I’m generally uninterested in anything connected to football — but a recent article by the SWP’s Keith Flett in tankie rag the Morning Star is really worth reading.
Flett is quite literally a “man of letters” — he has a letter printed in the Guardian at least every couple of weeks, and apparently repeats this feat with numerous other publications, both bourgeois and leftist. Anyway, his latest wheeze on behalf of the SWP seems to be sucking up to the Stalinists via football commentary.
Flett will not be supporting England in this year’s world cup. There are often racists attacks after England games, you see, “orchestrated by BNP members”; but “if England go out, it can’t happen at all”. Because violent nationalists never get lairy if their team is defeated by foreigners! And racist attacks won’t happen without football! However, the best is yet to come. Flett goes on:
“I have skirted around here what side socialists should support if not England. Before 1989, even people like myself, who were critical of Eastern Europe, might raise a cheer or two for a side from that region on the grounds that they were more progressive.
“That has gone, of course, and, without Venezuela and Cuba to cheer on, the best that an anti-imperialist might wish for is progress by Iran.”
Flett is such an inverted British chauvinist that he doesn’t care the bloody history of Stalinism, about the suppression of Solidarnosc or other workers’ movements, or even the Iranian theocracy which is currently trying to prevent women from entering football stadiums.
I am honestly not making this up.
