Politics and the Amateur Ideal

I once heard someone say it’s a shame that Fred Perry didn’t win more Grand Slams in tennis.  Pretty inarguable, I thought.  Then I looked up what Perry got up to after his final major, the 1936 US Open (or the US Championships, as it was called then).  It turned out he didn’t drop off the face of the earth.  He simply turned pro.  Although if you listen to some people, he may as well have vanished.

            The nature and chronology of the drives towards professionalisation vary from sport to sport, and it doesn’t do to enumerate them all here, because as much as I’d love to give you the lowdown on Fred Perry’s career using my newly-acquired knowledge, tennis isn’t really what I want to talk about.  But to be brief: football in Britain became professional at its highest level as early as the late nineteenth century; professionals were finally allowed to play in the tennis majors in 1968, merging the championship lineage of the new ‘Opens’ with that of the old amateur-only tournaments and thus consigning much of Fred Perry’s career, and that of Pancho Gonzales, the top professional player of the 60s, to the status of historical curio rather than canonical glory.  Rugby union held out until 1995.  Slowly but surely, the amateur ideal is receding into the past.

            In his wonderful book, What Sport Tells Us About Life, the former Kent cricket captain and sometime Test batsman Ed Smith identifies a reversal in the valences ascribed to the terms ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’.  Traditionally, it was considered grubby to earn, expect or demand money for playing sport, whereas amateur status conferred nobility and honour; you played not because you wanted to be rewarded, but because you loved the game.  Nowadays, if a team is poorly organised, lazy and/or unskilled they are said to be ‘amateurish’.  Conversely, ‘professional’ signifies praise.  You got your heads down, worked hard, played your designated role and came away with the win you wanted.  The only sport in which amateurs still enjoy more glory and respect than professionals is wrestling, and one could argue that amateur and professional wrestling are so different as to render any comparison redundant.

            Increasingly, politics is becoming an arena in which ‘professional’ is a dirty word.  In one sense this is nothing new.  It used to be that MPs comprised a phalanx of wealthy lords and landowners, who entered politics not because they desired to gain further riches but because of a fervour for public service.  Admittedly noble, but with the effect of excluding less well-off would-be politicians from this service.  Thankfully this changed in 1911, and politics became a profession with commensurate remuneration.  But I’ve noticed the amateur ideal re-emerging in recent years.  To give one example, in the general election earlier this year I received a leaflet from my local Conservative candidate (God bless him for thinking I would ever vote for the swine).  It listed his career achievements, his policies for the local area and, of course, a big ol’ picture of his mug.  And, with a depressing inevitability, it was adorned with the phrase ‘I’m not a professional politician’.  You see this more and more these days.  There is a segment of the electorate with whom this sort of claim plays well.  But, as Samuel Beckett might have said, not I.  When I saw the words ‘I’m not a professional politician’, all I thought to myself was, ‘Oh, ok.  I…kind of wish you were’.  My local MP is Labour’s Ben Bradshaw, who has held the seat since 1997.  You could call him a professional politician, for sure.  But, just as you might praise Chelsea (though increasingly infrequently these days) for being ‘professional’ in grinding out a 1-0 win on the proverbial wet Wednesday night in Stoke, Ben Bradshaw is great at his profession.  A model professional, if you will.  He was Culture Secretary between 2009 and 2010, as the Gordon Brown government spluttered to a rattling halt like a dodgy Zafira.  He was a candidate for Deputy Leader of the party (coming last in the ballot, admittedly).  He’s turned what used to be a safe Tory seat into a little red stronghold in the predominantly blue South West.  Ben Bradshaw is a professional politician.  But that doesn’t make me dislike him.  Rather, it gives him a track record that makes me far more likely to vote for him than some Conservative tyro who thinks that the amateur ideal can hold sway in contemporary politics.  Yet sadly, Tory-boy may be right in the long run.

            It’s profoundly ridiculous when you think about it.  Politics must be the only profession in the world where applicants proudly trumpet their lack of experience in order to try and get a job.  This would never happen elsewhere.  No prospective corporate executive would open an interview by saying ‘You don’t know me from Adam and I don’t know the first shitting thing about loss adjustment, but god damn it, I’m really enthusiastic and I reckon I’d do well’.  Wanting something isn’t a qualification.  To return briefly to sport, I play in goal for a 6-a-side football team.  I’m not great, but I try hard and I do a more skilful job than most people would.  Now imagine that I call Roy Hodgson, tell him that Joe Hart’s been a bit rubbish recently and that I would do better as England keeper.  Roy, being the intelligent and fair-minded gent that he is, would lend me a receptive ear and tell me to state my case.  I’m hardly going to tell him, ‘Well, I’m not a professional footballer’.  If I wanted to get over my exile from international football by setting up a company with a large loan, I’m not going to tell the nice lady at HSBC that I’m a rank amateur in the business world.  And if I injure myself in an attempt to prove that bastard Hodgson wrong, and the Tories have achieved their wet dream of privatising the NHS using the same amateur-ideal logic they’ve used with regard to education, which holds that any old fucker can set up a school, if the man in the white coat tells me, ‘I’m not a professional surgeon’, I’m out of there as fast as my knackered legs can carry me.

            Staying with business and surgery, let’s turn back to politics, and to America, because it’s across the pond that the worrying imbrication of politics and the amateur ideal is emerging most vividly.  The clown car of candidates that is the Republican Party presidential primaries comprises a cavalcade of professional politicians.  State governors, congressmen, senators.  And who are the two most popular runners, and by a long way to boot?  Donald Trump and Ben Carson.  An entrepreneur and a neurosurgeon.

            I’ll start with the Donald.  I hesitate to call his candidacy ‘anti-political’ as some pundits have done, because he was an intensely political figure long before he officially announced his intention to run for the Oval Office.  ‘Anti-establishment’ is perhaps more accurate.  His supporters point to his record of success in business, charitably ignoring his multiple bankruptcies, as proof that he’s got what it takes to lead the country.  He shoots from the hip, they say when he calls Mexicans rapists or patronises women, because they’re largely the sort of people who perceive shooting as glorious rather than a terrible last resort.  He brings new ideas, and sees politics with the eyes of an outsider.  He’s an amateur.  He’s never held elected office.  But that doesn’t seem to have harmed his standing in the polls.  In fact, it’s proved a distinct advantage.  Republican voters have become so virulently opposed not just to the right-wing mainstream but to the very idea of government, that they view public service as a black mark against Jeb Bush, or Ted Cruz, or Rand Paul.  If you want to be President, the less experience you have the better.

            Which brings me to Ben Carson, Trump’s closest rival at present.  Whatever you think of Trump, at least he possesses a business acumen (of a sort) which may help him negotiate the corridors of power, and his wealth limits the extent to which he will be beholden to corporate interests in the unlikely event of his taking office.  Carson doesn’t even have that.  Now, before I gleefully rip him to shreds I’m going to speak up for Ben Carson, which I am not generally wont to do.  He’s retired now, but when he was a neurosurgeon he was by all accounts superb at his job.  He saved countless lives, many of them children.  Well done to him, sincerely.  Does this qualify him to be President of the United States?  Not a fucking bit.

            Here’s how Ben Carson got into politics, in case you’re unaware.  Every year there’s an event in America called the National Prayer Breakfast, in which numerous faith leaders get together with the President, say a few words to, and about, the god of their choice, and enjoy pancakes in a contemplative setting.  In 2013 Carson appeared at this shindig, speaking on behalf of the Seventh Day Adventist community.  Breaking from the convention that the Prayer Breakfast was to be apolitical, he launched an attack on Barack Obama, with specific reference to his socialised healthcare policy.  This brought him to national fame, and led a group of conservative Christians, delighted that someone was finally brave enough to speak up for the interests of this marginalised, oppressed group, began a ‘Draft Carson’ campaign to encourage him to run for President.  He did, and here we are.

            Ben Carson’s even more of a political amateur than Donald Trump.  If Trump’s the journeyman non-league footballer who used to be on the books at Aston Villa, Carson’s the fat bloke who plays centre back for your local pub team.  He’s never run a political campaign, he’s never served in the Senate, Congress, or as relatively minor a legislative body as a State Senate.  He’s never even been mayor of the tiniest tinpot small town.  His principal qualification for office is that he’s a conservative Christian in the public eye, a prominence engendered by his rather ill-mannered willingness to politicise what was meant to be a reflective spiritual gathering.  That’s all.  So he was a world-leading neurosurgeon.  Irrelevant.  So he has an inspiring (if gradually unravelling) personal story about how faith in God saved him from a life of crime and violence.  Irrelevant.  His popularity is doubly puzzling when you consider that there are numerous candidates in the race who believe much the same retrograde Christian wank about abortion, homosexuality and Islam.  Ah, but of course.  They’re professional politicians.

            I’m not saying that you should always go for the continuity candidate.  Some governments and MPs become complacent over time.  They may need turfing out.  And the political system as it stands is fundamentally broken.  New people and new ideas can shake it up.  All I’m asking is that you refrain from blind faith that political outsiders are inevitably going to do a better job than professional politicians.  Quite often that simply isn’t the case.  Blanket condemnation of currently serving politicians, as we saw during the expenses scandal, is misguided and frankly dangerous, because it creates a space in which extremist neophytes with little political acumen can thrive.  Look at UKIP in Britain, the Front National in France, Golden Dawn in Greece.  Look at Donald Trump and Ben Carson, who are currently benefiting from Republicans’ disenchantment with their party machine.  We cannot follow these Republicans in becoming a nation of people who somehow see experience as an automatic negative trait in our politicians.  And at the same time, we must have the courage to accept new blood when it is able to demonstrate, in detail, its competence to govern.  Take each candidate as you find them, not with respect to their life story or their relative imbrication with political apparatuses but because of their policies and ideas, because of the job you think they’ll do.  Leave the amateur ideal in the nineteenth century.  Where it belongs.

On Hating Britain

            My name is George Twigg, and I hate Britain.

            

            Whoa, slow down!  Put the pitchforks away, dismantle that portable gallows, take the oily rag out of that empty bottle of Grolsch.  There is a context and a good reason for that statement, I promise.  Recently, context is something most of this nation’s media seem to have forgotten or (much more likely) wilfully ignored as, in a quest to paint new Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn as the second coming of Lenin, Stalin and Citizen Smith all in one big beardy bundle, they report headlines such as “Corbyn: Bin Laden’s Death Was ‘A Tragedy’”, omitting the part where he explained that the “tragedy” was that he wasn’t brought to trial to answer for his appalling crimes before the public.  Which is a bit like if someone filmed me saying “Hitler did a fantastic job…”, and then switched the camera off before I could say “…of destroying the German nation-state”.  So when I tell you, “My name is George Twigg, and I hate Britain”, think of it as a multifaceted unburdening; like at an AA meeting, though obviously much less serious.  As Homer Simpson once said, “I’m a rageaholic!  I just can’t live without rageahol!”

            There’s been a lot of accusations of Britain-hating flying around in the last few days like so many poorly made paper aeroplanes.  Corbyn copped a bombardment from the press just today for not singing the national anthem at a ceremony to commemorate those who died in the Battle of Britain.  While a spin doctor may have advised him against such an act on the grounds of avoiding the very flak with which he was subsequently sprayed, I can’t help but sympathise.  I mean, let’s look at the words;

            

            “God save our gracious Queen
            Long live our noble Queen
            God save our Queen.
            Send her victorious
            Happy and glorious
            Long to reign over us
            God save the Queen.”

Using my skills in closely reading poetry (a category for which I would say our national anthem qualifies, if only on a technicality), developed during many a happy A-Level English lesson imbibing the principles of I. A. Richards and applying them to endless turgid volumes of our nation’s (somehow) Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, I’m going to see if I can unpack for you exactly why Jeremy Corbyn might not have wanted to sing the national anthem.  I understand Mr Corbyn to be a man of religious faith, so it’s probably not the concept of God that gives him grief.  But he is a republican.  And so he might be forgiven for wondering why his God should save the Queen in the first place.  Or, indeed, why God should destine her to “reign over us”, particularly for a long time (a question I imagine Prince Charles asks himself from time to time).  Gracious?  I’ll give the lyricist that, though I remember Elizabeth looking distinctly sour-faced during the unexpectedly joyous opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics.  Noble?  That one’s inarguable, though one wonders why nobility should be celebrated in a song which ostensibly encapsulates our national identity, rather than, for example, being regarded as a signifier of a retrograde class system that some idealistic people like to think we’ve done away with.

            I’m probably only scratching the surface, and I haven’t even got to the old verse about crushing the Scots.  Not only is the tune of our anthem a bigger dirge than a 20-minute performance of “Hey Jude”, the lyrics are utter tosh.  Quite frankly I applaud Jeremy Corbyn’s decision not to sing such fatuous, antediluvian pap, and his courage in refusing to do so even in public.  He’s a republican; why should he be expected to sing words with which he disagrees?  And if you say, “well, it’s only words”; words are always overburdened with signifiers, and Zombie Derrida would like a word with you.  Don’t worry about him taking your brains, he’s already got enough.  I don’t sing the national anthem either, much for the same reasons as Corbyn.  I don’t sing any words with which I disagree when I’m in a communal setting in which these words form the basis of a collective affirmation of identity.  I’m not a Christian, but sometimes I go to church with my girlfriend, who is.  I’ll happily sing songs like “All Things Bright and Beautiful”, because it’s all about how God created the world, and I’m undecided on that score.  Christmas carols?  Sure thing, most of them are harmless enough.  Words like “every knee shall bow”?  Get out, and take your cassocks with you.  And my girlfriend understands and accepts this, because she’s a mature human being, which is more than I can say for our fourth estate.

            So we’ve established that Jeremy Corbyn won’t sing the national anthem because he hates the national anthem.  And he hates the national anthem because he hates the monarchy.  Does it then follow, as so many political commentators and twitterati have suggested, that he hates Britain?  I’d argue that it does.  And, moreover, that that’s a good thing.

            Listening to the accusations levelled at Corbyn puts me in mind of a notable Daily Mail hatchet job that was amateurish even by their standards, in which, presumably thinking it’d render the man’s son guilty by association, they called Ed Miliband’s late father Ralph “The Man Who Hated Britain”.  Ralph was an anti-British Marxist, they explained.  During World War Two he traitorously wrote,

            The Englishman is a rabid nationalist. They are perhaps the most nationalist
            people in the world . . . you sometimes want them almost to lose (the war) to
            show them how things are. They have the greatest contempt for the Continent
             . . . To lose their empire would be the worst possible humiliation.

Fanning themselves to recover from the shock, they detailed his disdain for the country’s establishment, which to him meant

            Eton and Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge, the great Clubs, The Times, the Church,
            the Army, the respectable Sunday papers . . . It also means the values . . . of the
            ruling orders, keep the workers in their place, strengthen the House of Lords,       

            maintain social hierarchies, God save the Queen, equality is bunk, democracy is    

            dangerous, etc. . . . 

            Also respectability, good taste, don't rock the boat, there will always be an England,

            foreigners, Jews, natives etc. are all right in their place and their place is outside . . .

Answering the Mail’s charges, many on the left defended Ralph Miliband, pointing out that while he might at times have idly wished for Britain’s defeat in the Second World War, he fought enthusiastically for his adopted nation in said war.  Even some right-wingers got in on the action, with Tory MP Zac Goldsmith pointing out that it was a bit bloody rich of the Mail to attempt to besmirch Ed Miliband by traducing his father, considering that the grandfather of its current proprietor wrote numerous editorials praising Adolf Hitler.  How could Ralph Miliband have hated Britain?, these people asked.  While their arguments were well-intentioned, seeking only to preserve the memory of a dead man with no right of reply, they didn’t quite get to the heart of the matter.

            Just as Jeremy Corbyn hates Britain, Ralph Miliband hated Britain.  And just as Ralph Miliband hated Britain, I hate Britain, for many of the same reasons that he did.  I hate Britain’s national anthem.  I hate the enduring public-school old-boys-club sensibility of so many of Britain’s corporations and professions.  I hate Britain’s xenophobic island mentality.  I hate the British media and its racist demonisation of immigrants, Muslims and refugees.  I hate Richard Littlejohn with every fibre of my being, and I hate his legions of braying fans even more.  In case you haven’t got the impression already, I hate Britain’s monarchy.  I hate the fact our taxes pay for their upkeep when they could easily finance themselves, and I hate the deference and adoration shown towards them by the majority of Britain’s public.  I hate the fact that bishops of Britain’s national church can sit in the House of Lords and bring their opinions to bear on legislation purely because of an ancient ecclesiastical privilege.  I hate that Britain has a national church at all.  I hate Britain’s seeming inability and lack of will to care for its homeless population.  I hate the woman-hating lad/rape culture that permeates Britain’s schools, Britain’s universities, Britain’s football terraces.  I hate the Last Night of the Proms and its conservative, complacent figuring of British national identity.  I hate the fact that millions of Brits sit glued to trash like The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent, but nearly nobody’s seen Black Mirror.

            A lot of these gripes are not exclusive to our country.  But Britain contains the attitudes that inform them.  It nurtures them, allows them to fester.  And so I hate Britain, loudly and proudly.  And guess what?  Unless you’re completely happy with the way this nation is run, with the way it looks after its people, with the way we look after each other, then you hate Britain too.  In some way, or in many ways, you hate Britain.  Whether you’re a soppy leftie like me who thinks we ought to be doing more to help the Middle East’s refugees, or a right-winger who think we should be doing less, you hate Britain.  There’s no escaping it.  For the love of all that is holy, do not complain about this country until you’re blue in the face and then deny that you’re driven by hatred.  You hate Britain.  Yeah, you.

            Guess what else?  That’s just fine.  Better than fine, in fact.  Those people who like things just the way they are?  Worthless bastards, all.  Complacency and stasis kills a nation, and kills its political culture.  People on the left – accept your hate, embrace it, channel it, make it mean something.  Use it to make this country what you want to make it.  Hate Britain, hate it with all your heart and soul, just like I do.  Because hatred is quite the motivator, and quite frankly it gets shit done.  Jeremy Corbyn hates Britain.  He hates Britain and British culture as it is, and he wants to make it better, fairer, more decent.  That’s what we need to do, however much our patriotism may be questioned.  Those people who claim ownership of what Britain and Britishness mean are your enemy.  People like Peter Hitchens, a very clever man who is sadly an inveterate right-wing blowhard and who regularly defines policies he agrees with as “pro-Britain” and ones he disagrees with as “anti-Britain”.  Remember Joseph McCarthy and his “UnAmerican Activities Committee”?  Same difference.  National identity is not immutable.  What we are as a country is not immutable.  When we hate British culture as it currently stands, that’s not anti-British.  That’s us affirming that we don’t have to like this country the way it is, and we don’t have to accept it either.

            My name is George Twigg, and I hate Britain.  And, like Jeremy Corbyn, I hate Britain because I love Britain.  I love the kindness and decency of so many of Britain’s people.  I love Britain’s sardonic humour.  I love Britain’s legacy of helping the vulnerable from all nations, not just our own.  I love Britain’s sense of fair play.  I love Britain’s history of labour movements, and the workers’ rights we clawed from the establishment piece by piece.  I love the National Health Service.  I love the fact that British TV screens multiple quiz shows with the philosophy of “Fuck you, you probably aren’t going to know any of this shit”.  I love the creativity of so many British artists, musicians and writers.  I love Britain’s local wrestling scene (if that Will Ospreay isn’t a huge star in five years, there’s no justice).  I love every single British person who is out there, in whatever part of the world, trying to make it a fairer, nicer, more equitable place to live.  I want our country to be more like that.  I want a Britain characterised primarily by the list of things I love, not by the list of things I hate.  And so that’s why I say, one more time, “My name is George Twigg, and I hate Britain”.  And I pledge that my hatred is going to make this country a better place.