1,813 words

Proxy warriors

As I hoped to make clear in my piece last week on the Gaza conflict, Israel vs. Palestine is much like Liverpool vs. Tottenham (if you get the football reference) in that I would like both sides to lose.

However, daggers are drawn and fighting has commenced. It is all rather a long way away, but one of the great things about the modern world is that you don’t have to go out to get things. They deliver now. This started with pizzas and flowers decades ago, but now you can get your groceries, books, and clothes brought straight to your door. Oh, and wars.

While Israelites and Arabs slug it out in the Middle East, the English might feel a bit removed from the action. TV is okay, but for real high definition you need the action up close and personal. Fortunately, all Brits have to do is go into London’s city streets and they will find it at first hand. The fighting may not be as fierce, but give it time.

It is quite the thing now for Britain’s spoiled youth — currently aged up to 50 and beyond due to arrested development — to get worked up about things which seem rather distant and, frankly, none of their bloody business. Minneapolis, where career criminal George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose while an unfortunate police officer was trying to restrain him, is apparently 4,009 miles from London, city of my birth. Gaza is a little closer, at around 3,350 miles. But both incidents led to the type of pathological hysteria in the United Kingdom which is now a trademark of a certain breed — or perhaps sub-species — of Briton.

If it is not happening in your backyard, mind your own bees-wax.

RIP Sir Bobby Charlton, FRO David Beckham

It is difficult to know where to look for English greatness these days, and another beacon of professionalism and decency has passed away.

Sir Bobby Charlton was a footballer from a different era, stylistically as well as literally. For a start, let’s talk about the ball. I don’t know if you have held or kicked a soccer ball recently, but they are like soap bubbles compared with the formidable pig-leather cannonballs I played with as a kid, and which Charlton could force, as if by magic, to obey his wishes. Footballs were paneled and laced, like shoes, and a lad in my team had visible lace-marks across his forehead after one game, having headed the ball so many times. We also thought he had concussion, but he was never the sharpest knife in the cutlery drawer, so I think that was just normal for the lad. Also, if it rained during a match — and bear in mind this is England we’re talking about — the ball gained weight as it absorbed moisture, and games often ended with the combatants kicking something around that resembled a big Christmas pudding.

Charlton, even with the ball I have just described, changed the game. Many goals pre-1970s seemed to be essentially bar-fights with a ball involved, which would somehow end up bundled into the “onion bag,” as the goal net was once termed. Charlton probably wasn’t the first to shoot from outside the penalty box but, my goodness, he did it very well.

This is a nice collection of Sir Bobby’s great moments, and I suggest watching the three goals from around 2:20, particularly the great hoof at 2:36. Those who know their British football will see that the brilliant and Mercurial Irishman George Best — who was to become, sadly, ruinously alcoholic in later life — supplied vital passes when the pair played for Manchester United.

Sir Bobby Charlton [Goals & Skills]

The Charltons had a dark side. Bobby’s brother Jack played in the infamous Leeds United team of the 1970s, possibly the most violent bunch of thugs ever to don football jerseys. Billy Bremner, Norman Hunt, Jackie Charlton himself: Their very names inspired fear in opposing teams, and many players bore the mark of Leeds United studs on the backs of their legs. “Studs,” incidentally, may have a different connotation in the United States, and before you get the idea that British football is some kind of porn orgy, they are the cleats on the bottom of boots to ensure grip on a grass surface. All is explained here.

The Charltons as brothers had a rather sad family rift, but they both graced the English game in their different ways. Sir Bobby played in the famous 1966 World Cup Final — although his role was subdued, and it was Geoff Hurst’s game — and scored 49 goals in his 106 appearances for the English side. Heaven now has a better soccer team. RIP Sir Bobby.

So, from one national institution to another, and the difference could not be more marked. David Beckham, for me, is one of the world’s most overrated sportsmen, and he cashed in on his Englishness in the same way that Prince Harry is doing currently. They both have pushy, rather plain wives. Perhaps that is a contributing factor. Sir Bobby Charlton did not have a range of sunglasses with his name and “brand” prominently displayed, as Beckham does.

Yes, Beckham scored a couple of spectacular goals, not least the perfect, last-minute free kick which sent England to the World Cup in 2001. But he also disgraced the national team by acting petulantly and being sent off in a key game.

Beckham married a Spice Girl, and if you don’t know the British all-girl pop group The Spice Girls, be sure and keep it that way. A documentary has just been released that makes Beckham look like a good, family guy, while we all know the allegations concerning his extracurricular dalliances.

Bobby Charlton represented what England used to be, David Beckham what it has, sadly, become. I am a staunch believer in capitalism, but it does throw up some rather unwholesome disparities when it comes to sport. In 1961, the year I was born and when Bobby Charlton’s career, aged 24, was starting to go up through the gears, the average weekly wage of a British professional top-flight footballer was about £20. That would be just under 450 quid today. But the average UK Premier League player earns just over £60,000 a week now. Also, between 1989 and 1999, average ticket prices went up by 312%, while the retail price index went up just under 55%, meaning wages will have done roughly the same. Both Beckham and Sir Bobby were working class in origin, but the male working class had to pay a lot more to see the former than the latter.

Labour day?

The UK and the US both have national elections at around the same time a year hence. In the US, I think it will be the most exciting election ever, and the dirtiest. Plus, both leading candidates could, theoretically, be doing their campaigning not from basement or ballpark, but from the exercise yard of a penitentiary. Both elections may be good ones to lose, because both nations are seriously broke. Goodbye American and British economic stability, hello Venezuelan, Zimbabwean, and Weimar currency. Enjoy.

The electorate in both countries are not exactly stupid, but they are a bit dim in that they stop paying attention to global events once the news cycle moves on to its next destination. I mentioned David Beckham’s extraordinary free kick, and I was working in the British media at the time. On October 6, 2001, this goal was the first event to shift 9/11 from the front pages of all major British newspapers. Which tells you something about Britain, although I am not quite sure what.

Now, in Britain, the media assure us that the Labour Party will form the new government in November 2024. This means three excellent things:

1. They will destroy the economy, finishing the job started by Blair (Tony, not Eric) and the fake “Conservatives” who have infested Westminster for the last 13 years. This is good news because the nation will no longer be able to afford to offer four-star hotels to Ahmed and his wives and brothers. Or anything else, for that matter. Humanity is always better placed when it has to start all over again.


2. Diane Abbott will be Home Secretary, and David Lammy will be Foreign Secretary. These two morbidly obese black diversity hires are stupid even by the standard of British politicians. Abbott’s version of arithmetic is legendary, and Mr. Lammy appeared on a TV quiz program called Mastermind, during which he voiced his belief that the Marie who discovered Radium was Marie Antoinette.


3. I can finally say I was at school with the Prime Minister. Starmer — sorry, Sir Keir (where’s my bloody knighthood?) — was a year below me at Reigate Grammar School.

As I say, this could be a good election to lose. If there is an economic collapse — and the Bank of England has been printing money for years with the same fervor as the US Treasury — people will blame whoever is currently incumbent in 10 Downing Street, not understanding that economic cycles play out over years, even decades, and don’t just turn up on TV all of a sudden like ads.

I have always found that British people understand politics far less than our American counterparts. Perhaps your civics classes served you well.

Khanned food

The current generation of British politicians seem to have received extra training in irritating and goading the populace. Diminutive Mohammedan Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has only just finished riling the car-driving public with his ULEZ scam (Ultra-Low Emission Zones) and now he is moving from British people’s cars to their kitchens.

The C40 group has been masterminded by Khan with a view to the net-zero grift currently being put in place to make everyone’s lives just that little bit more irksome than they already are. Here is the basic plan for this little man’s projected utopia:

[The C40 group’s] more radical suggestions involved no less than: the abolition of private vehicles; the prohibition of meat and dairy consumption; the rationing of new items of clothing to three each per year; and the restriction of short-haul return flights to one every three years.

I don’t imagine the Pakistan-legacy Mayor will be expecting all this to happen in Pakistan. Brown people are not required to lower their carbon emissions. Western kufr are the target here. Nor do I think the flight curb will apply to politicians or businessmen, nor the clothing restriction. Nor will ethnic minorities, particularly Muslims and blacks, pay any heed to these new regulations concerning food. It will only be timid and law-abiding whites who will start reluctantly on their new diet of mealworms and radishes. The desired result is, apparently, the reduction of carbon emissions by a percentage of a percentage point. What strange people decide our destinies. Enjoy your meal.

Here’s to old England.

The Union Jackal.

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