A diabolical defeat ... and no, I don't mean the football
Peter Hitchens, Daily Mail
17:27pm 24th November 2007
Rejoice, rejoice. The English football team has been heaved out of the Euro 2008 competition-by players from a tiny country that didn't even exist 20 years ago.
How completely just and right. I couldn't be more pleased, and I bet there are plenty like me.
Just think of it. No stupid fake-patriotic St George's flags waved by people who couldn't actually care less about their homeland.
No vomit-adorned festivals of drunken stupidity all across the European continent.
No ridiculous false hopes that our mediocre-to-bad sportsmen have any chance of winning in any serious international competition.
No more childish stuff about how we won the war - the British people today couldn't win a war, or stomach for a week the losses, griefs and hardships our grandparents endured for six years.
And there's an even better side-effect.
The people who have made football into a sort of patriotic religion now have to realise something serious folk have grasped for many years.
This country is a backward, disorderly dump, sliding down every conceivable league-table of merit, living on its past, demoralised, and deluding itself about its future.
Its citizens are feared and despised across Europe as tattooed morons who shriek at each other and their children, then fall asleep in the sun after drinking too much bad beer.
And this is largely our own fault because we have for so long refused to care about anything important, believed what we were told by rotten leaders, regarded consumer goods, cars and holidays as more important than education, and dismissed as 'boring' the central issues of our time, while being excited by groups of overpaid men whacking bladders about on football pitches.
Well, defeat by Croatia on a football field doesn't, fortunately, come with the trappings of a real defeat, though the wailing of the football devotees might suggest it does.
Croatian troops aren't roaming the Home Counties raping our women and burning our cities (they reserve such activities for others closer to home).
But national failure in the economy and education, national refusal to defend our borders or sustain proper armed forces, national failure to assert our independence or maintain our culture, will, in the end, have roughly the same consequences.
We will cease to exist as a country, and end up the slaves and playthings of others, if we do not grasp very soon how seriously we have declined from what we once were.
27 Nov 2007, 5:17 pm
