Beyond Anyone But England, Farage, Braverman & the England football team
In general on sporting occasions Ive been an Anyone But England person. That’s not because I deny great sporting achievements made by English women and men. On the contrary they can be celebrated, as can those of other teams.
However I am international socialist and my flag is not that of England or the other ‘Home Nations’(I’m a Scottish North Londoner who lives partly in Wales) but the red flag.
English sporting teams are mostly much better representations of the nation they represent than they once were and that is positive. Indeed the far right who mostly backed England have noticed.
Farage did not like the England football team taking the knee claiming that sport and politics should not mix. Well at least until he got his own Reform football team.
Braverman says she is not English but supports the England football team (Twitter 22nd Sept 2026) but they aren’t really a good representation of England. She has yet to notice that the England football manager is German. Farage probably knows but can hardly comment. His ex-wife is German
Neither I think are actually football fans. Farage’s intern tweets but his interest is in fishing and horse racing. Braverman, who knows…
David Olusoga wrote a piece in 2021 on the link between the England team and the better aspects of Englishness. I don’t think E P Thompson was a big football fan (it gets a couple of mentions in the Making of the English Class and David Kynaston’s new social history of 1965-66 finds him watching highlights of the 1966 World Cup final and supporting England) but he might agree. He however always saw it as a contradictory thing. His retort about why English socialists had not arguably produced the body of theory that their European counterparts had was because they had had ‘so bloody much to oppose’ meaning English and indeed British imperialism.
These are matters which socialists should be engaged in discussing and debating not just amongst themselves but in workplaces and pubs.
The far right don’t like the England football team that the England of 2026 has produced. A good reason to support them while keeping the imperial context firmly in mind
England lost 3-2 to Spain btw, but unusually it was a decent game
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