“Keep politics out of sport” is a slogan we’re hearing a lot of again, thanks to the controversies over historical tweets by members of the England cricket team, and some booing of the “taking the knee” protests by the English and Welsh teams, though not the Scots, at the Euro football championship. The truth, though, is that sport and politics have always been tangled up, particularly at the international level. We can think, for example, of the 1936 Berlin Olympics and Jessie Owens, the boycott of apartheid-era South Africa and the athlete Zola Budd, of the Moscow Olympics of 1980 and the Los Angeles games in 1984, when the US and Soviet blocs applied sanctions to one another, and right up to the design of the Ukraine football shirt at the Euros, depicting the Crimea as part of Ukrainian sovereign territory. Images such as an England football team making the Nazi salute at a “friendly” match in 1938, or Tommie Smith and John Carlos giving the black power salute on the winners’ podium at the Olympics in 1968 remain stark and powerful decades on. Politics doesn’t stay out of sport for long. It can’t.
Politically, “taking the knee” at the Euro football competition presents an acute difficulty for the government, and a familiar one – what should the line be, and how to make ministers stick to it. It poses particular problems for the Westminster government vis a vis the England team. Thus far, the government has played a poor game, its defence in disarray and its attack at best muted. There are three current versions of the policy. Boris Johnson has given the lead by indicating that the players have the right to make the protest, and make their feelings known, but has not actually said he supports it. Gillian Keegan, an education minister, says it is “divisive”, deriding it as “symbolism more than action” and adding, in an oddly oblique formulation that: “There are some Conservative MPs (that) are very much against it, why? Because Black Lives Matter stands for things that they don’t stand for. It’s really about defunding the police and the overthrow of capitalism, which is, you know, Black Lives Matter the actual political organisation.”
