How New Labour Ruined the Beautiful Game
posted by Geoff Andrews at Saturday, March 29, 2008
In his recent article 'Power Games', the Financial Times political editor George Parker describes how 'Demon Eyes', the amateur football team composed of such rising New Labour luminaries as Tim Allan, a former Blair press officer, James Purnell, now Minister for Pensions, Andy Burnham, now Culture Minister, Dan Corry, the current head of Gordon Brown's policy unit, Ed Balls, Minister for Children, Schools and Families, and Foreign Secretary David Miliband, 'took over Britain', by forging lasting political links on the football pitch near Kings Cross station.
The name of the team, Demon Eyes, was taken from the 1997 Conservative Party election poster, which portrayed Blair as satan. By 1998, this new generation of government advisers, spin doctors and New Labour functionaries were bonding well on the pitch and even winning a few matches. More importantly they were consolidating extensive and powerful political networks. According to Parker:
'The story of Demon Eyes is also about New Labour, New Britain and its new religion: football. Football has been a thread throughout New Labour's decade in power. It greases the wheels of politics: it is a networking tool; it is a political message. And Demon Eyes emerged in the 1990s at a time of intense change for two of Britain's most venerable working class institutions: the Labour Party and football'.
Unsurprisingly Demon Eyes played their matches and practiced in Highbury Fields and Market Road, not far from the New Labour heartland of Islington which was also the location of Nick Hornby's novel Fever Pitch, which had helped make football respectable amongst the middle classes. Parker is right to see football being used to 'grease the wheels of power', though in more subtle ways than it has for Silvio Berlusconi in Italy of course.
However, it also reveals another version of Labour's top down managerialism which modernises and consolidates the instruments and institutions of power while failing to engage with the progressive modernising social currents. After Italia '90 and Nick Hornby there were two broad interpretations of the future of football on offer. There was the relentness extension of corporate power and the commodification of the game with all its negative implications for the soul of football. And there was the popular revival of fan culture, a defence of the simple pleasures of football and greater respect for the technical side of the game, (an end to the 'brainless football' of the 1980s) enhanced by the arrival of more foreign players. The two are not completely separate given the money and the TV interests etc, but there has always been an important distinction.
New Labour's open celebration of corporate culture extended to football. Hardly surprising perhaps that Chelsea should be a favourite team amongst the Demon Eyes players, while the New Labour government courted the football world as the Conservatives used to appeal to the aristocracy. The difference between Blairites and Brownites does not work any better in football, whereby the Brownites are regarded as traditionalists, than it does in attempting to distinguish the rest of their politics. Both sides embraced corporate culture and their attitude to football reflects their view of politics; short-term and populist, career enhancing and subservient to business interests.
However the short history of Demon Eyes, which began a year after New Labour entered power and ended as soon as the players got cabinet positions, suggests that we can hold New Labour not only partly responsible for encouraging the corporate take-over of football, but for ruining the beautiful game on the pitch too. According to Parker, Demon Eyes were not a pretty bunch; pot-bellied and physical, their control freakery brought them into frequent disputes with the referee and punch-ups with the opposition. 'We had a reputation as an unpleasant team to play against', Andy Burnham, now minister of culture, admitted to Parker. According to Liam Halligan, an FT journalist who knew them in this period: 'Most of them didn't have any touch - they couldn't really play football, but they tried. They ran their arses off'. The picture of the team shown in the article, where they are dressed in black ties attending a ball in France, could be that of any British ruling class over the last century. Hardly, the modern, cutting-edge and technically sophisticated face of the people's game.
Here I have to declare an interest as Tim Allan, a close confidant of Blair and Peter Mandelson before leaving to become head of Public Relations at Rupert Murdoch's News international, played a couple of games for Philosophy Football in 1995, recruited by PFFC's assistant manager, Gareth Smyth, who had a knack of finding players to make up the numbers at short notice. All I can remember of Allan's appearances is of him sulking on the wing, refusing to pass the ball and arguing with the ref. David Miliband, from whom we would have expected a more philosophical approach to the game, unfortunately never made it for us despite being named in a couple of our squads.
Philosophy Football, along with When Saturday Comes, and the growing number of grass-roots fan initiatives, shares the alternative story of the post Italia '90 period. This is rooted in the defence of football culture in campaigns against commodification, celebrating the pleasures of the game through cultural events, and giving a voice to fans through forums and fanzines. This is an alternative culture which started before New Labour came to power and is sure to outlast the short-term power games of Labour's first eleven.
Published in Il Manifesto 10/4/08