Everything’s Political

You know, I actually saw someone come out with it again the other day – that most idiotic phrase in history: ‘they should keep politics out of sport’. Don’t misunderstand me – it didn’t come as a surprise, I just knew that somebody, somewhere must be saying it in the wake of ‘Black Lives Matter’ and all those sportsmen ‘taking the knee’. It was just that it took so long for it to materialise within my sight. It is one of those constant refrains: we heard it during the South African apartheid era when teams from, well, everywhere, were banned from playing South African teams, also during the US boycott of the Moscow Olympics and the subsequent Soviet boycott of the Los Angeles Olympics. It is as if those saying it really believe that there is some kind of abstract, universal, notion of ‘sportsmanship’ which transcends political and moral principles. Except that there clearly isn’t – for some, both individuals and nations, it is apparently OK to use performance enhancing drugs. What most might call cheating, they rationalise as ‘gaining a competitive edge’, no different from swimmers shaving their body hair to reduce friction, for instance. And such decisions are, inevitably, political.

But what really irritates me about the people who say this, is that they want to propagate the idea that sport isn’t political in the first place. Yet they are, generally speaking, the very same people who, through their complaints about footballers kneeling for the national anthem and so on, clearly think that the national anthem should be played before a sporting contest, even though its playing is, in itself, a political act. Its playing and the hushed silence expected during the anthem’s playing is effectively making the statement that this is all about allegiance to the flag, that the contest we are about to see is really an embodiment of the ‘values’ underlying that anthem. Like I say – it’s all political. But on a more basic level, surely all sporting contests are political in that they represent a relatively harmless way to express, often bitter, rivalries between competing groups? International contests are frequently a surrogate for actual conflict between the participating nations. Conversely, they can also be used as a form of political endorsement for a regime – if respectable, democratic nations are prepared to send their teams to play a country, then they are tacitly saying that they think they are ‘OK’, an acceptable member of the international community.

Which is why, of course, apartheid era South Africa was always keen to organise those spurious ‘international’ tours, where various unofficial overseas teams, made up of sporting mercenaries, visited the country to play the South African national team. The idea was to give an impression of ‘normality;, that South Africa was a fully functioning member of the international community. I recall, during one of those intermittent tours of apartheid era South Africa by ‘England’ cricket or rugby teams, made up of rogue internationals, someone in the pub trying to defend them by saying that British Airways still regularly flew to South Africa, but didn’t face any kind of penalties. The difference, obviously, is that, unlike these rogue teams, British Airways was in no way purporting to represent the UK – they were an entirely private carrier (courtesy of Thatcher’s privatisation programme) which happened to have the word ‘British’ in its trading name. But a team touring South Africa and playing international matches against an official South African team under the ‘England’ banner are clearly making some claim to be ‘official’ representatives of the sport involved. Moreover, by organising the tour in the first place, South Africa was making a deeply political statement: attempting to demonstrate how ineffective international sporting sanctions against them were, that greed would always trump any sense of ‘sportsmanship’ among some sportsmen. That’s quite apart from the fact that the racial segregation of sports in South Africa, which helped spark the international boycott, was a political act.

Even at national level, football (or soccer, if you prefer), is all about tribalism. It gives people a sense of belonging, of identity. In this respect, let’s not forget the tradition of the sectarian divide in Glasgow football, with Celtic the catholic team, Rangers the protestant. While it is no longer the case that only catholics can play for the one, protestants the other, the divide still very much exists between supporters and is as much political as it is religious. Then there’s Tottenham Hotspur and the anti-Semitism faced by supporters, which includes prominent Jewish supporters of Chelsea trying to tell Spurs fans that their self-identifying as ‘Yids’ is anti-Semitic while simultaneously supporting a club whose supporters regularly chant ‘You’re on the way to Auschwitz’ when playing Spurs. Again, if that isn’t ‘political’, then I don’t know what is.

Obviously, sport has always been political – and not just at international level. So please, don’t tell me that politics should be kept out of sport when what you really mean is that they should only keep politics you disagree with out of it. But the fact is that everything’s political, not just sport. The health care you get, the education you receive, crime levels, the kind of housing you can afford – all the result of political decisions. But more than that, every bit of popular culture you consume is the result of politics, for it is inevitably the product of and reflects the society it was created in, which itself was shaped by economic and social factors which are themselves the result of political decisions. That’s the thing about art, it is defined by the politics that surround it – it is created either in opposition to those politics or it is complicit with them. Supposedly ‘non-political’ art is always political: by failing to challenge the status quo of its milieu, it is complicit with it, effectively endorsing it. That’s the thing you see, everything’s political, whether you like it or not. So, stop whining on about how it shouldn’t be and just accept reality!

Doc Sleaze