Posts Tagged ‘Leicester’

Both left and right seek a moral purity that is illusive and destructive

25/04/2016, 10:17:07 PM

by Jonathan Todd

“Football, and the Premier League’s integrity, needs Leicester to win the title,” writes Louise Taylor in the Guardian. If, therefore, you want anyone other than Leicester to win the league, you want a football sans integrity. Spurs fans must be morally debased to want their club to win the league.

Similarly, in a wonderfully detailed critique of Bernie Sanders, Robin Alperstein notes that his rhetoric seeks to convince that, “anyone who supports her (Hillary Clinton) is part of the problem. And then it becomes an act of immorality to vote for her, and a symbol of one’s own moral purity, indeed a rejection of corruption itself, to vote for Sanders”.

As Spurs fans, according to Taylor, cannot in good conscience want their club to win the league, it takes a special depravity, Sanders implies, to vote Clinton. This is tiresome and corrosive.

It has been argued that the indiscretions of Jamie Vardy make Leicester City less virtuous than other Premier League Clubs. I wouldn’t go that far. All clubs, like all collections of human beings, contain good and bad eggs. And the good eggs aren’t always good. Nor are the bad eggs always bad.

The Taylor contention, of course, is the opposite: that Leicester are more virtuous. Given the association between Vardy and racism, it is tempting to see this as the Guardian looking past this scourge. You’d think a left-wing paper would be vigilant to racism. But the paper’s readers’ editor acknowledged in 2011 that they needed to be “more vigilant” to language that might be construed as anti-Semitic.

The lines between criticism of Israeli policy and anti-Semitism feel ever more sharply contested. The Palestinian plight is undeniable. Sympathy for them, however, can lead to attacks on Israel that go beyond the legitimate and into the anti-Semitic. As support for Sanders can be built on an unjustified equivalence between Clinton and immorality. Or desire for Leicester to win the Premier League can rest atop dubious claims about their unsurpassed integrity.

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The Tories might tolerate youth unemployment, we do not

23/10/2012, 07:00:21 AM

by Rory Palmer

Having grown up in a North Nottinghamshire coalfield community I have seen the costs of a lost generation. That community lived the consequences of Thatcher’s destruction of industry and its vicious spiral of hopelessness.

Areas with traditions of industrial pride and hard graft saw a generation denied opportunity. The consequences were painful; drugs and crime, poor health, long term worklessness and aspirations smashed. This is why the coalition’s refusal now to change course is not just incompetent but dangerous.

The government’s austerity plan and a growth-less economy is a toxic combination for youth unemployment. Nationally over a million young people are now looking for work. In the East Midlands we have seen increases of over 20% in young people claiming out of work benefits.

This challenge is urgent. We need government at every level to act and act decisively. Local government is doing what it can. In the face of slashed budgets Labour-led councils across the country are developing youth job programmes. These areas saw the real impact of Labour’s Future Job Fund which was so callously axed by the coalition, with the prime minister calling the jobs it created “phoney”.

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