Category Archives: Sport

How is £5 million in sports funding supposed to stop the youth crime epidemic?

Knife crime is rampant in the UK, much of it involving young people. How is £5 million of sports funding supposed to turn it around?

Here’s the story. Discussion below:

I was talking about this only last night, with a 19-year-old friend of mine.

He told me that stunts like this from Dominic Raab are pointless.

Young people are surrounded by a culture of knife crime, he said – in the music they hear, the social media they visit, and in the people they meet in their daily lives (including, often, family members).

In the year ending March 2022, there were around 45,000 offences involving a knife or sharp instrument in England and Wales (excluding Greater Manchester Police Force), according to the Office for National Statistics. This was nine per cent higher than in 2020/21 and a massive 34 per cent higher than in 2010/11.

Home Office data shows there were 261 homicides (also known as murders) (currently recorded) using a sharp instrument, including knives and broken bottles. This meant sharp instruments were used in 40 per cent of the 594 homicides that occurred in 2021/22.

Data from NHS Digital shows there were 4,171 “hospital episodes” recorded in English hospitals in 2021/22 due to assault by a sharp object. This was two per cent higher than in 2020/21 and 14 per cent higher than in 2014/15.

How is a pittance of cash spread across the UK to fund sport supposed to help turn that tide?

Not only is it not enough, it will not be interesting to many of the youngsters who may have been involved in creating the statistics quoted above.

I wonder who provided the advice on which this was based, and on what information it was based.

And I wonder who knows how much it will cost to effect real change.

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How many blunders must Boris Johnson make before we can get shot of him?

Not a good sport: Boris Johnson’s last brush with football was when he tried to use the delayed Euro 2020 tournament – in which England reached the final – to distract everybody in the UK from his catastrophic failures to address the Covid-19 crisis properly.

When Boris Johnson said Ukraine should host the Euro 2028 football tournament, hours after the UK and Ireland had signalled their intent to jointly bid for it, that wasn’t a mistake or a result of bad briefing.

It was stupidity.

The same stupidity informed his claim that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was teaching journalism in Iran – that the authorities there used to keep her in prison for a five-year term, plus a further year on a separate offence.

He does it all the time – and we should blow the final whistle on it.

Source: AHEAD OF THE GAME: Boris Johnson’s gaffe adds to FA anger

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#Russia stripped of hosting #ChampionsLeague final. So now footballers CAN be in politics?

Marcus Rashford: Natalie Elphicke said he should have stayed out of politics after he missed a penalty in the Euro 2020 final last year. Now Elphicke’s fellow Tory Liz Truss wants footballers to be involved in politics after all. These Tory hypocrites just want the rest of us to do whatever suits THEM best, at any particular moment.

Confused?

It’s a little more than seven months since Tory MP Natalie Elphicke said footballer Marcus Rashford should concentrate on his “day job” rather than become involved in politics.

She was attacking Rashford after his campaigning ensured that the poorest schoolchildren could avoid malnutrition by forcing the government to continue providing free school meals to them during school holidays at the height of the Covid-19 crisis.

After he missed a vital penalty in the Euro 2020 final, she said he should have focused on his football rather than “playing politics”.

Elphicke later apologised – after her comment became a matter of public knowledge.

It later transpired that Elphicke herself wasn’t entirely focused on her own “day job”, after it was revealed that she earned almost £100 per hour as chair of the New Homes Quality Board.

How opinions change when it’s expedient for them to do so!

Here’s Elphicke’s fellow Tory – Foreign Secretary Liz Truss – urging English footballers to become political and boycott the Champions League Final in St Petersburg, Russia, if their team manages to win a place in that match:

Her comments were motivated by the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, of course.

But they expose yet another vein of hypocrisy in the words of UK politicians: they want footballers out of politics when it disadvantages them, but then they want footballers to make political decisions when it suits their own purposes.

People like Liz Truss want to have their cake and eat it – all the time.

As it happens, This Writer would have supported a boycott of the Champions League final, if it was to take place in St Petersburg. But UEFA has stripped Russia of that privilege and the even will take place in Paris.

My own stance is not hypocritical, of course: I have always supported Marcus Rashford’s intervention in politics.

If more of us took active control of our political lives, we might have fewer hypocrites like Truss and Elphicke running our country into the ground.

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Rashford: Is lack of awareness stopping people claiming food vouchers – or misplaced pride?

The difference between sustenance and starvation: will medical staff step in and point out to families who fear the stigma of claiming food vouchers that there is no shame in feeding their children?

It’s a curiously British phenomenon, this – the mass idiocy that encourages us to say we’re managing (when we’re not) rather than accept help from the government.

Government help is in short supply under the Tories. Anybody who has the chance should seize it with both hands.

But people who can – and should – claim food vouchers aren’t doing it, according to Marcus Rashford, whose campaign for the government to provide free school meals during the holidays saved thousands of your children from starvation over the last year.

The BBC’s report is garbled regarding who can benefit, as it mixes Rashford’s school meals scheme with one for pregnant women and low-income families with children aged under four. Perhaps this new campaign is for both.

Rashford himself, writing in the British Medical Journal, said the food voucher scheme has helped 57,000 parents, but expressed concern that it was “plateauing”.

He said more than 40 per cent of people who were eligible had not registered, and suggested that this was because they came from communities with “no internet, no high street, no word of mouth” – in other words, no way of learning that the scheme even exists.

He called on health professionals to do more to ensure everybody knows about the scheme who are entitled to apply, “especially given the planned digitisation of the scheme this autumn, which will disproportionately disadvantage those without easy access to the internet”.

He asked staff to use an online eligibility calculator and “consider collaborating with us on communicating and educating people about the scheme when possible”.

Crucially, though, he also acknowledged that some people may have been shamed out of applying, in fear that they would be labelled (perhaps as the “undeserving poor”?) because they have been pushed into a position where they have been prevented from being able to feed their children.

He said more needs to be done to end any “silly” stigma and to persuade people to register for support.

I hope doctors and other medical staff pay attention to this.

It would be shocking if children starved because people who have sworn to do no harm found it awkward to do a little good.

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Johnson lied again: England team reception at Downing Street was cancelled because they didn’t want to meet him

This is a great find by Skwawkbox:

The so-called ‘msm’ reported earlier today that Boris Johnson had cancelled a Downing Street reception for the England team, after the team narrowly lost the European final on Sunday, in a ‘snub’ to the players.

However, it is now emerging that the event was cancelled because England’s players refused to attend, in solidarity with black team-mates because Johnson and his front bench had fanned the flames of racism toward Marcus Rashford and other black players.

So Johnson lied again.

He led his tame client journalists to report that he was snubbing the England team when in fact, they were snubbing him.

Neither position is tenable for a prime minister who spent PMQs today (July 14) trying to claim that his government was leading the fight against racism:

  • If he snubbed the England team, then it was because of members’ stand against racism so he is racist; and
  • If the England team snubbed him, then it was because they agreed with team member Tyrone Mings that his Home Secretary Priti Patel ‘stoked’ racism – and that, by supporting her, Johnson does the same – so he is racist.

So the prime minister has boxed himself into his own racist pigeonhole.

Perhaps he’d like another fridge to hide in?

Source: Breaking: England team’s Downing St reception was ‘cancelled’ because players refused to meet Johnson – SKWAWKBOX

England player – CORRECTLY – condemns Priti Patel for ‘stoking’ racist abuse

Hypocrite: Patel chose to side with racists who opposed the England team ‘taking the knee’ against racism – then tried to take the moral high ground when the same racists heaped abuse on team players for missing penalties. Tyrone Mings was right to tackle her.

Kudos to Tyrone Mings for correctly singling out Priti Patel and the Tory government as the cause of the wave of racist abuse against members of the England football team after Sunday’s Euro 2020 loss.

Readers of This Site will know I have been writing about Patel’s racism for a considerable period of time, but Vox Political doesn’t have the following that Mings has. He will get the message to millions, while I only reach thousands.

He correctly identified Patel’s dog-whistle racism as the cause for which the attacks on his teammates Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka and Jadon Sancho were symptoms.

She denigrated England’s decision to ‘take the knee’ in support of the fight against racism as “gesture politics” that she would not support – encouraging a certain type of ‘fan’ to shout abuse when the team did it. I called her out over it in an article on June 15.

Other examples of Patel’s racism include her Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill that advocates prejudice against the Gypsy/Romany/Traveller community.

And her immigration policy locked hundreds of people into a concentration camp together at the height of the Covid pandemic, causing hundreds of them to be infected with the disease. She is pushing a law through Parliament that will make it illegal for refugees to come to the UK, and anybody helping them to do so – even if it is the RNLI rescuing them from drowning – could face imprisonment for life.

So Mings was absolutely on-target when he scorned her condemnation of the racist abuse his teammates received.

“You don’t get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as ‘Gesture Politics’ & then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing we’re campaigning against, happens,” he tweeted.

It really is vile hypocrisy – as was Patel’s sudden show of support for England as it became clear that Gareth Southgate’s squad was heading for the final. I also highlighted that, on July 8.

Team Captain Harry Kane has also condemned the racist attacks on his teammates, saying, “If you abuse anyone on social media you’re not an England fan and we don’t want you.”

Personally, I would wish that he extend that to include people like Patel who stoke racist abuse, as Tyrone Mings pointed out.

One last point: I wonder if the racists attacking three black players even understand their monumental hypocrisy if they agree – as I do – with Alan Shearer’s choice of “player of the tournament”: Raheem Sterling.

Source: England footballer Tyrone Mings hits out at Priti Patel on Twitter after racist abuse – Mirror Online

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As England’s football team scales the heights, how many of its fans will be plumbing the depths?

Try to take this in:

“If England get beaten, so will she.

“Domestic violence increases 26% when England play, 38% if they lose.”

At a time when the England squad and its manager are winning universal praise for the examples they are setting – in leadership, against racism, and for any number of grassroots causes that, frankly, shame the UK’s fascist government, it shames the entire nation that so-called supporters are likely to respond like this.

It could be argued that people who inflict domestic violence on others are going to do it, no matter what the stimulus – but that doesn’t make it acceptable.

This Writer is no expert on what is to be done, so in the run-up to a match where tension will be at its highest for 55 years, and nerves are likely to be frayed to their limits, I can only echo the advice on the image:

“For help with a protective injunction text ‘NCDV’ to 60777 or call 0800 970 2070.”

If anybody has better or alternative suggestions, please send them in to the comment column.

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Never mind her antics: Priti Patel would have DEPORTED members of the England football team

Priti Patel: this is a more accurate representation of the image she should have had on her shirt.

Priti Patel really has a nerve.

Only a few days ago, she was saying she saw nothing wrong with racist football fans booing the England Euro 2020 squad for ‘taking the knee’ before its matches.

That was before Gareth Southgate’s team won a place in the final, of course.

Now look at her:

Just wait until somebody tells her that her idea of good immigration law would have denied eight of the 11 team members their place in the team she now supports so fanatically:

As it is, she seems intent on criminalising the Royal National Lifeboat Institution with her proposed new laws to stop us saving refugees from death. Get your head around this:

Here’s the relevant part of the legislation:

That’s right – for seeing somebody in desperate need and saving their life, you could be imprisoned for the rest of yours under Patel’s (and her boss Boris Johnson’s) dictatorial, fascist regime.

Perhaps the worst indictment against her is that she can’t deny that her proposals would have outlawed initiatives like the Kindertransport that saved hundreds of Jewish children from Nazi death camps by bringing them to safety in the UK before the outbreak of World War II:

I wonder how well that plays with her friends in Israeli politics?

Of course, that law hasn’t been enacted yet, so we can all enjoy this:

Final word:

So much for Patel.

If you want to admire a political figure who supports the England team in an honest way, here’s the Left’s Grace Blakely:

What are the Tories going to sneak past us while we’re going football crazy?

Big lie: racist Boris Johnson cropped this image to remove the references to a campaign against race-motivated hate crime, then put it out as his own expression of support for the England team. Is there any limit to the depths he’ll plumb while the England football team rides the crest of its wave.

Gary Neville nailed it after England won their Euro 2020 semi-final against Denmark: “The standard of leaders in this country the last couple of years has been poor, but looking at that man there [Gareth Southgate] – that’s everything a leader should be: respectful, humble, tell-the-truth, genuine.”

The sentiment is exactly right, and Neville was right to use the platform he was given by the win to voice it.

Sadly, those other leaders he mentioned are almost certain to take the opportunity provided by all of us going football crazy… to try to slip something really nasty past us. See if I’m right.

And of course Boris Johnson, oily opportunist that he is, will try to jump on the bandwagon. He’ll try to associate himself with Southgate’s brilliance – and his government with that of the England team.

I say: don’t let him. We’re seeing something inspiring on the grass of Wembley. Let’s use it to demand better within the walls of Westminster.

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BUSTED: Johnson ‘England flag’ image wasn’t what he said it was

Big lie: Johnson cropped this image to remove the references to Nationwide’s Mutual Respect campaign, then put it out as his own expression of support for the England team.

I dare say that Clare Hepworth wasn’t the only person to have this reaction on seeing a now-infamous image in the run-up to the Ukraine-England Euro 2020 match on Saturday:

Yes it was, but not in the way she may have imagined. Johnson certainly released the image – he posted it in a tweet himself:

But he was being dishonest about the reasons for the picture being taken.

It wasn’t to show his support for the England football team; it was part of the Nationwide Building Society’s campaign for Mutual Respect in Football – a reaction against the rise in hate crime (under Tory governments) in recent years:

Well, we’ve seen that Downing Street did release that image.

Here are a few similar images, showing how Nationwide has been getting public figures to sign a huge England flag in support of Mutual Respect in Football and opposition of hate crime:

I also found a video reaction from one person, discussing what Johnson had done, who hit the nail right on the head – but it seems to have disappeared. Count yourself lucky if you don’t like extreme language because this was not only on the head but near the knuckle too.

POSTSCRIPT: Found it:

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