019?), there aren’t many English men and
women who have a clear idea of what their nation actually is. There was no national
ambiguity in Zagreb last night though among the fans going ape-shit in a nation
of 4m born out of sectarian horror just two and a half decades ago.
If you cannot unavowedly name your nation, then it doesn’t exist
(yes, it’s true, a tree falling in a forest doesn’t make a sound if nobody is
there to hear it). If, like Tyldesley, your nation is a confusion of England,
Britain and, I suspect, some half-cocked rewriting of wartime history, and the
role of a few German royals and a half-American half English toff called
Churchill in it, then maybe this doesn’t matter. But the reason why people get
killed in your name without anybody you elect having any constitutional
authority over it, and why the tiresome parade of unelected aristocrats propping
up the head of state and her church, continues is because the “English” can’t
tell their national arse from Rice Krispies. God Save Us indeed.
