Britain is no paragon of sporting virtue – let’s stop pretending otherwise

Mary Dejevsky in The Guardian

As the latest scandal involving the ex-England manager Sam Allardyce and questions over cyclists’ drug exemptions show, the UK plays no fairer than anyone else

It started on the Iffley Road running track in Oxford, with Roger Bannister and the four-minute mile. It continued with Chariots of Fire, the filmed version of the same, and it was reinforced in the national consciousness with London 2012, the glorious festival of sport that everyone thought was going to be a disaster, but wasn’t.

Along the way came England’s victory (over Germany) in the 1966 World Cup, whose anniversary has been celebrated this year with mawkish nostalgia. And when the medals kept on coming, in this year’s Olympics and the Paralympics in Rio, the self-image of the UK as a highly successful and, of course, squeaky clean sporting nation seemed secure.
That image has been thoroughly discredited this week with the departure, by mutual consent, of the new England football manager, Sam Allardyce, after a mere 67 days. He was the subject of a Panorama exposé 10 years ago – and even I, as a football ignoramus, had caught the drift – which helped to explain why this “obvious” candidate for the England job had never been offered it before.

But now there he was, on camera, courtesy of a classic journalistic sting (by the Daily Telegraph), setting out how the rules of the transfer market could be circumvented, and considering a nice little supplement to his salary.

Nor, it would appear, is he alone in regarding the Football Association’s rules as an inconvenience to be challenged rather than a standard to be upheld. At least eight more guardians of the supposedly “national” game, it is claimed, agree with Sam Allardyce that ethics are for others upright or unambitious enough to heed them. The real pros know different.
If dubious practices were unique to football, that would be one thing. After all, everyone knows – do they not? – that there is far too much money sloshing round in the game generally, not least in England’s Premier League – money that is taking ticket prices out of reach of ordinary families and stifling the growth of homegrown talent.

We also know about the rot that set in long ago at Fifa, the headquarters of international football, so it is hardly surprising if something putrid also contaminates national organisations – including, alas, our own.

But it is not just English football, is it? Football may be the richest and most egregious example, but revelations in recent weeks suggest that question marks hang over other areas of UK sport. Nothing illegal, mind, nothing so crude as the“state-sponsored doping” we so loudly deplore in others, but little tweaks here and there, and especially close readings of the rule book that identify the opportunities between the lines.

So it is that the stellar success story of our times, Britain’s emergence as a world leader in cycling, looks slightly less glorious now that hacked reports have revealed the chemical help some cyclists were receiving – quite legally, it must be stressed – in order, as the people’s hero and multiple Olympic gold harvester Bradley Wiggins put it, to ensure “a level playing field”. Is a doctor’s note now to be considered part of sportsmanship?

And on the eve of the Rio Paralympics, there were reports of unhappiness within the British camp over allegations that classifications were being – how shall we say? – manipulated in the pursuit of more medals. We are sticklers for observing the letter of the law, it would seem, where the spirit of sport is concerned. But the story is starting to look a little different.

The shock here – if it is a shock – should not be that UK sports officials are as adept at playing the system as anyone else – within but sometimes also outside the law. It should rather be the persistence of the myth that only foreigners (especially Russians) cheat, and that British sport across the board – just because it is British – is cleaner, more honest and, yes, more innocent than everyone else’s. It isn’t.

The bishops’ letter to British politicians is a true act of leadership

Jon Cruddas in The Guardian


I welcome the pastoral letter by the bishops of the Church of England at many levels.


It expresses concern about the condition of our country and its public institutions, so it is by definition political; but it is not party political – and is all the better for it. It is as much a challenge to the left, and our commitment to the state and centralisation, as it is to the right with its unquestioning embrace of the market. Its roots are far deeper than 20th-century ideologies, drawing upon Aristotle and Catholic social thought every bit as much as the English commonwealth tradition of federal democracy.

It is a profound, complex letter, as brutal as it is tender, as Catholic as it is reformed, as conservative as it is radical. It draws upon ideas of virtue and vocation in the economy that are out of fashion, but necessary for our country as we defend ourselves from a repetition of the vices that led to the financial crash and its subsequent debt and deficit. It invites us to move away from grievance, disenchantment and blame, and towards the pursuit of the common good. 

It cannot be the case that any criticism of capitalism is received as leftwing Keynesian welfarism, and any public sector reform as an attack on the poor. This is precisely what the letter warns against, and it is a dismal reality of our public conversation that it has been received in that way.


I also welcome the letter as a profound contribution by the church to the political life of our nation. Christianity and the church have always been part of that story. Not as a dominant voice, but bringing an important perspective from an ancient institution that is present in every part of our country as a witness and participant. From the introduction of a legal order and the development of education, the church has been part of our body politic, so it is incorrect to say that the church should stay out of politics: it is morally committed to participation and democracy as a means, and the common good as the end.


One of the great things about faith traditions is that they do not think that the free market created the world. They have a concept of a person that is neither just a commodity nor an administrative unit, but a relational being capable of power and responsibility and of living with others in civic peace and prosperity. They also do not view the natural environment as a commodity, but an inheritance that requires careful stewardship. Conservatives and socialists have shared these assumptions and they could be the basis of a new consensus.


The bishops have said that the two big postwar political dreams – the collectivism of 1945 with its nationalisation and centralised universal welfare state, and the1979 dream of a free-market revolution – have both failed and we need to develop an alternative vision. As we know, 1997 was not the answer either. The financial markets and the administrative state are too strong and society is too weak. The bishops are right to say that the “big society” was a good idea that dissolved into an aspiration, by turns pious and cynical. The answer is not to return to the old certainties, but to ask why things failed and how society could be made stronger. I think that Labour’s policy review has made a strong start in this direction. 

The letter has a lot of interesting things to say about character and virtue and how these are best supported in human-scale institutions; how the family is a school of love and sacrifice, and how we can support relationships in a world that encourages immediate gratification and is in danger of losing the precious art of negotiation and accommodation. There is not enough love in the economic or political system, and the bishops are right to bring this to our attention.


In another expression of the generosity of thought in this letter, the lead taken by Pope Francis in addressing economic issues has been embraced. When the banks are borrowing at 2% and lending to payday lenders at 7%, which lend to the poor at 5,500%, the bishops are right to call this usury and to say that it is wrong. They are also right to say that there needs to be a decentralisation of economic as well as political power. They are right to say that there are incentives to vice when there should be incentives to virtue. They are right to say that work is a noble calling, that good work generates value, and that workers should be treated with dignity. They are right to value work and support a living wage, and to build up credit unions as an alternative to payday lenders.

They are also right to point out that competition is opposed to monopoly and not cooperation, which is necessary for a successful economy: an isolated individual can never become an autonomous person. They are also right to remind us of the importance of place and to warn us against a carelessness to its wellbeing.


That is why decentralisation and subsidiarity are vital for our country, so that we do not become a society of strangers, but can build bonds of solidarity and mutual obligation.


Above all, the bishops are right to assert that autonomous self-governing institutions that mediate between the state and the market are a vital part of our national renewal. The BBC, our great universities and schools, city governments and the church are our civic inheritance, and vital to the wellbeing of the nation. All are threatened by the centralised control of the market and state. We cannot do this alone, and that is why politics – doing things together – is important; and that is why the body politic and not just the state is important. Our cities and towns cannot take responsibility unless they have power.


As the election approaches there will be a tendency to turn everything into a party political conflict. That is understandable, but there is also a place for us to engage in a longer-term conversation, a covenantal conversation, about how we renew our inheritance and rise to the challenge of living together for the good.


I have read the letter and learned a great deal from it. I will read it again and reflect on its teaching because the issues it raises will endure beyond May.


Issues of how to build a common life under conditions of pluralism, how to engage people in political participation and self-government, how to decentralise political and economic power, how to resist the domination of the rich and the powerful, how to renew love and work so that life can be meaningful and fulfilling. These are the right questions to be asking.


I am grateful to the bishops for challenging us to develop a better and more generous politics and public conversation. It is an act of leadership.

If we're going to cry foul over Fifa, then we should at least hold our banks to the same standard

Mary Dejevsky in The Independent

Modern life provides many opportunities for bafflement, but the continuing capacity of the British to regard themselves collectively as paragons of public virtue never ceases to amaze.

This week we have seen the lid taken off two prominent areas of our national life – banking (again) and football – to reveal something quite unpleasant beneath. But the response has been – in the first case – to insist yet again on “just a few bad apples” and – in the second – to attack a report that was so misguided as to exonerate Qatar and Russia over their World Cup bids, while fingering England (how dare they?) for being economical with its observance of the rules.

I remember vividly my response to the first reports that bankers in the City of London were suspected of fiddling the Libor rate. I was horrified. Was Libor – the London inter-bank offered rate – not the benchmark for international banking? The standard-setter? If Libor was being manipulated, what did this say about the soundness of UK banking generally? How and why had anyone been able to cook the books for so long? With something as fundamental as Libor, why were there no fail-safe mechanisms for checking?

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The two questions that I asked most often, though, were the most basic. How come the only remedies being mooted were fines on the institutions – fines that would ultimately be paid to a large extent by you and me, the taxpayers, seeing as how we had rescued these banks by taking them into public ownership? And even more basically, why had the reputation of the City of London not been tarnished beyond recall? The Prime Minister and the Chancellor were still, it seemed, lavishing time and energy trying to secure some arrangement with Brussels that would minimise the damage to the City from tighter eurozone regulation. Frankly, why bother? Let City banking lie on the bed it has made.

It then transpired that not only Libor was being rigged, but the foreign-exchange market, too, with gung-ho bankers exchanging jocular emails about what they were doing. And not only doing, but getting away with, until last year. What was the price for such cynical profiteering? More fines on the institutions, no doubt plea-bargained down, and again likely to be paid, one way or another, by you and me. Is it not passing strange that the offending emails could be cited verbatim, but that those who sent them remain unnamed? Even stranger, that there are apparently no criminal charges yet being brought? Oh yes, the Serious Fraud Office is apparently looking into that possibility, but such a tentative response hardly inspires confidence.

 

As a journalist, I find it hard to believe that hacking someone’s voicemail warrants something akin to a show trial and a prison sentence, but swindling the country out of millions of pounds isn’t treated as a crime – at least not one that anyone shows much eagerness to prosecute. Are there frauds that are too big or too brazen to punish? Even the reputational damage seems limited. Far from being diverted to Frankfurt or New York, the money, it seems, continues to roll in. Or is this perhaps a reflection of the sort of money that now flows through London; a quality of money and banking that deserve each other? 

And so to the “national game”. When Fifa published its report into allegations of corruption during the most recent bidding process, and essentially absolved Qatar and Russia, the initial reaction here in Britain seemed to veer between disbelief and resignation. After all, Qatar’s bid had succeeded despite summer temperatures that are now requiring the whole global football schedule for 2022 to be rewritten, while questions over Russia’s capacity for bad behaviour are hardly new. When it emerged, however, that Fifa had put someone in the dock for rule-bending, and that someone was England, the response was apoplectic. Righteous indignation hardly begins to describe it.

The fury was palpable, with MPs talking about a “whitewash” and the English FA categorically rejecting charges that it had tried to “curry favour” with the former Fifa vice-president, Jack Warner, despite a list of actions that at least permitted such an interpretation. The former English FA chairman, Lord Triesman, accepted the findings as “legitimate” and “embarrassing”, while also insisting that the report reflected Fifa’s “dislike” of England.

Already turbid waters were further muddied when the US lawyer, Michael Garcia, who actually conducted the inquiry, complained that the report contained “incomplete and erroneous representations”. There is now pressure for his findings to be released in their entirety. But the self-justifying anger the report prompted in London leaves a sour taste and suggests a verb that can be conjugated “I entertain; you offer encouragement; he/she/it gives bribes”.

One consequence could be that the next time the UK casts aspersions on the probity of an Arab state or Russia, the polite response will cite pots and kettles.

What I fail to understand is why the same seems not to apply to the City of London and its banks.