Gareth Southgate’s progressive patriotism needs work
My plea for Keir Starmer to develop a populist story for the Left appears, so far, to have fallen on deaf ears in the Leader of the Opposition’s office. However, if the media hype is to be believed, we don’t need the Labour leader to re-energise social democracy. Step forward Gareth Southgate, folksy and likeable England Manager and – if the extraordinarily positive response to his open letter to the nation, “Dear England”, is to be taken at face value – a man who manages to seamlessly combine the sagacity of the Venerable Bede, the social nous of Orwell, and the bravery of St George himself. But did Southgate’s vision really reflect a genuinely coherent “progressive patriotism”?
“This is a special group [of England players],” he wrote this week: “humble, proud and liberated in being their true selves. Our players are role models.” The team shouldn’t “just stick to football,” he continued. It has a “duty to continue to interact with the public on matters such as equality, inclusivity and racial injustice, while using the power of their voices to help put debates on the table.” For “humble, proud and liberated”, read national pride, an improving mentality and sporting prowess. It’s neatly done – but in the context of a sport deeply divided over its role in contemporary politics, the letter actually reflected a consensus on the liberal-left that real political conflict is best explained away, rather than confronted and taken seriously.
Southgate’s vision of an ideal England read to me like an attempt to construct an ideal fan: socially conscious, family loving, and certainly not likely to boo when players “take the knee”. It’s a little like trying to work out who is the most Marxist Marxist. Or the most Christian Christian: Peter, Paul or Mary?
People disagree. In a recent YouGov poll, 54 per cent of England fans supported the taking the knee gesture; 39 per cent disapproved. In Scotland, 42 per cent of fans registered their opposition.
Plainly, “sticking to football” – or put differently, what it means for players to be “role models” – means different things to different people. My own view is that England should unilaterally boycott the World Cup in Qatar. Hundreds of migrant workers from the subcontinent have died in the construction effort in preparation for the World Cup in 2022. If players encounter racist abuse from the stands, they should be backed to the hilt if they want to walk off and not return to the field. And yet, in 2019 after “monkey” chants disfigured England’s Euro 2020 qualifier in Montenegro, Southgate was wearily equivocal on the matter: “I don’t think we need any more symbolic statements that this [racist abuse] is unacceptable.”
In his reflections on pageantry and patriotism, Southgate recognises rightly that perceptions of “winning well” are as much inflected by national or local loyalties as by aesthetic considerations. We have the Ancients to thank not only for the notion that the key is not just to win, but to look good while doing it, but also the idea that sport is a proxy for warfare drawing on the same violent energies. Homer and Pindar after him used the same term “aethlos” to describe epic heroes variously carrying out their labours, warring with each other, and at play on the sports field.
In general, we respect pragmatic winners; we fall in love with sportsmen, and women, who win with a certain sense of style, élan, even braggadocio. But we certainly fall in love with pragmatic winners playing for the home side. Alastair Cook was an awful trundler of a batsman at times – but he was our awful trundler, brave, determined in adversity, as tough as the men who built Stonehenge, as sturdy in a storm as an English oak tree, etc. etc.
Just as our aesthetic conceptions of a winning style change with the times, our perception of the social and political context in which sport finds its meaning has markedly shifted over the last few decades. The quaint orthodoxies of 20th century cricket, and the ingrained and detestable racism with which touring sides from the old Dominions were treated, have not survived the democratising forces of the modern era. The culture of football has been transformed. This 2021 English vintage is a fantastic embodiment of the meritocratic professional ethic embraced by the Premier League.
I applaud Southgate in appreciating that sport cannot be divorced from the political arena. To bastardise CLR James’s famous dictum (“What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?”), Southgate is right that both football and footballers should be seen as part of society at large. But to construct a “progressive patriotism” worth its salt, he must make sure its foundations are sure.
If England can win on the field and win in style, this team will do the work that other great sports teams have done just as a matter of course – they will lift our hopes and cast a light over the spirit of our times, in all its good and bad aspects, in all its magnificent complexity.