The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
PM will play a cunning game on Indyref2, just like he’s done with the Super League
Politics and sport shouldn’t mix, according to some folk. However, the urge to cash in on a potential vote winner can prove irresistible. When Boris Johnson, a devotee of unfettered capitalism, vows to stop unfettered capitalism, you know that you’re living in strange times.
The prime minister has put the boot into proposals by the six greediest football clubs in England in their shameless bid to become even more corpulently rich than they currently are by joining a breakaway European Super League.
It’s an upside-down world when Tories who traditionally eulogise market forces turn socialist in an attempt to stop the already uber-rich from becoming even more bloated with wealth.
Those who thought that the closest the PM got to Marx was his belief in Groucho’s mantra, ‘these are my principles, if you don’t like them, I have others’, may be scratching their heads.
They should leave their nappers alone though; Boris is simply playing the man of the people card, and it’ll go down well with those who don’t realise that he’s actually supporting the merely very greedy against the insatiably greedy.
It’s certainly an easier target to attack avaricious football clubs funded by American venture capitalists in their ‘the world is not enough’ project, rather than to launch an inquiry into NHS procurement contracts, which threaten to further expose the heart of darkness at the centre of his party.
The PM is playing at being a latter-day Robin Hood in looking after the supposed footballing poor who would be left behind in this new set-up, robbed of the trickle down of riches which the big box office clubs provide to their lesser brethren.
And he is ‘playing’ at it, because he’s taking the moral high ground to defend financially voracious institutions who themselves years ago sacrificed their poorer compatriots with their own breakaway Tv-funded super league.
It’s shameless opportunism from a man who could have copyrighted the concept of shamelessness.
The simplistic idea swallowed hook, line and sinker by many in the Scottish independence movement is that the current Number 10 occupant is a bumbling buffoon.
That, despite being a classics graduate from Oxford, he has more in common with Homer Simpson than Homer the ancient Greek poet.
Johnson though is anything but a fool.
He holds the levers of power and is embarking on an odyssey to change British society irrevocably to a more self-centred one of the kind which some Scots affect to deeply despise.
That journey is one which many in Scotland don’t want to take with him, and yet I suspect a fair number are also happy to quietly share the ride.
Some football fans, mainly among the big two Glasgow clubs, would jump at the chance of escaping the stifling Scottish football environment for the potential riches on offer in a British or European league.
Similarly, many Scots remain to be convinced that an independent Scotland can offer them the benefits which they feel that membership of the UK union provides.
Those Scots, and not just Tories, are often culturally and politically conservative, albeit with a small ‘c’, and Johnson, as he’s shown in latching on to this football propaganda opportunity, instinctively knows how to play to a receptive audience which will hear him out.
I’ve never bought the notion that Scotland was some kind of potential Cuba in waiting. We may talk the talk but we don’t walk the walk. I jalouse that Johnson has guessed this.
In UK opinion polls, the Conservatives are miles ahead of Labour.
It’s a different tale here in Scotland, but that may be of little consequence if he simply stands firm and refuses all demands for another independence referendum.
Johnson shows with this opportunistic attempt to curry favour as a saviour and spokesman for the average football fan that he’s a sharper operator than some give him credit for.
He possesses a low cunning and is in pole position to use it to maximum advantage.
He could call a snap independence referendum requiring a super-majority to win, and a time frame of say 25 years before another can be called.
He could insist on a Clarity Act laying out clearly what the terms of any break-up would be.
Of course, he could simply ride out the storm and let the demand for independence fade as all but the most committed give up exhausted in a world readjusting to life after this long, grim period of Covid.
The picture of Johnson flattening a young boy in a rugby game some years ago is instructive.
He plays the daft laddie when it suits, but the incident shows he competes fiercely.
The ball is firmly in play in the independence battle; Johnson may well be tactically astute enough to win the game.
Johnson instinctively knows how to play to a receptive audience