I am not a huge football fan. Unless it involves Inverness Caledonian Thistle, I really don’t care and even then it’s more of a spiritual thing. I don’t actually need to watch 22 men kick the bag of wind around the field. But my antipathy to the game wasn’t the only reason my heart sank when I saw the new Liberal Democrat campaign, “Bring the 2018 World Cup to England” this morning.
Certainly, having just had a month of nothing but football anywhere, I was screaming for respite. It’s bad enough on the other side of the world but if it were just over the border it would, frankly, be unbearable.
The main reason, though, was that I thought Nick Clegg’s recent calls for both Russia and Qatar to be stripped of their World Cups were really good. To be honest, they should never have been awarded to countries with such scant regard for human rights in the first place and wouldn’t have been a safe place for any LGBT football fan. Russia’s outrageous behaviour in Ukraine since has shown that it is simply not the right country to host a major international competition.
What worried me was the “Bring it here” element. It seemed a bit self-serving, if I’m honest, and I’m not the only one who thought that. Nick Barlow blogged that this wasn’t the way to make the point:
[The petition] That’s currently on the Lib Dem website, and suddenly turns it from legitimate concerns about Russia to one of the countries beaten by Russia in the 2018 bidding trying to get revenge. It weakens the case against Russia hosting it by associating it with England getting the tournament instead and thus makes it into a contest of two countries, not weighing up the merits of one.
But then I got to thinking that maybe it is a good idea to bring the tournament here, even if I have to suffer endless references to 1966 on an unprecedented scale. Let’s face it, there’s a nasty culture around football. I wrote about it recently. There’s a whole load of sexism, homophobia and violence around the game both here and internationally. Why not say to FIFA that we would spend the next four years cleaning up our act and then host the most inclusive, fairest World Cup ever, restoring beauty to the game and making a whole new generation of people around the world get to love it? It would certainly test whether FIFA is ready to deal with these issues in its sport.
Oh, and one more thing. Instead of England, why not celebrate a “No” vote in the Sc0ttish referendum by making it a joint bid from Wales, England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. That would save building new stadia and would be a true celebration of our whole nation. And just think what we could do with the Opening Ceremony…
* Caron Lindsay is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings