Keys, Gray and dinosaurs

Yes, I know, four months, &c, &c, &c.

But cast your mind back, if you can bear it, to August 1992. Working-class culture and unity as a political force had just received its final defeat - indeed, now it was not only socialism but social democracy that was decisively beaten - but one important aspect of working-class culture, which had teetered on the brink of oblivion through the years of squalor and violence which were a natural consequence first of the working class's abandonment of its side in the Butskellite bargain and then of the revenge destruction that followed, was BACK! Not only was it back but it was reborn and reinvented for a new era. A new, ostentatiously classless and mid-Atlantic face of football was, it had to be accepted even by the most fervent socialists considering what we'd been through in the previous decade, the only way out.

But what we were already seeing was the purloining of a genuinely progressive agenda by short-term capitalists who, only a few years earlier, would have been happy to see the sport collapse into oblivion. The game was, in truth, saved not by the Murdoch organisation but by the strong efforts of the fanzine movement, the well-organised mobilisation against the Thatcher government's identity card scheme, the genuine public sympathy and goodwill and desire to save such a significant, embedded part of British life which spread, quite unexpectedly and quicker than most newspapers sensed, after the "never again" moment of Hillsborough, the impetus for reconstruction set out in the Taylor Report, and a couple of fortuitous moments of good luck for the game spread entirely through terrestrial television - the Liverpool-Arsenal match six weeks after Hillsborough which convinced the residual aldermen of the Football League, and many others besides, that the game and dramatic live television could be the most natural bedfellows, and England's well-documented World Cup campaign of 1990.

All these occurred at a time when Sky was struggling to stay afloat, and showed no interest in football other than as co-owners of the original Eurosport. When the triumvirate that remained unbroken until this week - Richard Keys, Andy Gray and Martin Tyler - all deserted an ITV knowing that its original role could not last, they in fact joined the Sports Channel of BSB, the IBA's doomed attempt to keep the old broadcasting values alive in the new world. This organisation's very name, like most of the positive and progressive forces without which Sky would never have had a product to market at all, has rarely if ever been mentioned by Sky, for the simple reason that - like the overwhelmingly socialist fanzines and equally heartfelt left-wing campaigns against both the Tebbitists and the unashamedly lumpenproletariat thugs who posed an equal and remarkably similar threat to football's future at that time (what were the former, ever, but a more "respectable" version of the latter?) - it is politically embarrassing to acknowledge, not least because Richard Keys spent those years working for TV-am, the Daily Mail on screen and the place where the organised working class decisively lost its stake in broadcasting. The truth is that, just as the Labour Party was already in a strong electoral position on 12th May 1994, football was recovering anyway without Sky, and would have continued to do so - and in a direction that would have maintained the best elements of the old game while, if anything (because far more left-wing and democratic in the true, non-Blairite sense) more determined to throw out the worst aspects, especially the attitudes that Keys & Gray never even attempted to lose.

As their purloining for ultra-capitalist means of reforms that could never have happened without deep-rooted left-wing convictions gathered pace, Sky benefited initially from the fact that there was still a residual Reithianism at the BBC and a residual "right-on" stance at Channel 4, which gave them a sheen of rebellion and outsiderdom that they didn't deserve. The undeniable technical advancement for the time of their early Premier League coverage, coupled with the unprecedented commercialism of their presentation (mainly derived, as were many other aspects of their coverage, from the Channel 4 coverage of American football which had reached its peak at our own game's nadir), made veteran pundits such as Jimmy Hill, who twenty years earlier had reinvented football coverage just as much as Sky would do, and especially Saint & Greavsie, who quickly disappeared from ITV's shrivelled coverage, seem how Keys & Gray seem now - stupid, irrelevant old men. But this, as has been made brutally clear this week, was only on the superficial level of appearances. The actual attitudes and assumptions remained as backward and outmoded as they had ever been, rendered more so by the very force - global capitalism - which made them falsely appear to be different.

If Keys & Gray's neo-imperialist arrogance could very briefly claim to be set against a residually social democratic or paternalist broadcasting establishment, this was only the case at the very beginning of the Premier League era, for a number of forces rapidly came together to ensure that Sky's values gained more and more influence over the established broadcasters. Halfway through the first season of Sky's Whole New Ball Game, Channel 4 began to sell its own advertising airtime, effectively eroding the window of opportunity which for the previous decade had given Guardian values a mass television platform. The new system of ITV introduced at the same time decisively ended the era when even the most populist face of British TV had to be backed up with serious and unashamed aspirations to public service respectability. And even the BBC, faced with the unappealing alternative of the "Himalayan Option" which would have removed forever its claim to universality and confined it to an ever-diminishing Reithian ghetto (and of course destroy the outlet which was soon to spawn Britpop), began to play more and more by the rules of the market. Moreover, the cultural and political Left in the mid-90s decisively abandoned many of the principles that had guided the likes of the old Channel 4 and the fanzine movement, and began to accept if not actively celebrate neoliberal politics, a crude success-orientated attitude to popular culture, and social views (with wafer-thin justifications of "irony") far closer to those displayed at Molineux last Saturday than to anything that could be described as progressive. Keys & Gray were setting the agenda for an age. While it was always acknowledged that, say, the "New Football Writing" of the mid-90s came from a different cultural starting point, they were widely seen as at least allies of convenience for such a movement to an extent that, like much else about that era, is truly shaming when looked back on today.

The rebels, just like the Blairite rock'n'rollers to whom they became so close, had become the rulers. They had conquered the awestruck heights of British broadcasting; the whole system was being reshaped in their image. Incompetent and ill-thought-out attempts to dethrone them - such as ITV's idiotic attempt to develop digital terrestrial television as a low-rent competitor to Sky, and to build its own pay-TV sports channel around the continuing Football League and lesser Champions' League matches - only made them stronger, and made their competitors ever more laughable, caught frustratedly between the stools of erstwhile public service duopoly and hamfisted attempts to find a deregulated niche. No matter that huge numbers of the population never had, and have still never had, Sky; it became impossible to live without its influence unless you chose to isolate yourself from all mass media. The result was the inevitable outcome of those whose sole definition was how "anti-establishment" they were becoming the unquestioned, unquestionable rulers; like their counterparts in Blairite (and of course latterly Cameronite) rock music, they became drunk on power, so certain of their position that it never occurred to them to think before they spoke, or to think very much at all. All the time, right up to this week, the pretence remained that, just as Keys & Gray had moved the presentation of football on from the 1980s, they had also moved it on in terms of underlying attitudes and values. What really died this week is an important sustaining myth of the Britain of the last 15 years.

On an internal level for Sky themselves, the challenge now is to reinvent their own coverage in the same way they reinvented football coverage generally when Keys & Gray were the fresh young faces. No doubt, with the immense political and cultural power they have developed, they will succeed. But for the rest of us a more interesting point is this: if the faces of Sky throughout its existence are now recognised and accepted to be the very definition of dinosaurs, does that not show that the people they got rich by taunting with that description simply for daring to be socialist were never anything of the kind, merely people who had the temerity to hold to unfashionable ideas? If these most potent faces of 90s and 00s neoliberalism stand discredited and ruined, just as their creed is taking a more extreme and dangerous form in government than ever before, that could be an unexpectedly potent way back for the rest of us.

At any rate, a delusion died this week, a delusion that has shaped the second half of my life so far just as assuredly as the different (though related) delusions of Thatcherism shaped the first. Richard Keys and Andy Gray have fallen on their swords by the crudest rules of trial by media. To destroy the myths of neoliberalism which they so deeply embodied will be a far deeper challenge.

Setanta and the myth of the market

When Setanta's UK operations started they fairly quickly found a niche (much as Eurosport, which everyone now forgets was the first sports channel Sky ever had anything to do with, has done in recent years) - the Scottish Premier League augmented by a range of European football beyond anything any UK broadcaster had ever got together before (the top divisions of Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Portugal were all shown at one point) and by relays of RTE's GAA coverage (which was the reason why my father subscribed). They had a raison d'etre. They had a position, and (better still) one which reflected the much greater European feeling and awareness of the Celts compared to the English. That's supposed to be what the modern-day market economy encourages.

Unfortunately, in practice, it doesn't. The system that theoretically encourages diversity in reality merely encourages smaller companies to make desperate attempts to copy larger ones, and when they inevitably fail merely reinforces the logical end of the alleged free market, namely oligopoly. ITV found that out some years ago when, instead of having the sense to create something akin to what Freeview has become now, decided instead (mainly out of a desperate and self-destructive hatred for Sky which had festered throughout the system since ... well, since at least 1989, really) to attempt to build another Sky Sports on the second tier of English football, and feigned shock when it failed.

In the case of Setanta, what they thought would be their route to status as a genuine competitor to the oligopoly in their particular field began - ironically - as an indirect result of the very same factors which for some of us give Michel Platini all the justification he needs; namely the fact that, in the context of the involvement in Europe of the political state dominated by England, Sky money is blood money. Anyone who understands how international politics work knows that the EU's insistence that no one company could own all six packages of live Premier League games had more to do with a completely justified wariness of precisely what Sky represents, and where its money is coming from, than anything else. The problem is that the very system that has elevated Sky to its current status - a system which the EU if anything currently intends to further institutionalise - cannot really stand competition (a natural aftereffect of the UK's inability to reach a halfway house during the 1970s, and the way it was all thrown away when it had almost been arrived at).

Armed with its 46 Premier League games, Setanta then started to acquire as much sport as it could from under the noses of Sky, often sport which could not be more now, more part of the rules of big business and post-colonial rules-reversal (most obviously the Indian Premier League). It is true that the economy had yet to fall off a cliff at that stage, but the warnings were there, and right from the start Setanta ran the very serious risk of being beaten by the very game it was now playing. That which is supposed to empower minorities all too often ends up merely reinforcing the tyranny of the majority.

The company's likely fate is yet further proof of the truth that unfettered market capitalism doesn't even work by its own criteria. Quite apart from anything else, it could have severe political implications. For a company of Irish origins to indirectly bring about the financial ruin of Scottish football clubs through its obsessive chasing of the English market, at a time such as this, could go quite some way to further unbalancing the Union.

Incidentally, considering how little ITV seem to be interested in him, the BBC should really get Jon Champion back. Like Barry Davies before him, he pisses off pseudo-rebellious inverted snobs so much that he really has to be defended - no commentator who angers those who regard a command and knowledge of their own language as actually A Bad Thing can be without merit, and Champion has a scope of knowledge and awareness of both the game and the wider world far beyond most of his contemporaries.

Why Chelsea fans cannot have it both ways

The general consensus this week has been that Barcelona's frankly hilarious injury-time equaliser against Chelsea was the result of a UEFA conspiracy to prevent an all-English final. And I dare say it probably was.  I dare say Michel Platini really does feel that the Premier League is becoming too dominant on the European stage. But - and here is where I nail my colours unreservedly to a flag which will probably see me lynched into exile within the next 24 hours - I do not see what is wrong with this.

I do not defend corruption in sport (though I suspect that it is far too deeply-rooted in many sports for many reasons to ever be eliminated), and I do not defend what has now been proven to be corrupt refereeing which prevented Liverpool from reaching the European Cup final in 1965 and prevented an all-British European Cup final and an all-English UEFA Cup final 25 years ago this year. But it should be remembered that two of the above three incidents involved clubs from Italy (probably the only other European country, at least out of the long-established multi-party democracies, to be as institutionally corrupt as England and the only one to be in as dispiriting a political state at the moment) and that, in the case of the 1984 incidents, they had a point.  At that moment 34 years of development towards equality of opportunity and the erosion of squalor, want and bigotry - Britain was at its most economically equal in 1977, and its quality of life peaked in 1978 - were being systematically wrecked, and north and south were being set against each other as never since the Great Depression, leading directly to our present predicament where Chelsea/Man U pointscoring takes the place of serious debate and engagement between people who - I regret to say - genuinely despise each other, let alone everyone else. What was wrong with symbolically standing up for the European social model at the precise moment that Britain was abandoning it? The following year it became obvious what the cultural ingraining of suspicion of "foreigners" (while still taking an entire culture from a different sort of foreigner) had led to (while the Heysel Stadium was undoubtedly outmoded, this should never have been the excuse for Euro-bashing it became in the British press, least of all at a time when, as had been brutally exposed at Bradford 18 days earlier, almost all British football stadia were also largely unchanged from the days of Luke Haines' carrot-cabbage winters).  I have genuine sympathy for the likes of Oxford, Luton and Wimbledon - none of whom will be in the Football League next season - whose fans could reasonably have been trusted to behave themselves and who were denied unrepeatable European campaigns by the ruling.  My own team, Crystal Palace, suffered the same fate after finishing third in 1991, when the ban had been lifted but only the top two qualified, and although I doubt whether we would achieved much, simply playing in the UEFA Cup would have made us seem more fulfilled.  But the post-Heysel ban wasn't a conspiracy. It was the only way UEFA could possibly have reacted to the perversion of England itself by the creed which turns the north-west Europeans against their own.

Chelsea fans need to realise that they are spoilt.  Their culture is (regrettably) the dominant one that is being promoted at the expense of the native cultures throughout the world.  They have it all their own way.  They do not know how it feels to be under genuine threat from rapacious neoliberalism, to have the social and economic model they cherish continually attacked by the dominant ideology of the day (those of us who cling to the European social model in Britain do know how that feels, but Chelsea's current support base seem to be the children of neoliberalism, they literally do not know or understand anything else).

Most of their fellow Europeans, and especially the French, know all too well how that feels. They want a multipolar world, and for that I applaud them.  They also feel, quite justifiably, that pan-European competitions should not be put out of the reach of those who are committed to the European project by money and power which emanates from directions which symbolise England's disdain for it. Perhaps The Sun is actually right when it screams that a dummy page on UEFA's website on Wednesday afternoon predicted almost exactly the outcome.  But it ought to wonder precisely why that is, and ask itself whether its own pro-NAFTA propaganda, and its obvious connections with the forces that have taken the Premier League to its current financial level, is the real reason why football at this level has become so intensely politicised.  Most importantly of all, it speaks with forked tongue when it attacks the death threats which have shockingly been directed at the referee.  It has itself created that mindset over four decades by encouraging the working class to pathetically hate each other, or "foreigners", or the "nanny state", because the collectivised unity which was that close to achieving genuine, lasting change was genuinely scaring those who had taken power for granted (and who, in most cases, would ironically lose that power to deregulated global capitalism).  If The Sun in its current form had never existed, death threats directed at football referees would be utterly unthinkable in this country. 

I will no doubt being accused of being a "hater".  Wrong.  I don't hate English football, or Chelsea, or Manchester United, or Liverpool, in themselves - what I do hate is the process by which the Europe I love is being turned into a playground for big business and consumerism, the range and diversity of interests and tastes in England is being slowly narrowed down to Blairmurdochcamerongoodyboylewhoeveritisthisweek (and, again, who can blame UEFA for wanting to make a symbolic stand against the encroachment of this closing of the public mind into the continent?), both pop culture and high culture in England - and, through its influence, the rest of Europe - lose their fascination and thrill through becoming incompetent imitations of each other.  And I think Chelsea fans in particular should look at themselves, look at their tastes in music, food, drink, newspapers, television und so weiter, and ask themselves how they look to anyone not bound up in the irrational hysteria the Murdoch media have created around football since they took it over.  Ask themselves whether they might perhaps look decidedly hypocritical and humbug-ridden when they moan about all things European and yet expect complete and permanent dominance of the UEFA competitions without ever giving anything back.  Ask themselves why it always has to be their fellow Europeans who have to change while they must never themselves change or absorb anything outside their experience that has not been presented to them by a tiny clique of media controllers.  Ask themselves how much longer they can expect to have it both ways. As will probably happen to England itself sooner rather than later, the reckoning may well come before too long.

I am not actually saying that English football should be exiled to CONCACAF, but this would be the logical conclusion of the Murdochian nightmare of England, one which I insist he still desperately wants to see come true before he dies.  It is curious how you will never get a Sun-reading, Sky-watching, rock/rap (depending on age)-listening, fast-food-eating, Coke-drinking follower of Chelsea, or whoever, to call for England to move from UEFA to CONCACAF, even though every other aspect of their vision would fit perfectly with such a conclusion.  No, they expect to take everything away from Europe and give nothing back.  They read newspapers riddled with hatred for their fellow Europeans and expect nothing but love in return.  English football has got where it is financially purely because of one man who would have us out of the EU and straight into NAFTA if he could and still they wonder why there is antipathy on the continent to English dominance and why they are even now so hated.  I say again: they cannot expect to have it both ways.  Not while they issue death threats against referees, and not while they hurl abuse at "foreigners" while barely knowing anything about their own history, culture and literature.

It is time that those empowered by 40 years of Murdoch and by the self-hatred of both the Left and the traditional Right started realising how things appear when the boot is on the other foot. It is time they stopped attempting to build a surrogate Empire in their own back yard.  Let us create a Europe of equals.  And if it has to be without England (Scotland and Wales could still be in) let that be.

I do have a long piece on the ramifications of Hillsborough in my head which I didn't feel like posting at the time of the actual anniversary.  Hopefully I will this weekend.