Football and politics

In the Guardian on Saturday, Martin Jacques wrote a column in which he argued that the debate on race in Europe was being played out in the world of football. Martin made some important points, and I agreed with most of what he wrote. But I disagreed with him when he said this about football:

Political commentators do not fulminate about it, editors think in terms of
the back pages and politicians largely ignore it. But that is not a reflection
of the true reality, just their myopia, and the blinkered way in which we tend
to perceive politics.

One thing you could not have said about Labour politicians, particularly New Labour politicians, is that they have ignored football. Who can forget Tony Blair heading a ball back and forth with Kevin Keegan in the mid-nineties? It was supposed to be a symbol of Blair's youthfulness, and a direct attempt to link him with ordinary (male) voters. The young Blairite advisers even had their own football team, 'Demon Eyes'.


Martin is a sensitive and intelligent commentator, and of course his point is somewhat different: that politics is reflected in culture and in cultural representation, and football is an example of that. Martin's focus is on race and football, but there are other ways in which football reflects wider issues in our culture. I'm a Cardiff City season ticket-holder.You can mark, for example, at City games, how much more Welsh they have become in recent years. This is not just about Sam Hammam waving the Welsh flag, or the re-emergence of the flag of St David. When we first took our kids to City games in 1994, and they were speaking Welsh, it was something people remarked upon. Now there is a Welsh-language page in the City programme, the match-day announcer for some time now has spoken some Welsh (the Welsh-speaking broadcaster Ali Yassin has been the announcer on and off for much of the recent past) - and they've even played the odd Dafydd Iwan record....(personally I could do without that, although Yma o Hyd has a good refrain). The use of Men of Harlech as the unofficial anthem has deep cultural references, of course. Not only does it recall the last-ditch defence in the film Zulu, a project of the Rhondda actor, Ferndale's Stanley Baker, those of us at primary school in South Wales in the Sixties had it drummed into us regularly. It's therefore highly nostalgic for middle-aged fans. It was part of the difference of being Welsh for those of us from English-speaking Welsh backgrounds. There is a positive, self-conscious and ironic side to the expression of Welshness at Ninian Park, as I wrote in my book on the 1999 devolution campaign, Wales Says Yes.

Politics - and the English-speaking Welsh experience - surfaces in other ways at Ninian Park, of course. Before the game with Nottingham Forest last week they played the old Strawbs song 'Part of the Union'. This was - I assume - a deliberate reference back to the miners' strike, and the starkly different positions of the South Wales Miners and the Nottingham miners.

When I came back to Cardiff to live in the mid-90s I found other reflections of that English-speaking Welsh identity. City had a player called Tony Philliskirk, who rapidly became known as Phyllisdoris, after a character in the (English-language)Ryan and Ronnie TV series that I recalled from my teens.

If you watch a team regularly, it takes on a soap opera quality. There are certain continuities from one game to the next. You want to see City win of course. But then there are the different cameos played by particular players: will so-and-so deliver a corner that beats the first defender; will that player actually tackle for once; will he pass forwards instead of backwards.

My election to the National Assembly in 2003 coincided with Cardiff's drive for promotion to Division One (as it was then). I pointed out in my inaugural speech (we don't have maiden speeches in our equal-opportunities institution) that Cardiff City was one of the few positive symbols of the long-standing historical linkage between the Valleys and the capital city. There has been an ambiguous relationship between the Valleys and the capital since their rapid development in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Cardiff was built on the wealth produced by Rhondda coal.

Many of my constituents travel from the Rhondda to watch the City. That in itself raises key issues about the capital and its hinterland (its City-region, if you like): basic issues of transport as well as issues of power and identity.

In Wales, competing views of Welshness are central to our political debate. Cultural politics have been central to the writing of the history of Wales in the modern era as well. That includes sporting history. For a time, during the Thatcher period, there was some overlap in the analysis of contemporary Welshness offered by historians from different political backgrounds. The centrality of the labour movement to the making of modern Wales could feature in the writings of the Gramscian nationalist Gwyn Alf Williams as much as in the work of the Labour historians Dai Smith and Peter Stead. Today nationalist history appears to have retreated to the world of princes and pageants. There is a nationalist version of the whig view of history in which the place of progress is taken by independence - a history in which 'Wales wuz robbed'.

Football and politics - on Saturday night I went from the FA Cup game with Blackburn to a wonderful Welsh Indian engagement party in Cardiff's City Hall. City Hall was built ultimately on profits from Rhondda coal of course, so it was appropriate half the Rhondda seemed to be there. We heard Ferndale's Cor Meibion Morlais produce a rousing version of Men of Harlech - what else - while we nibbled bhajis and samosas. Croeso i Gymru!

I guess in May 1968 Martin Jacques was revolting - on the streets, I mean. I was a ten year-old watching Cardiff City play S.V.Hamburg in the Semi-final of the European Cup-winners Cup. Of course, we wuz robbed then too.