Right full back on the left wing

Gary Neville, former full back turned TV commentator, used the opportunity kindly provided by ITV to address 4.5 million viewers before the World Cup final.

Those football lovers got more than they bargained for. Rather than just being regaled with penetrative insights into overlapping wingbacks and some such, they found themselves on the receiving end of a deranged rant.

Neville is so indignant about the plight of our striking nurses that he compared them to migrant workers brought to Qatar to build the facilities for the World Cup. Those imports from the low-rent parts of Africa and Asia indeed had to labour in appalling conditions, reminiscent of slavery.

Some 6,500 of them died, whereas the others were squeezed dry and sent on their way, as poor as they had been to start with. While one can legitimately believe that our nurses are also overworked and underpaid, equating them with Qatari slaves is typical leftist hysteria.

One can also detect an attempt at overcompensating for Neville’s side activity: controversially accepting a six-figure fee to do commentary on a Qatari-owned network. That drew a great deal of criticism, with some pundits accusing him of hypocrisy.

That’s like accusing a politician of not keeping campaign promises or a prostitute of not being a virgin. Politicians lie, prostitutes have sex for money, Bollinger Bolsheviks mouth leftist platitudes just as they rake in millions from whatever source is willing to oblige.  

Now Neville, nicknamed Red Nev, is known as one of the leftmost left-wingers among footballers, which is saying a lot. For most ball-kicking pros tend to hug the left end of the political spectrum.

That stands to reason. Given the dominant bias of both schoolteachers and TV broadcasters, young people are inundated with a deluge of woke, socialist propaganda. This forms a pervasive ethos, signposted by mindless bien pensant clichés.

Some people are capable of bucking the mandated trend, but what kind of people? It’s impossible to keep mass propaganda at bay without a highly developed capacity for independent thought. That faculty is partly innate but mostly acquired.

Acquiring it takes a sustained effort going by the name of education. And I don’t mean a school graduation certificate or even a university degree. These may or may not help but, when you get right down to it, there’s no education but self-education.

Only a dedicated effort can hone one’s ability to analyse information, filter it though one’s critical mesh, separate true from false, draw conclusions and form ideas impervious to vox populi. That takes much thinking, reading, debating, submitting one’s thoughts to destructive testing, both internal and external.

It would be fair to say that most people don’t take the trouble. They pick up their ideas pre-packaged and untouched by free thought. Some may be lucky to receive those packages from thoughtful parents, unusually good teachers or perhaps – though increasingly seldom – their parish priests.

Such luck evades most people these days, and your typical professional footballers hardly fit the profile of an independent thinker I’ve drawn. Hence they are likely to go with the flow, whose current is moving in one direction only.

Then there’s the money, as there so often is. These lads mostly come from impoverished council estates, often from broken homes. Then, when they are barely out of their teens, if that, they start making millions, sometimes in one month.

Their childhood playmates are still stuck in poverty, often etched with drunkenness, drug addiction and the odd arrest. But ball kickers aren’t trained to believe in individual responsibility for one’s life in any field other than that on which balls are kicked. They know it has taken them years of training to get where they are, but they can’t relate their own success story to their family and childhood friends.

“It’s all society’s fault” is a thought blown into their minds by the zeitgeist. And when it first appears, they become putty in the hands of propagandists. Witness, for example, that not a single England player refused to take part in the obscene pre-whistle genuflection honouring a black criminal accidentally killed while resisting arrest.

Admittedly, not every player becomes a fire-eating agitator like Red Nev, who is a card-carrying member of the Labour Party and a vociferous shill for every plank of its electoral campaign. He is also a natural, passionate hater.

In his days of playing right full back for Manchester United, Red Nev openly admitted to hating Liverpool (his exact words). Now that he often has to share commentating duties with former Liverpool players, he has found a new object for his hatred: the Tory Party, which he calls “cold-hearted”.

Neville’s rant yesterday amounted to a party political broadcast, which I assume wasn’t the mission specified in his ITV contract. Essentially he tricked his way to a vast audience by promising to talk football and instead spewing leftist political spittle.

His party is trying to force the Tories into a snap election, which Labour would win by a wide margin. Communist-run unions are unleashing misery on the whole country to that very end.

They don’t want to wait another two years. God forbid the Tory government will use the time to make things better for everyone. They know and I know and everyone knows that’s unlikely to happen, but forcing a general election now will guarantee victory, rather than almost guaranteeing it.

I wonder if Red Nev would countenance some obvious ways of freeing up NHS cash to pay the nurses more. Such as sacking, effective immediately, 90 per cent of the non-medical personnel and 100 per cent of all those directors of diversity and ‘lived experience’.

Yes? No? Thought so. He and his ilk don’t care about nurses, railway workers or postmen. All they care about is indulging their hatred and half-baked misanthropic ideology. The cant of “share, care, be aware” is a means to that end – as are the parasitic administrators syphoning funds away from doctors, nurses and ultimately patients.

Oh well, it’s a free country – especially for people like Red Nev. If he wishes to campaign for Labour, by all means he should do so. But our TV channels will be in default of their charters if they don’t withdraw their screens from that effort. At least during sports broadcasts.

P.S. Speaking of footie, French papers are pouring scorn on Manny Macron and his unsuccessful attempt to engage in foreplay with the France star Kylian Mbappé.

Manny, who evidently has nothing better to do, graced the World Cup final with his shirt-sleeved presence, only to see France lose. Having gone into jubilant paroxysms each time France scored, he then decided to explore the PR potential of trying to console the distressed players.

Yet Mbappé brought back the bitter memories of my youth, when so many girls wiggled out of my hopeful attempts to embrace them. He did exactly the same to Manny, who then did what I used to do: trying to find, without much more success, more willing marks. Bien joué, Kylian!