Old Firm, infirm

Other football matters were put into perspective by events concerning Fabrice Muamba. But media attention has quickly and tastelessly returned to the "survival" of Rangers FC, that older patient through whose veins it is proving difficult to pump money.

I expect a way will be found to let the club continue in business. After all, the media assures us (with the same idle metaphor), Scottish football cannot survive without Rangers.

Excuse me? Certainly, clubs traditionally feed on and into their local communities, and the loss of a football club can leave locals as bereft as the loss of a local factory. And certainly, the lack of competition at the top of Scottish football is a pity – compared with twenty-odd years ago, when Aberdeen and Dundee United were reaching European finals. And perhaps, if Celtic have no credible opponents, the sponsors will go home.

But kids will still kick a ball around on any available patch of land. I mean, if the Scottish league goes part-time, will the kids switch to baseball, or croquet, or caber-tossing? Football as a sport will hardly notice the difference. Football as a multi-million-pound circus may well be affected, but that is a business affair – not a sporting one.

In fact it is probably that very circus, that same sea of cash, that is destroying football clubs as a community resource. Manchester United has long since ceased to be part of its local community. It is a global brand with a global support base, and a largely non-UK playing staff (in common with other top “English” teams). If it relocated to Sheffield or Shanghai, there might be the merest blip before business continued as usual. Remember the Brooklyn Dodgers?

The excess of money may also contribute to a growing culture of cheating and ref-baiting. If a missed offside flag can cost a million pounds, or a sly elbow gain 10 million, what antics may not result?

It’s also the excess of money that causes a growing minority of us to lose interest – not that this hurts the owners, as long as Sky and the sponsors keep the taps turned on. Really I’m beginning to think I’d prefer to watch croquet or caber-tossing. (I’ll draw the line at baseball.)

A few months ago I opened my bank statement. I shan’t (and needn’t) name the bank: but the envelope proudly proclaimed the bank’s association with the English Premiership. And I realised: I’ve been bitching about the money “earned” by top footballers, and here I am – in effect – sponsoring those salaries.

I’m not surprised at the bank in question: after all, who better than a bank chief to understand the value of handing out obscene salaries for non-achievement? But I have moved my bank account. And I dare say the bank will notice this about as much as England would notice the demise of Rangers.

And you thought school league tables were bad

I blogged the other day about illegal quota-setting by a privatised traffic warden service. I expressed shock that, within days of the court’s finding, David Cameron would announce the contracting-out of certain areas of police work.

Now, in the aftermath of the murder of 16 civilians by a “rogue” US soldier in Afghanistan, the BBC revived a link to an earlier story referring to the atrocities at My Lai and elsewhere. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-15499138

“Officers were under pressure to produce high body counts of enemy in Vietnam and those pressures persist.” That is to say, groups of soldiers had “kill quotas” to fulfil. But I imagine the bad guys had guns, too. So I guess it was just natural to fill the quotas up the easy way, by killing unarmed women and children.

Can this be true? Surely the BBC is making it up. In any case, I imagine American military training nowadays extols discipline, not merely a Space Invaders mentality: so this week’s gunman no longer has the defence that he was “obeying orders”. But can you imagine what might happen if the US, or the UK, sent a privatised peacekeeping force to Afghanistan? Or we could both send one - just to add that competitive edge?

Can David Cameron still be serious about privatising law-enforcement? Altamont could shortly look like a walk in the park.

Just hand over the money and we'll say no more about it

In late January a tribunal found that a traffic warden, Hakim Berkani, had been unfairly dismissed after blowing the whistle on illegal quota-setting by his employer.

Three things are worrying here.

Firstly, he was not employed directly by the authorities, but by NSL – a private contractor. To place law-enforcement in private hands is surely asking for trouble. Tax-collectors in New Testament Judea were widely known to be creaming it: and I am sure the Mafia, experts in collecting revenue, would love to do so with official sanction.

Secondly, NSL is the largest such contractor in the UK, working for 60 local authorities. So there is no reason to be optimistic that the same practices are not operating throughout the country.

Thirdly, and astonishingly, within weeks of Berkani's tribunal, the government is proposing to allow the contracting-out of police work.

Berkani said to reporters: "Do you tell a police officer he should arrest a minimum of 10 people a day?" He was joking. David Cameron is not joking.

Unmasked

I blogged a couple of months ago (Masks) about the Occupy London protest. This is a group of people in V for Vendetta-style Guy Fawkes masks, who camped between St Paul’s Cathedral and the Corporation of London to protest against economic injustice.

Their presence must have been very scary for London’s financial elite. So I am sure their recent eviction has brought sighs of relief and saved the stock market from meltdown.

I was interested to see one Occupier interviewed – without his mask. It is now the powerful who are keeping a low profile. The Corporation of London continues to hide – behind the bailiffs and police officers who carry out their bidding.  But the Corporation at least expressed “regret”, while St Paul’s has (to my knowledge) remained silent.

Mary Ann Sieghart wrote recently in the Independent celebrating the tolerance she sees in the Church of England. She links this to its status as the Established Church: belonging to all, it seeks to be the servant of all. (David Cameron celebrated the same tolerance in a recent statement about this country’s Christian values.)

Certainly, in a world where some religious groups preach death to homosexuals or to poets they don’t approve of, the C of E – by contrast – is certainly a broad church. It tolerates many voices, including scepticism of its own stated beliefs.

But is it possible to be too tolerant? Pastor Niemoller spoke with regret of the failure of the German church to oppose the Nazi regime. In Kenya, Bishop David Gitari challenged economic injustice and political corruption – and at one point was actively asked by government figures to make sure the church maintained its role of prophetic moral challenge to those in power.

The Church of England has the same role and the same invitation. The role (shared with other denominations) derives from a Biblical call for justice, and has led people (from Wilberforce to Barnardo to Desmond Tutu) to show us that the world can be better, if we will it so.

The invitation derives from its status as the established church, which places its senior bishops in the House of Lords. Thus (if the mood so takes them) they can challenge our thinking from Parliament as well as from pulpit.

And from time to time, they have done so. David Shephard wrote Bias to the Poor (and thereby ruled himself out of contention for the Canterbury post while Thatcher ruled). John Sentamu cut up his clerical collar on national TV in protest against the Mugabe regime.  I think it was David Jenkins who dared to “pray for our enemies” during the Falklands war.

But on the whole, the established church, understandably, does not want to rock the boat. Sieghart values a church “that is prepared to move – albeit a generation behind the rest of society – with the times”. I would like to see a church which moves ahead of society: which takes the lead, like Wilberforce, like the Quaker reformers, like the Jubilee campaign: which sides with the vulnerable in the (often hidden) face of the comfortable and the corporate.

The trouble is, challenging the government has been portrayed (at least since Thatcher, perhaps longer) as disloyal. But the opposition’s official title is Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. Opposition to bad legislation – indeed, forcing the government to properly justify good legislation – is an essential function in a democracy.

It is also a function which the church forgets at peril to its relevance. We do not make the gospel “relevant” by changing the message to fit what people already believe, any more than we make the speed limit “relevant” by changing it to match the speed people already drive at.