MPs share blame for rise of racism

MIMS DAVIES, the Minister for Sport, is demanding a summit with football’s leaders to discuss fears of growing racism and other prejudices in the game. The parameters appear to be quite wide-ranging and will involve conversations with Kick It Out and Stonewall, players, fan groups and coaches, as well as football executives. Perhaps Davies might also like to consider whether British society has grown less tolerant since a major political campaign was framed around the falsehood of Turkey joining the European Union, making Britain’s borders vulnerable to an invasion of Turkish immigrants. Vote Leave — the campaign Davies supported — directly stigmatised those who were perceived as other to us. They are all trying to disown the specious Turkey scare now — ‘I didn’t talk about Turkey, mate,’ Boris Johnson told a reporter last month, which is, again, a lie — but it was there. Dominic Cummings, who conducted the successful Leave campaign, admits it. He made a direct link between uncontrolled immigration via the EU, the toll it would take on the NHS, and the money we could spend on the NHS if we got out. ‘If Boris, (Michael) Gove and Gisela (Stuart) had not supported us and picked up the baseball bat marked “Turkey/NHS/£350 million” with five weeks to go, then 650,000 votes might have been lost,’ Cummings explained in

The Spectator. And this is the campaign Davies backed. A campaign based on a false scare that Turkey would join the EU — there was no prospect of progress in that area, and has not been for years — with figures plucked out of thin air, that linked a failing NHS with mass immigration. So racism is on the rise in a working-class sport in a country which recently held a very divisive referendum — for which Davies also voted — with the topic of outsiders and outside rule at its core. Maybe football should be calling for a summit with ministers, rather than the other way round. When is it their turn to take the responsibility that comes with control?