Cap’n Gas inspects the pitch to ensure it’s shipshape and Bristol fashion
I’ve been a reasonably active fan of the Gas Girls or Bristol Rovers Women FC for just over a year now. Well for someone who lives 130miles away and also supports my local team anyway. One year ago I arrived at Lockleaze for the first time to the disapointment of being pipped to the League title by Torquay United. Yesterday, I found myself making the 7 hour round trip to Bristol for a very rare football experience. Very rare for two reasons. Firstly a home game with the league title already in the bag with the guarantee of cup lifting ceremony at the end. Secondly for a women’s team who normally play at a smaller ground making use of the much larger club stadium. Basically a day to celebrate the womens game and the success of this fabulous team at a proper stadium with stands on all four sides. Incidentally with the new South Stand the Mem finally looks like a proper football stadium, it is still small at a 12,000 capacity but it looked smart yesterday in the sunshine
For once I arrived early to The Mem (The Memorial Ground) and the Fan Zone; a gathering space behind the North Stand with a bar, hot food but with the added bonus of a live band and such delights as a sweet stall, an ice cream van and face painting. Rarely do you get such a positive, friendly atmosphere at a football stadium.
So after a nice pint of cider it was into the stand. Only the West stand was open for the game. With around 1700 fans, compared to around 100 for the regular matches at Lockleaze. This meant there would be lots of potential new converts to womens football, in particular children who will be hooked to be Gasheads for life, but also regular GasHeads giving watching the womens team a go and hopefully impressed and able to get over any hang-ups about watching women play football as I had. I think this was a big part of the decision to pay at the Mem, to raise the profile of the team and the womens game in general and win over new supporters. In much the same way as a little boy when my dad took me to Eastville all those years ago for my first football match and making me a Gashead for life.
All set to go, Bristol Rovers v Liskeard Athletic
On the other hand there was a real risk this festive atmosphere could be a bit of an anticlimax, we could have had a frustrating match, Rovers losing and then have to meekly lift the cup after a home defeat. If you add in that this was an unfamiliar pitch to play on and a young team unused to playing in a large ground. Then again this would count double for the away team.
Before the the Liskeard Athletic players formed a tunnel to congratulate the Gas Girls as they entered the pitch to respect the champions, a really lovely gesture they seemed to appreciate the occasion.
There certainly was an edge of tension, as after kick off, respects paid Liskeard demonstrated that they hadn’t come to make up the numbers but to play a game of football. The Gas were edging most of the onfield battles and were largely in control yet the team were not at their best and unable to create the space for attacks on goal, but they kept the pressure up and bagged the first goal from a cross that somewhat fortunatly, floated past the keeper and bent into the far side of goal on 27 minutes.
1-0 at half time and half-time entertainment. It was simply Captain Gas (Bristol Rover’s pirate captain mascot) taking penalties from an under-12s team, yet I do miss these half-time penalty shoot-outs, sadly missing from much of the women’s game.
The second half commenced, Liskeard were not giving up, they somehow managed to get the Gas defense out of position and for a period peppered the goal with shots forcing some strong saves from our goalie. However we managed another goal and as fans we could start to relax a little bit. Somehow the ref managed to find 5 minutes in a second half when there had been no injuries, but it did give the Gas Girls the opportunity to score a proper goal and a 3-0 finish to lighten the celebrations at the final whistle. Followed by team coming out beaming and really enjoying the occasion and cheesy trophy lifting escapdes to the traditional football cup winners soundtrack of Queen’s “We are the Champions” and Tina Turner’s “Simply the Best”
The Gas Girls, South West England Womens Regional Premier League champions 2024!
Critics may say that tier 5 is easy if your team has the backing and resources of a major mens football league club. They may also point to Rovers being a big city team and have access to an entire city’s worth of young women, compared to the smaller towns whose teams make up this league. It would be churlish to deny this. Having said that there is a lot of quality in this division and the Gas Girls have had to work well as a team across the season and show the grit an determination to keep going to have gained the success they have. We are a really young side. We lost several good players after my first match twelve months ago, succumbing to the desire to play higher up the footbal pyramid for other clubs, but they were replaced by youngsters stepping up from the development team who have become key players. Nonetheless it’s fantastic for the womens game to have grown to the point where there is such a high standard and training and support available at Tier 5.
I suspect I’ll be back next season to see the Gas Girls in tier 4 and the delights of the English National League. If this team stays together I do belive they can thrive at tier 4 and beyond. If the commitment can be manitained the promotion won’t be followed by the usual relegation battle newly promoted teams often face.
I’ve posted on here about my conversion to the women’s football game. I’m fortunate to support five football teams [Wales, Manchester City, Bristol Rovers, Enfield Town and Aberystwyth Town] who all have women’s teams, so I now support ten teams but I haven’t yet seen all of them live. I decided to put that right and have been recently enjoying Gas Girls (Bristol Rovers) games. I decided to was high time to tick another of my teams off the list, but a team based further away, a London trip. Last weekend I was priviledged to see Enfield Town Ladies FC in action for the first time.
ETFC v Dartford FC 28/01/2024
Whilst I didn’t quite know what to expect I did know two things: I already knew the stadium as the matches are played at Enfield’s Town’s ground, Donkey Lane (aka The Queen Elizabeth II Stadium). I also had some baggage from knowing Tier 5 of Women’s Football in England. Bristol Rovers also play in Tier 5, in the South West England Premier League, Whilst Enfield Town play in the London and South East region of England Premier League. I mention baggage as Bristol Rovers are flying high at the top of their league with high hopes for promotion to Tier 4, whereas Enfield Town were placed 10th of 12 before this match and are at risk of relegation on 7 points from 10 games, albeit with some games in hand. It is sometimes difficult not to make comparisions and see things with fresh eyes and I don’t think there are many others doing this whole ‘catch-up process’ for all the football temas they support as 10 teams is perhaps a bit much.
In case anyone is wondering why Enfield Town. I lived in London for four years and started going regularly to watch Enfield FC at Southbury Road, who became my “London Team” and also my introduction to the wonderful world of non-league football. After, shall we say some chairman shenanigans, including selling to the wonderful Southbury Road stadium to developers, the club split to create Enfield Town FC, the first 100% fan owned football club in Britain. Then after years of ground sharing we were very lucky to get our new home in Enfield, Donkey Lane, a curious old athletics stadium with an Art-Deco Main stand and a long jump sand pit.
It was a tough game; it was going to be. Dartford were third in the league, with games in hand, so very much much potential league winners and the Towners near the bottom of the league with risk of relegation. As such Dartford were able to dominate possession.
Donkey Lane is one of the few stadiums where I prefer to be behind the goal, I’m usually a side person. And being “non-league” there is no segregation so you can swop ends at half time. So in a game where the other team dominate possession most of the action is at the other end of the pitch, so at times I didn’t get a great view of the action. Having said that, when Enfield were in possession we were doing the right things and passing the ball into the right places and we had a few opportunities develop, they just didn’t fall right, we had our chances. Meanwhile at the other end the defence seemed to be doing the right things and the Enfield goalkeeper kept on saving everything that went her way. However as the match progressed the pressure kept mounting and eventually Dartford scored. The Towners struggled on, but alas to no avail. Enfield Town 0-1 Dartford was the final score but I was now a proper Enfield Town Ladies fan.
One of the issues I noted was attendence, I counted around 30 supporters at the ground and the vast majority of those had come to support Dartford. At Aberystwyth Town and Bristol Rovers, 100+ attendence is more usual. I mentioned this to the lovely lady in the tea bar. The issue is London, there are so many other things on in London it’s more difficult to raise awareness of the women’s game at this level with London’s other attractions, not least the plethora of Tier 1 sides you still can go and see cheaply too which possibly attract the new converts to the game.
Having said that, I absolutely loved having the Town End all to myself. Making noise by banging the back of the stand to make some noise for free kicks and corners around the goal was quite fun. However, it was hot sunny day of 14 degrees in January! [Climate Change!], so I don’t quite get why more people weren’t there. You get a warm welcome at the entrance, pay a mere £3, get a free programme, refreshments availablefrom a tea bar and even the licensed bar open serving ale [I love that Enfield Town is one of the sadly very few football grounds with ale on tap] and you don’t have to queue for anything. I still don’t get why more people weren’t there for what was a wonderful afternoon’s football?
I did grow to love the team during the match. They have the skills and abilities to thrive at this level. It’s largely adding to the trainable skills that special, often elusive elixir, confidence. Lacking confidence means you doubt yourself, there’s this little thing that makes you doubt a decision for a split second, or that makes you choose a safer option when it’s not the best decision, this delays a player being that half a yard ahead to pick up that pass and be clear of a defender. You see this in real time at football matches, particularly with teams down the league. It’s also why as football supports we feel we can be the 12th man or woman, trying to telepathically give that belief to the players of the team. It works, you can then witness making a difference to those split second decisions in a football match to make them more positive. However when there isn’t enough support there the team have to work that much harder.
After the game I felt how annoying it is that London is so far away for me time wise, expensive to get to and that I have other teams I also enjoy watching closer by or I’d be at the next match.
In the bar after the game I thought it would be positve for the team know that someone had made a special trip all the way from Mid-Wales to see them. I got a bit of a shock. “Wyt ti’n siarad Cymraeg?” [Do you speak Welsh?] Is there a potential future Wales star player in the squad???
It seemed sadly not, that was the only Welsh she knew, but it impressed me. As a Welshman I know the phrase from St David, one we try to live up to particularly on St Davids Day: “Wnewch y pethau bychain” [Do the little things]. As Welsh folk we often feel ignored or neglected by our neighbours in England, that the English don’t value us, that our language is seen as an inconvenience and all we are good for is sheep jokes. The problem often is we only hear the negativity, the criticism, amplified by the Hard Right trolls on Social Media. So it’s always imensely heartwarming to be reminded that this isn’t how most people in England see us. Doin gthese little things makes a big difference.
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The issue for me is that it takes about 9 hours to get to Enfield from Aberystwyth by public transport. Yes I know it should take 5.5 hours to get to central London + an hour to Enfield, but like this afternoon, a train gets delayed and the Aberystwyth train connection is missed so you have to wait two hours for the next one. It is impossible to do as a day trip. It is about 5.5 hours to drive; or possibly more as I imagine the M25 and the North Circular are a lot worse today than when I lived in London, but is very much pushing it. So this trip needed to be top and tailed with an overnight stay, which makes it really expensive. So, why oh why, if you live in Enfield are people not going to these games it’s just £3 and down the road for you?
Once I’d made the decision to watch Enfield Town Ladies FC play, it made sense to make the most of a London trip for leisure. This was my first non-work related London trip for many years and I wanted to get my moneys worth to dip into some of the other things I miss about living in London or big cities in general.
My childhood football team is Manchester City and I was very excited to note that one of the lesser North London football clubs were playing Man City in the FA Cup this weekend and the fixture had been moved to the Friday night for the telly and mor eimportantly to not to clash with Enfield Town matches. However despite a 9,000 allocation, I couldn’t get a ticket. I don’t make it down to Manchester very often these days and I have no points left on my membership, so I couldn’t get a ticket. I’m a football supporter and I kind of feel that Man City dare less in need of my support anymore. It doesn’t seem that long ago when getting away tickets for myself was easy! So after the slog on the trains down to London and checking into the hotel my weekend began in the pub. And like every time I go to the pub outside of Manchester to watch City, I was the only Blue and there were inevitably a number of supporters of these Totnam You Spurs, or whatever it is they call themselves. a cracking 0-1 win, to set up a nice weekend.
Saturday morning was spent having a wander around the British museum. Partly as I like a good museum and I was curious to see this shield. A shield that Ceredigion Museum had asked to borrow for an exhibition. I found the shield on display but I was, shall I say, dissapointed to note it said it was from ‘Rhyd y Gorse’, one of them weird old half anglicisations of the name, it’s ‘Rhyd y Gors’. Gors means marsh and not the spiny yellow flowered plant. Oh and Dyfed doesn’t exist as a county anymore! Rant over. The British Museum has a really very good Museum shop. I used to work in a Museum shop for a while and have worked in Retail Space Planning, which was I suppose another reason for going, to do my old job, spying on other shops displays. I was impressed.
Then it was up to Enfield for the mens team game. ETFC v Hornchurch FC. I’d purposely picked this weekend to do the double header of mens and womens team games as I miss Enfield Town FC. We lost 1-2, dubious penalties, but we were unlucky not have got at least a point from the league leaders.
This was followed by the slog back into Zone 1 to see Wicked, sadly I no longer remember all my old tube change short cuts I used to know from living in London. I love the theatre and I wanted to go to a West End musical show as it’s been years since I’ve done it. It’s a really good show.
Sunday was match day and I’d been let off bell-ringing and choir for this Sunday so made my way to St Bartholemew the Great churcdh in the City. It was so good to be at a service at such a beautiful church, that was well attended, with a superb choir and a wonderful organ. Sadly at my church we do struggle so it’s always inspiring to be part of a service when everything is done so well.
Then was the trip back to Enfield for the big match before heading back into town for a meal, a quiet, but inevitably overpriced, ale and much needed sleep before the trains back to Wales today. I’m exhausted but happy. Enfield Town can survive and thrive in this division, we can do it! I just wish I could come again soonest.
This now leaves just Manchester City Women as the only team I’ve yet to watch live. Watch this space.
Welsh politics was taken over a few weeks ago by the introduction of a new law. The default speed limit in urban areas was reduced from 30mph (miles per hour) to 20mph. Local councils were left with the power to exempt major wide major thoroughfares with good visibility to maintain as 30mph zones. The reason for the policy was to reduce road accidents and make urban centres more livible. Many small villages in Wales have a major arterial roads running through the middle of them, indeed many of these villages spread along these major thoroughfares, and modern fast noisy vehicles speed through these villages, not how things used to be at all.
The law was voted though parliament in April 2023 with support from all the major political parties, and 20mph zones had already been implemented in parts of major towns and cities and in other countries. There wasn’t really much fanfare about this law, until a week or so before implemetation day and the hard right Conservative party suddenly U-turned and started a major campaign seeking to overturn this law; a law they had voted for and senior members of the Conservative party had promoted pictures of themselves supporting the campaign of “20’s Plenty”.
Welsh Conservative Leader Andrew RT Davies [left]
This kicked off Welsh media into a frenzy. For many it seemed this was the issue of utmost importance. I was a little baffled. To me, a centre-left Social Democrat, it seemed like a sensible enough idea to reduce road accidents and make urban centres more livible with a relatively low inconvenience cost. If it works, great, if it doesn’t scrap it. I can understand centre-right folk being a bit more sceptical and as they value individual liberty a little more highly and social cohesion a little less highly and tend to be more averse to social change unless there is a very clear case fot it. However for those on the hard-right this was the number one issue, loudly proclaiming how ridiculous and somehow viscious an attack on individual liberty it was to drive slightly slower where there are children and the elderly people trying to live their lives. When the right to protest or human rights to be taken away, these people were not bothered about, iso it’s not freedom as such that they care about? It made me wonder what was going on. How has our political world become so emotive and divisive?
I believe it’s understanding the difference between centrists, whether they lean right or left and the hard right and the hard left. The left generally support the 20mph law, as it intention is to improve road safety, to improve society, so it ticks the boxes of the key principles of socialism. For the hard right it ticks the boxes of restricting individual liberty and and an overly-prescriptive “nanny state”.
This is perhaps the key difference between centrists and the extremists. For centrists the pragmatic solution, of what works, of policy where the benefits outweigh the costs and this can be tested by data. Centrists only support a law like this 20mph law if it actually reduces the cost of road accidents more than the cost of slightly increased journey times. Or at least to then modify the law so it targets where it does have advantages and leaves areas it doesn’t at 30mph. Whereas for the extremists, what actually works in the real world is of less importance than whether the policy aligns with key facets of their beliefs, whether the policy chimes with their worldview or not is mnore important than whether it is a policy with measurable benefits. That it is more important if something feels right rather than is demonstratably right. So to the hard-right this 20mph rule feels wrong and even if it actually saves many lives, or even improve traffic flow in congested urban centres.
The hard right don’t acrtually believe in liberty, freedom and democracy, just the parts that they like or the parts that affect them as a social group, it’s th enature of th eright to be selfish perhaps. In reality, freedom for us and not for everyone else, which to an expert or an academic is not a definition of freedom or liberty that stands up to scrutiny, as liberty only works if everyone in a society has freedom and liberty.
The difficulty of this ‘common sense’ approach, with ideas feeling right and a belief in principles that don’t actually hold up to close scrutiny that can be a real problem. I’ve used this example before, pre-Copernican people believed that the sun orbits around a flat Earth because that’s what you see in your everyday lives. Once you send cameras into space you can then see that the Earth is a sphere that spins around with a daily day night cycle. If humanity had never embraced abstract thought we’d still be banging flint together to make sharp stone edges to use on axes as the ultimate expression of human endeavour as we did for millenia
It was even pointed out that during the fuss they campaigned for 20mph zones only near schools and hospitals, the fact that most urban areas are near schools and hospitals and that it would cost far more and be less productive for towns to me a mess of 20mph and 30mph zones, that a default law was the cheapest, easiest and lkikely most effective way of making this change, with local democracy able to opt the roads out where it didn’t work. The objectors hadn’t thought it through, but that didn’t matter, the rabble rousing rhetoric was all of what was important.
Politics wasn’t always like it has been for the last 10 years or so. We used to kind of operate with a political consensus. Change didn’t happen unless a majority were convinced or that experts would be the ones making the case and the arguments for policy. This doesn’t happen as much now, particularly in the UK and the US. Centrists are now vilified as politics has moved to the extremes. We are now ruled by those who don’t trust expertise, don’t test ideas and rely on ideas and policy matching the dogma of political ideas from generations ago that were created to resolve particular problems of the time, that are not universal truths and simply damaging to the world we now live in. The politicians have worked out that reason and logic don’t get you very far, educated people have worked things out for themselves, of far greater political probity is rhetoric to appeal to the uneducated about politics, and this shift has proved successful for politicians. The UK and the US thus elected buffoons like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump.
How does this rhetorical game work. You start off with a truth, somethind hard to dispute, but also something that chimes with people’s gut feelings or “common sense”. For Trump it was that the political class are corrupt and don’t represent ordinary people’s interests, For Putin that NATO and the Western Alliance are really not good guys. Truths that are hard to dispute and of course not mentioning that Trump, Johnson and Putin are all very much a part of the establishment they claim to despise.
The next stage is to pretend that your big idea follows logically from that truth, even if the logic falls down under scrutiny, but their target audience isn’t people interested in philosophy or abstract concepts, so it works. For example: Politicians are educated and corrupt, climate activists are educated and corrupt, therefore climate change doesn’t exist, it’s just suits these educated folk to make money out of it. This isn’t logical as it falls into the pattern of: Brian is a bad cat who likes sleeping , Megan is a bad cat who likes eating fish, therefore fish do not exist.
It’s also that pursuing the divisive policies of the extremes of the political spectrum, also divides society and creates social unrest. Turning society into an us and them, rather than a people with a common cause and this is dangerous. The Hard Right are playing these divisive culture wars, because it works to convince the socially conservative majority (and people are naturally socialy conservative I believe) that they need to support them because it feels right, that homosexuality is a sin, that war against Bongo Bongo land is fine as they are all bad people there, that children in poverty deserve to be in poverty because their parents are not exactly like us and don’t live in “our” neighbourhoods.
How did this become socially acceptable? My other thought recently was that is is due to the decline of the church in our lives. For me going to a church does a couple of things. It gives everyone a space to think. The material given to attendees to think about comes from an educated person, the priest, who has plenty of time to think and reflect on events affecting the members of their church, that they are too busy working or raising children to consider and find a way to present these ideas in a thoughtful way and join everyone together for a bit of a sing song. This is the Episcopal Church of Wales I grew up with and attend now. We don’t accept the dogma of a religious text written 2000 years ago as being literally true but is a path to guide us to God’s truth, wisdom and peace that we seek to understand. To accept science and other academic disciplines and use those truths to also inform how we understand the world.
I mention this as when I was a teenager a lot of people left the church behind, I did too, Wales is now a very secular country, because it didn’t seem relevant, we could work this stuff out for ourselves and make our own decisions as confident young people without the church. Yet we’ve grown up into a society that doesn’t reflect, that just accepts dogma whether religious or political without thinking things through, without scrutiny and the decline of attending religious services in the UK may not be such a good thing.
All this is scary. Most of the time whether we drive at 30mph or 20mph doesn’t matter as we rarely knock over other people and many of us have never hit someone with our vehicles. Whether the staistics for next year show a percentage decrease in road accidents or not isn’t all that important (well unless the numbers are huge!).
However this media frenzy was overtaken by events, by the tragic escalation of the conflict in Israel-Palestine. I was deeply saddened as the reports came in daily of the mounting thousands of deaths that have been part of this escalation by extemists. We pray in church every week for the victims of war, whether Israeli, Palestinian or in wars that are ongoing elsewhere. It is such a human tragedy that we should reflect on that in 2023 there are still people firing bullets and flying drones and missiles at other people, killing children, destroying hospitals, destroying lives.
Yet it seems that not everyone shares this view of these events as human tragedy. My social media feeds are full of people condeming Israelies and sharing the tragic tales of Palestinian families. Others share the stories of the Israeli families who have sufferent and condemn the Palestinians. I don’t get this need to pick sides, this isn’t football, it’s human life and death. I also don’t get why the Hard Right side with Israel and the Hard Left with Palestine. or indeed that the Hard Right are more sympathic to Putin’s war on Ukraine and everyone else solidly backs Ukraine, it just feeds into more extremism. In Wales people have been so incensed that they are taking things out on the Jewish and Muslim communities in Wales. This just makes the conflict worse for everybody. I know decent Russian, Jewish and people from the Levant, it’s not these people’s that are to blame for this, but people don’t think it through.
Extemism isn’t helpful, it doesn’t resolve conflict. You need to instead work on solutions, because they exist or can be found. To do that you need to understand why there is a conflict and what will end that conflict and those answers don’t come from a gut feeling, a political principle or “common sense” they are complicated.
Being a fairly recent convert to women’s football and having made my second visit to Lockleaze for the first home game of the season, I really wanted to go to a GasGirls away game, because away games are always more fun. Due to having to take annual leave recently and subsequent costs I wasn’t able to afford the Wales national team games (whilst I was Eisteddfoding my toilet leaked causing my kitchen ceiling to collapse). Maybe I should have gone down to Cardiff for Cardiff City Women v Aberystwyth Town [a hard fought by all accounts 0-0 against the Welsh champions], but no, I’m a complete tart and this one was doable in a day, I could make it to a Bristol Rovers away game! As I live on the Welsh coast, this one didn’t involve a long drive down to the deepest South West of South West England, but a mere 3.5 hour drive to Nailsworth in Gloucestershire, home of Forest Green Rovers; or about the same driving time as a trip to Bristol for me, so doable in a day. This is generally away football for me, going to away games of teams I support that are closer to where I live than home games. Belt up, for seasoned football fans, this was an unusual trip.
The drive down was odd, it looked complicated on the map, so I left it to the SatNav to guide me to the ground. Cutting South East onto main roads, then single track roads, back to main roads, all with the mighty M5 always close at hand, and finally entering Nailsworth from a single track road right next to the football ground.
Entrance was only to Forest Green’s Main Stand and only via the officials entrance, so up a carpeted staircase; for non-football fans this is very bizarre. The entrance to the stand itself was only via the bar, very civilised. So posh and civilised is this stadium that they only serve vegan food in the ground, being owned by the owner of a major renewable energy company. Veggies are generally poorly served at football grounds, the traditional snack being the [some sort of] Meat and Potato Pie. Yet this is wonderful. As regular readers know I do not eat meat outside of the home as I cannot guarantee it’s sustainability and feel when eating out vegan food should be the norm. It means everyone has a choice and you won’t be eating dubious meat from intensive agriculture. However at a football stadium this is still strange indeed.
It’s a pleasant setting, a tier 4 English Mens league ground (EFL League 2) with the rare site of trees swaying behind the terraces. Nailsworth is perhaps a bit small for English Tier 4. Indeed they spent most of the twentieth century playing in the Gloucestershire Leagues, before making it to the League in the 1990s. Incidentally gaining that fame and glory about the same time as my London club, Enfield were pushing for entry to the Conference (tier 5), until disaster struck; the chairman sold the stadium and then ran off with all the money, hence causing the creation of Enfield Town… whose Ladies team have still yet to see, I’ve not had any London trips since Covid and it’s just a bit far at the moment, sorry.
The match commenced with a minute’s clap to mark the tragic death, at just 27, of Sheffield United’s Mandy Cusack.
Anyway to the match. A ‘top of the table clash’ at tier 5 in the English women’s game, with two clubs whose men’s teams have league status (Tiers 3 and 4), in a league with just one promotion spot, despite it not yet being October the result could determine who wins the league this year, one which both teams wanted to prove a point with.
The game started as it would go on, with both teams pressing the other team high up the park, never the prettiest open football, but in football sometimes needs must. Scrappy and very even but the Gas seemed to be just about edging the percentages of winning tackles, passing players and getting the ball back. There was one problem, Forest Green have a very pacy forward, who had already shown she could overtake our dender from 2 yards behind and get in froin with the ball facing goal. This time she got a shot off, excellently blocked by our keeper, but unfortunatly into the path of a Forest player, 1-0 Forest Green.
Second half, as a pressing game, there was a lot of tackles flying in, all good ones for the most part but inevitable one will get mis-times and give way a free-kick. We conceeded a 40 yard one. We’ll be fine I thought, this isn’t the national team with free kick specialists who put these away. Bang into the net just under the crossbar and inches from out keepers outstretched hand 2-0 Forest Green.
Thes Gas Girls don’t give you know and were sprinting back into position to figth back. Less that a minute later we had our own 40 yard free kick, Bang into the net just under the cross bar… wait what didn’t this just happen at the other end less than a minute ago? Yes 2-1! I suspect I will never see two 40 yard direct free kicks go in at either end within a minute ever again, worth the entrance fee alone.
Now we had one back it was all Rovers (of the Bristol variety), still a pressing game, but winning more and more of the exchanges and finally getting some space to work the ball. We had chance after chance but they wouldn’t go into the net. I was getting deja-vu for last Friday night’s visit of Wales women to Iceland in the Nations League, where Wales dominated possession and just couldn’t score (Iceland 1-0 Wales FT). 90 minutes appeard on the clock and as injury tiem deepened and the Gas Girls thundered the ball forward, it was just not to be, it wasn’t our day. We had out-played the opposition at their home ground, but that’s football, we love it for it’s unpredictability.
So I’ve now seen the Gas Girls three times. I’ve started to know the players, whose good at what and weaker at other things, all the bits that make being a fan interesting.
So I was a bit deflated facing the long drive home. Yes 3.5 hours is a longish drive on Britains, narrow windy up and down roads, endless junctions and roundabouts, constantly changing speed, it is tiring. Especially with the cliche of it starting the rain just after crossing the border back into Wales.
I made it back to Aberystwyth and to a roaring pub in time to catch the second half of Wales v Australia in the Rugby World Cup (or egg-chasing as many football fans call it). Wales were winning! I was still wearting my bright blue Bristol Rovers scarf in a sea of Red Wales rugby tops * but Wales were winning! And not only that but dominating the game and making Australia look like a poor side. Cymru 40-6 Australia 40-6! Incredible stuff. So all my earlier disappointment washed away and I could embrace a pub full of fellow happy Welsh people, supporting sport teams gives you these amazing roller-coasters of emotion sometimes.
*You can do this in Faberystwyth. Unlike when I was returning to Bristol from an away game against Yeovil Town to overnight with Bristol friends in Bedminster. I hadn’t thought and two men approached me ‘That a Gas scarf?’ [Note that Bedminster is generally a Bristol City part of Bristol]. I was really scared as they pulled my scarf off. Then I saw the dumbfounded looks on their faces as they read ‘Enfield FC, Pride of North London’ on the scarf. I’d got away with it and they handed me back my scarf!
All in all a grand day out, seeing the amazing Gas Girls in action and Wales winning in the rugby. Sometimes I think I support too many teams an dlike too many things but on days like that it feels very worth it.
There are those who don’t get Eurovision who will have spent today quietly relieved that Eurovision is over until next year and there are those still recovering from all the excitement. It is still the original and best television song popularity contest and maybe expression of the joy of being alive there is. What a year this has been. Hosted by the UK in Liverpool, which did the excellent job of hosting, a very good choice of host city to step up to relive war torn Ukraine from the security nightmare of hosting, being last years winners.
It was such a strong year, it seems the selectors and audeince have been coming together to this point for some years to finally provide the contest that Eurovision fans wanted, the artists seemed to know exactly what the Eurovision wanted and gave it to us in spades. It seems that Eurovision has matured into it’s role at the cultural heart of Europe, albeit with Russia excluded for their warmongering. So strong was the competition this year that it broke my scoring system! There were so many good acts in the middle of my score sheet within a point of each other. It meant my bonus point system elevated acts above others, such that it made me uneasy with my scoring. I’ve used bonuis points for many years, partly as a bit of fun, for things like hats and use of mic’ stands, but also dance routines and singing in a native language. So many songs that in any other year would be top 5 relegated to the bottom half of the table.
However, also a controversial year which also broke the Eurovision’s own scoring system. I’ll have to take a moment to describe it and a bit of it’s history as it has been through several machinations.
Back in the day each competing country hired a jury of music industry people to score the acts then aggreagate their scores into the Euroivision scoring system, with 12 points to the favourite act, 10 for second, 8 for third, 7 for fourth and so on down to 1. In modern times there are 26 acts on Final night, so only the top 10 gain any points. Each country cannot vote for themselves and each vote is revealed on the night on a flashy scoreboard.
As technology developed it was possible to have a televote, where people could use their phones to vote for favourites and use these popular votes instead to determine each country’s vote and ultimatly the winner. However these were also the days on expanding the contest to Central and Eastern Europe to bring in the fledging democracies of the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries. The EBU (European Broadcasting Union) a body of television broadcasters from across Europe, who organise Eurovision were concerned by political voting. The juries were brought back in alongside the popular vote, perhaps to smooth out any political voting.
The difficulty with this is that the music industry professionals and the Eurovision audience have radically different views on which is the best act. Eurovision realised that great TV drama ensues from this clash. Firstly the jury votes are announced by country with some fun chit chat with a national presenter, then the popular votes are amalgamated and announced in reverse order of the combined jury vote; the lowest scoring country gets it’s popular vote first and so on. What ha shappened in recent years is that there is a top three from the jury vote who then finish nowhere as the more heavily weighted big popular votes comes in. SO it has been that the popular vote has been weighted enough for the popular vote to effectively decide the winner and incidentally any popular political voting is hidden from the live show.
This year this did not happen. Sweden piled on the votes heavily during the jury vote and Finland, the crowd and popular choice scored weakly. The Liverpool crowed chanted in unison ‘Cha Cha Cha’ the name of the Finnish entry in an awkward moment for the competition. The Swedish entry was strong enough to score strongly in the popular vote too and this was enough to be declared the winner. It’s a great song, huge congratulations to Loreen and Sweden, but there was soem bitterness expressed today and it is perhaps tiem to review the voting system yet again.
Whilst it is the Eurovision Song Contest, it has not been about the Song for a long time, it is a popularity contest in the guise of a competition to produce the most Eurovision song. I think it’s this the non Eurovision fans struggle with conceptually. For th eisue with th ejuries is that they are not Eurovision fans, they are music industrty people, perhaps more concerned with backing a commercial success, which the Eurovision at it’s heart has never cared about. It’s odd, Eurovision loving artists create a song to be performed, it is selected by Eurovision loving selectors, performed at the Eurovision to be voted on by Eurovision fans, but then there is this odd jury system there of people who are not Eurovision people. Last night they seemed so out of touch and out of place, they don’t even correlate with choices made by their own countries, it’s now very odd.
In the UK we have fianlly moved into 21st century Eurovision in ditching the light-entertainment RV show to pick “A song fo rEurope” which produced weak entries and it is now left to experts who do a better job. Which I hear even the 20th century Eurovision goliath, Ireland, is now considering ditching to ensure Irleand entries make it to the Final.
Whilst this years Eurovision was wonderful and a huge success there is this sense of a sour taste. Not because my favourite, Norway didn’t win [a perfect Eurovision banger, an amazing voice, well performed [and Alessandra is utterley stunign on top of all of that]) I sensed that Finland were the likely winners, everyone at the Eurovision party I attended picked Finland to win, bucause it is an almost perfect Eurovsion embracing Eurivisions ability to laught at itself, it;s love of kitsh, novelty, using backing dancers to great effect, catchy memorable and just what Eurovision is and should be about and Sweden being winners just felt a touch cyncial. Sweden take Eurovision very seriously, they are not the most successful country in Eurovision for no reason. It’s kin kind of as if they knew that their entry would not only do well with the Eurovision audience but the non-Eurovision juries too, whilst Norway, Finland didn’t care about commercial successand instead embraced a more true “Eurovision”; and I will include Croatia and Germany’s entries this year for also doing this. There is this sense of a wider understanding of what appeals beyond the Eurovision audicne that grates a bit with a more purist Eurovision fan like myself.
As a Eurovision fan I do want great vocals and good songs to succeed, alongside the quirkier numbers. What make Eurovision so fabulous is sometimes a passionate ballad can win and sometimes somethign utterly bonkers and sometimes even a song that combines the two. I’m genuinely happy for Sweden, but just have concerns going forward. Looking forward to next year already!
This week sees the Coronation of King Charles III. For the Coronation the King has made Coronation Quiche the official dish of the Coronation, a classic French tart which our horticultural monarch has deemed to be made with out of season Broad Beans, perhaps frozen for the ocasion after death of his mother. This is the sort of absurdity that built the glory of the United Kingdom.
As anyone who has travelled to the UK and tried to travel by train will know the British love, grumble about, cherish and stoically tolerate absurdity. Many this weekend will don cheap plastic Union flag bowler hats, probably made in China, to celebrate that the UK still has an hereditary head of state. A King who lives in huge palaces, wears a brazen ostentatious yet gloriously tacky crown. During an economic crisis where millions of Britons struggle to pay the bills, we lavishly spend money on a bizarre ceremony where our head of state has to be annointed with special oils, clothed in ancient robes, regaled with medieval trumpets from men wearing medieval dress, handed a special stick and an orb and the aforementioned crown to continue the hilarious idea that the people in positions in power in Great Britain are somehow ‘chosen by God’ and not the decendents of charlatans and bullies who managed to raise bigger armies than the other guy, to be paraded around London in a golden horse drawn carriage to the baying crowds. All whilst renowned journalists are drafted in to commentate on the proceedings by discussing which princess has the most ridiculous hat or which former Prime Minister is most in disgrace. We loves it and I say this from the fathomless depths of British sarcasm, it does make you proud to be British.
As a Briton the most striking aspect of this weekends festivities is that for the first time the British will be asked to swear an oath of fealty to the King. This is perhaps either the least British thing to do or the most. The least because, whilst we are all subjects of the Crown we are in no way obliged to offer the tiniest smigeon of respect to the instiution of the Monarchy. My family are Royalists and yet it was drummed into me as a child that it is my right as a Briton to disparage the Royals as much as I like, because we are a free people. Yes there probably is some of that delicious British irony in there somewhere. The most because many people will swear this oath with tongue firmly in cheek but go along with it because it’s the thing to be seen doing.
Of course there always were genuine Royalists who rampaciously defend the institution and similarly Republicans actively campaigning for the abolition of the Monarchy. However I’ve always felt that most British citizens, like myself regard it all with a gently respectful yet wry amusement; we are just happy to get the day off work to ironically enjoy making quiches, wave flags, getting some smiles off people for a change and some general quality time with our families.
This love of the absurd is perhaps the most defining characteristic of the British. One of the United Kingdom’s largest exports is culture. Our televisual comedies are sold throughout the world, comedies such as Mr Bean, Father Ted, Alan Partridge, Derry Girls and Keeping Up Appearances to name a few. Comedies that are globally popular yet which all send up British sensibilites and culture to the most extreme levels.
Pantomime is a great British institution perhaps because whilst it is gloriously absurd at its best and despite that is only possible because of a intense diligence to the traditions of Panto. Whislt Panto’ is mainly great fun for children, a proper one always includes a dig at the government for the ‘grown ups’. Panto is ridiculous but it only works because we take the production and traditions of it very seriously indeed.
Similarly with pop music from the Beatles, David Bowie and so on took used surrealism for the creation of bizarre characters the performers took seriuosly to create some fantastic pieces of popular music. Whilst in CLassical music great composers are alost absent, apart from those who savour the comic elements of classical music.
The Royals seemed to use to understand this British love of the absurd. Our late Queen Elizabeths last party saw her eating marmalade sandwiches with Paddington Bear. The late Queens children participated in ‘It’s a Royal Knockout’ a special edition of the insanely wonderful ‘It’s a Knockout’ gameshow, where people dressed in giant foam costumes to carry buckets of fluid half blind across slippery rotating floors, bumb into each other and fall over for laughs.
Yet this joyously British event seems to lack this taking the absurdity melded with seriouisness and respect for the absurdity which Royal occasions of old held dear. It’s perhaps partly as the United Kingdom is not at ease with itself and hence not finding it as easy as it once was to laugh at ourselves, our coping mechanism. It has been said that the British don’t fo revolution as we are too busy making up jokes. I imagine these words here causing the blood to boil in outrage from certain sections as ‘damnable wokery’ from the Royalists and conversely accusations of being a Royal apologist from the Republicans. The fun seems to be absent from this Royal event. It seems criticism and support of the Coronation has become involved in the establishments Culture Wars. Ironically perhaps merely a continuation of the policy of divide and rule that is sadly seeing a resurgance across the world. Perhaps all this caused by the seemingly endless global economic crisis we are facing: the declining British economy no-ones even talking about fixing, war in Europe, Covid, the general crisis of late monetarist capitalism. We almost don’t have time to discuss the greatest peril to our way of life, climate change.
The jokes don’t seem funny anymore, the joy is disappearing. You can laugh at the idiocy of the government or establishment class as long as fundamentally you believe they are least trying to put things right even if their ideas are fundmenetally flawed, that faith in the British economy to keep ‘buggering on’ has almost entirely faded, we are waiting for a miracle to come. There is the perception that no-one is even trying to unite the countries of the UK or fix the economy anymore, we are getting more used to things not working and there being no money to fix things.
It does come back to the elephant in the room no-one talks about anymore, or rather we talk about it all the time but without mentioning the accursed word, Brexit. I’ve written a lot about Brexit. Prior to Brexit there was a sense of ‘whatever our differences are at the end of the day we are all British’, that one uniting thing was viciously attacked by Brexit. Brexit may have been the British being at it’s Pythonesque best by saying that being members of the European Union (EU) was far too sensible and prevented the UK being as silly as it wanted to be and thus Brexit was won. However, Brexit exposed and amplified all the underlying tensions within the nations of the UK: between the Celtic nations and England, between black and white, between LGBTQ+ and striaght, between North and South, between the rich and poor, between Royalist and Republican, even and most strikingly between young and old and perhaps most fundamnetally those who value Britains diversity and those who value it’s conformist streak.
During Brexit it was often said ‘I don’t understand why polls are suggesting Brexit is 50-50 (or 52:48 as it was on the day of the vote) because I don’t know anyone who is voting for Brexit/Bremain’ The division was exposed, an individuals socio-economic and cultural background determined which side you were on. It made people realise that amongst their own side they agreed on so many other things. The government and now with the royal “oath of allegiance” UK institutions are no longer attempting to unite the country or try to tackle the economic problems and are instead exploiting the division for their own ends, divide and rule, attack freedom of speech, the scapegoats. It used to be the Catholics, now it seems to be everyone not exactly like them, hence the culture wars. Brexit demonstrated that you can foster intense debate over minutiae of word definitions, in particular what is an immigrant, to obscure and make imposible any genuine debate on immigration or anything else, what the UK economy can do post-Brexit. The age of informed polite discussion has been a victim of the culture wars, it’s now flame wars, cancel culture, obfusicating the narrative and leaving truth as a forgotten blood stained rag on the battlefield. It’s no longer comfortbale to be be wryly amused by Royal events, it seems you have to pick a side Republican or Royalist.
I simply fear this Coronation, the first in my lifetime, will lack any sense of joy or celebration of Britain and our love of the absurd. We are not supposed to take pomp and pagaentry seriously, how crazy is that, but that seems to be the argument the Royalist faction are pushing. We shall see. God save the King.
As I made my way home tonight, I stopped by my dads for a cuppa on the way home. He was wryly bemused I had been to a South West England Regional Premier Division game and a women’s football match. That it was a lower league women’s game a three hour drive from home may raise a few eyebrows, especially to a non-football fan whom may not understand all the stories many of us have behind this curious thing called football club loyalty. My journey home allowed me to reflect on how I got to be to supporting ten football teams in Wales and England and football in the first place.
It all started, how it does for most boys at least and a few lucky girls, kicking a ball around the school playground at breaktime and discovering how almost everyone else seemed to support either Liverpool or Manchester United. I’ve always been different and didn’t want to go with the flow and wanted my own team, so I plumped for Manchester City. However I found school sport intimidating, and found solace as a geeky kid hanging around the music room and drama studio instead. I kind of missed out.
So it wasn’t until many years later, idly scrolling the internet I suddenly wondered why have I never made the trip up to Manchester to watch a game. So soon after I was on the train up to Manchester to make my debut at Maine Road, a 1-1 draw agianst Portsmouth. Despite City being in the Championship in a battle against relegation season. Simply being in a football stadium with over 30,000 fellow fans chanting ‘We love you City, we do…!’ and watching the match unfold was magical and atmospheric. I was hooked and sought to repeat this journey as much as possible.
However I was living in London at the time and trains up to Manchester weren’t cheap, neither is it easy getting up early on a Saturday and returning late at night. So a friend suggested going to a local team, Enfield FC. Yep, I got hooked again, despite this being non-league football, so Enfield FC (and then Enfield Town FC, quite a story btw, being part of the 1st fan owned football club in England) and my first game was a 2-2 draw in the FA Cup
I moved up to Manchester, got myself a Season ticket, away games, a trip to Wembley and Manchester Derbies, the joys of English league football in Tiers 1 2 and 3. It was all quite wonderful. Whilst living in Manchester I had an interesting conversation with a female friend and Coventry City supporter.
“Have you ever been to a women’s football match?”
“No”
“Why Not?”
” I just feel it would be creepy to go and watch attractive young women running around in football kits”
“I understand about the football kits! why do you think I watch mens football!”
She won that argument, however, an opportunity didn’t really arise for some time and I forgot about it. I have another friend who gets turned on by women wearing dresses, I’ve never quite got that!
After some years living in Manchester, I realised, country boy that I am, that I didn’t really get living in big cities and the hireath of Wales was calling me back home. I moved to Aberystwyth, which meant adding Aberystwyth Town FC to my list of football clubs. I also support Wales (I’m Welsh) and one other English club:
When I was a little boy I found myself in a car on the way to Bristol with my mam and dad and my mam’s friend who had planned a days shopping in Broadmead. I think my dad realised that his role would likely be chaperoning me around clothes shops and thought it would be a better idea to leave the shopping to those that enjoy it and instead take me to my very first football match! My dad spent part of his childhood in Bristol and had an allegiance to Bristol City. I was born in Bristol (my parents moved back to Wales when I was 5). However, Rovers happened to be playing at home that Saturday, it was a 1-1 draw! However when Rovers scored I leapt up, jumping around manically, screaming with delight, backed by the roars of delight from the thousands of Rovers fans and I’ve kind of been a bit of a Gas Head ever since my first football match, though shamefully averaging a lot less less than a game a season.
It had taken me a long time, to re-discover how much I loved watching football. That was me, a football fan supporting 5 teams.
I then found myself living in Cardiff, [sorry Cardiff City, I already had 5 teams by this point] and a group of female friends suggested going to Newport to watch Wales Women play Northern Ireland, it was only a £5 to get in. Finally the opportunity had cropped up to experience women’s football.
Of course it was another 1-1 draw, but I massively enjoyed the experience. Yes, I was attracted to several of the players, however in a list of things I enjoyed most about going to the game, supporting Wales, the atmosphere (despite only using one stand of Rodney Parade) and simply the game of football itself were amazing, the leching was fairly low down. I felt as though I now could and was now happy to watch women’s football!
However even Cardiff didn’t quite suit me, so I moved back to Aberystwyth and very shortly afterwards Covid happened. I was mightily relieved to not be living in a city. I could walk in the hills, stroll along the beach, even ride my bike around the deserted streets, but I couldn’t watch live football (incidentally there were some fans who watched the games from the roof of Tesco’s car park, from where you can only see half the pitch, football fans are like that) Whilst I am a Aberystwyth Town supporter, I never got that warm fuzzy fan glow, the love of a team I’d got from watching my four other teams. So after Covid, I found myself started regularly attending Aberystwyth Town Women’s team, learning the attributes of our players and falling for the team.
At some point it occured to me that I now actually support ten football teams,as each men’s club I support also have a women’s team. Which meant that there were teams I notionally support but have never been to any matches of. Something I should rectify, I didn’t want to be merely an armchair fan of teams I support!
The thing about football is that it’s an amazing sport that can enjoy watching it at any level. I learnt this watching Enfield (in comparison the Man City). All you need is two teams reasonably close together in terms of ability and you can have a fascinating football encounter as any non-league footie fan will tell you. And fundamentally there is no difference between mens and womens football. Sure, males in general do have a tendency to be taller, stronger and able to run faster, but that isn’t important. Elite sport is great, as a Man City fan watching some of the greatest footballers of our times is and it really has been amazing. However, these top levels of skill are not in themselves what makes football appealing, its the encounter between two reasonably equally matched teams vying to score goals against each other and being emotionaly committed to one side emerging as winners, or at least gaining a point against tough opposition. It’s the contest, with simply good levels of football skills, some strategy unfolding and understanding of the game coupled with the sense of bonding with a team as a community of supporters and learning your teams players. The football league systems of Wales, England are there to enable teams to find their level and seek to improve to play at a higher level.
It’s football as community, it’s this sense of being part of something and having fellow fans having your back. I’ve had huge problems with anxiety in my life, but being accepted as a fan of the football clubs I support, has been so therapeutic for me, football grounds were somewhere I felt could be myself, and cry in public because my football team had lost. Like my own single experience of going to a Bristol Rovers mens away game and just be instantly accepted as a fellow fan is wonderful, despite years of absense. I stopped following Man City for a while because I strongly objected to the people who ‘owned’ the club and pumped in the dubiously gathered billions to achieve success. However, one day my dad, said he’d been offered tickets from a season ticket holder for him and his partner to go to Swansea City against Man City, do you want to come? I decided to go for the day out and managed to get tickets in the Away End with my now pointless membership card. At that game I realised that Man City fans are still Man City fans and that I was still one of them, despite the issues of ownership and silly money. The fans hadn’t asked this to happen, we were still singing” Like fans of the Invisible man, we’re not really here” with a trophy cabinet bursting with Premier League titles. I did of course shut up , well burst into laughter, for the ‘Sheep shaggers’ accusations!
Yesterday I did something I suspect most people would find a bit unusual. After ringing the church bells for Sunday service ringing as usual I foregoed breakfast and instead drove over to Bristol to watch Bristol Rovers against Warminster Town in Englands South West Women’s Regional Premier Division. Motivated to tick off one of my teams and do something a little crazy. I have had on paper supported from afar. I was a little nervous, not knowing what to expect in terms of skill levels, what the ground was like or how the other fans would be, would I actually even like the Gas Girls or not? I was asked when I arrived ‘Who do you know in the team? “None of them, it’s my first time!”
Lockleaze is an outdoor sports centre with a number of football pitches. Every town has them, filled at weekends with various local teams, from tiny children to aging men. Bristol Rovers play on the main 4G pitch, which you can view from the terrace of the bar. Unusally for a low attendence game it’s not lining up along the sides of the pitch, but like bigger stadiums where you can get a better view from height and indeed like Enfield Town’s Donkey Lane, you can enjoy a pint from the bar terrace whilst watching the game. I nervously made my way up onto the terrace to see the teams warming up on the pitch with maybe 40 -50 people gathering to watch the game, many of whom are friends or family of the individual players.
This was actually familiar to me, Wales away and Aberystwyth Town home games which are also like this, 30-50 people watching. I’ve kind of got used to standing next to players’ fathers and trying to be careful what I say about them. But this is women’s football so it’s almost always positive stuff! Like Wales women away and Aberystwyth Town.This wasn’t the 15,000 people at Cardiff City Stadium to see Wales home games or the Memorial Ground for the mens team, or Eastlands for that matter, or even Donkey Lane, just a small intimate crowd. The fans were a friendly bunch and soon enough the whistle went for the start of the match.
It was a bit windy! Also the wind was blowing from behind the opposition, which made thing easier for Warminster. It was a scrappy start. I’ve seen several such openings at Park Avenue with neither team able to impose themselves. An issue was Rovers were playing with a high defence, an offside trap. However the wind taking the ball forward and a liner who didn’t seem terribly keen on lifting his flag, caused several worrying moments. However Rovers were also slowly gaining the confidence to take on players and pass balls onto runners and were creating opportunities to score. On 35 minutes, Rovers scored. 1-0 justifiably as they were creating more things.
In the second half, with the wind behind their pirate sails, they started imposing themselves more and more and taking control of the game, so on around 60 minutes , with the help of the wind, bagged a second. It’s always wonderful to see a team work out what they need to do and bring about having the better of things and the relief of being able to convert that into goals.
I am here to talk about the warm supportive environments of the womens game. It is perhaps the one things that arguably makes the womens game better than the mens game. Us heterosexual men are generally rubbish at talking about our feelings. However for the 90 minutes of the game the players are at least as competitive as in the mens game. Unfortunatly there was an incident on around 80 minutes where, as I understand it, as the late great rygby commentator Bill McLaren may have said “a wee bit of argy bargy there’ So two Red Cards, one for each team. It was then inevitably the most talked about incident of the game. The Red Mist sometimes decends in football. Fortunatly everyone was physically okay after this. The game ended 2-0 to Rovers. It wasn’t 1-1, what was happening to me. Do my first games at new teams not end as 1-1 draws anymore???
Whilst I had come to this match already being on paper a supporter, I knew after the game that I had already developed a love for this team. That we have the coolest badge ever isn’t important. It’s such a shame that it is a 6 hour round trip, and fixtures will clash a lot with my life and other football commitments, but I’d really love to go back again next week for the last game of the season, but I have life commitments.
Just like at Aberystwyth Town, after the game the players go to the bar for a meal and a drink. It’s so nice that clubs do food for the visiting team, the intensity of the game can be forgotten (well not always) and friendships made. I discovered that the players are also a lovely bunch of people. I’d have loved to hug them all, but alas couldn’t, more on this below.
I don’t think my journey as a football fan being awakened to the women’s game is typical. The growing crowds for Wales and England have perhaps come mainly from success on the pitch and in Wales because of the success of the Red Wall growing the support for Wales footbal in general, matched with qualifications for major tournament finals and our women being annoying close to doing so (Switzerland away was just a smidgion too much of an ask). I have spent time trying to put my finger on what the difference is between mens and women’s football. I don’t think there is any actual difference, it’s just the hangups we have as a society, really it’s just football this crazy yet wonderful game.
Whilst my journey has been far from typical it has given me the opportunity to be a part of and watch a variety of football. It’s left with me with a local team to support and watch individual players develop and opportunities to watch football when visiting England. It’s far better for me than just following one or two teams. I have rival teams, Manchester United, Bristol City, Barnet and England. However the women’s game is much more inclusive, rivalries are less important and confined to 90 minutes on the pitch. I’ve lived in three mustiple football team cities an dEngland and had to get used to sharing a city with other clubs, having friends who supported the other lot. Now supporting Wales women we have Welsh players in many clubs I consider rivals. Football rivalry was never a major part of the game for me. Multiple team and multiple gender support is just nicer.
I suppose the other point is that it would be possible for me to watch football of a higher standard without travelling so far. Football isn’t just about appreciating th egame is going to support and you have to have feelings for the team to to really support them. Yet I’ve found a perfect balances, always a local team and my other teams for special trips away.
I’ve got so much out of my journey to supporting women’s football and whilst the game is growing in popularity, there is still so much to do. Let’s go Gas!
My Greece trip last year my first experience of international football which whetted my appetite for a second taste. It came last month in a trip to Spain for the Pinitar cup. The South East coast of Spain, an area insanely popular with the British for beach holidays, summer sun and sangria, and retirement homes. The sort of holiday mentality that symbolise to me, the worst possible type of holiday. I prefer an ice cream on a deserted drizzly beach in January, but that’s just me. The idea of a beach holiday in the sun appals me, just not my cup of tea. Yet here women’s football has found a pleasant stadium to play a mini-tournament to play similarly ranked teams against each other in a friendly tournament. The tempatation of a tournment between my three favourite international teams, Wales, Scotland and Iceland, was just too tempting. Surely Spain in February won’t be too hot and I was just curious to get some idea of what all the fuss was about.
Again I was on a tight, but not as tight a budget as the Greece trip was and Spain being effectively in the same time zone, presented the possibility of an easier trip then Greece. I decided to do it all on Public Transport and ended up not messing up my sleep at all, which meant I didn’t waste a day recovering from sleep deprivation. It did mean I missed the first match of the competition, Wales against the Philipines as I found myself after finishing work for the day on the 5.30pm train to Manchester. Wales won 1-0 anyway and I arrived in Manchester at 9.30pm, nicely timed for a brief curious stroll around the city centre of a city I had called home for seven years and took an early night.
As I stated last time marrying flights with travel times is tough restricted to public transport. This trip was sandwiched by two nights in Manchester budget hotels, sub-£50 a night as it was mid-week, although I would have been unhappy paying more than that for these tired, poorly maintained shells of fine old Manchester buildings. Despite having lived in Manchester for seven years, and even living 3 minutes walk from a railway station on the Airport line, I had never been to Manchester Airport. I’d heard bad things about it which was worrying. Fortunatly in February and catching a mid-morning flight meant it wasn’t too busy and pleasant enough. However I can imagine it being horrible when busy. Somehow Manchester has an airport designed by people with no idea how people flow through an airport. You seem forever in narrow corridors making 90 degree turns into people going a completely different direction. I’m so glad no-one enforced the signs suggesting “no luggage” “on the numerous escalators you are compelled to use as there is no signage to suggest what the alternative route is and the signage is often mis-leading. They also hurry you through the ‘undressing’ at security and just accept a high number of people setting off the archways. Very Manchester and very British really and all kind of works if you’re not too much of a stickler for trying to do things properly.Yet civilisation awaited!
No hickups with the flight, it was RyanAir again. Alicante airport was so much more impressive than drizzly Manchester, clean well-mantained and with accurate signage and I don’t think I had to use an escalator at all! Next the bus into Alicante. The South of Spain with it’s rows of palm trees and strip malls, looks and feels so much like Latin America. In contrast to my first trip to the North of Spain which was so much more European in style. Then a late check in to the hotel. I hadn’t planned on my ‘phones data not working in Spain [A Wales told told me you just need to switch it off and back on again], so it took me a while to find my hotel. Even so it was only late afternoon and I had time to explore the quiet almost deserted streets of the city, I was back on Mediterrean time. So after an explore I had a meal in a deserted restaurant before people came out for the evening and then found a bustling freindly pub for a few beers before bed.
Once people realised that my Spanish sadly doesn’t extend much beyond being able to get a meal and order a drink I found a few English speakers. One guy I think wanted to argue with me about the craziness of Brexit and I perhaps dissapointed him by wholeheartedly agreeing with him and told him that we, the British, still don’t know what Brexit was all about after 8 years of the ruddy thing. The other curious thing was this pub solely played English language music on its jukebox. I asked and was told that the Spanish listen to mainly to two times of music, European music and Latin music, in an almost 50-50 split. They don’t miss terribly well together, so such a separation makes sense. It also gave me the impression of Spain as a country with two foci, one as an old European country, the other in awe of the culture the Spanish created in Latin America in their own language. My room was very hot on my return. I again hadn’t checked the AC, they had set it to a crazy 26 Centigrade, so popped it down to a more comfortable 18 and went to sleep.
Still no footbal today, so instead of racing to Pinatar, I had a day to be a proper tourist in Alicante. Alicante is a beautiful city, easy to walk around, pretty and full of interest. I decided to do the tourist thing and walk up to Castell Santa Barbara. An interesting castle, built on an older castle, which was built on an older castle originally built by the Muslims. The main draw of the trip up is the views, of the mountains, the plains and the curious strips of high-rise hotels hugging the sands of Benidorm. The closest I supsect I’ll ever be to Benidorm. Also some beautiful churches, this was a long time ago, the Christian frontier, so they built them to impress and impress they do. I can’t stress enough how February is probably the perfect time to visit, just pleasantly warm all day and people sat outside the cafes and patiserries which I partook perhaps a little too much of.
Anyway I had to catch the last bus of the day to San Pedro del Pinatar at 5.30pm. A two hour ride of endless roundabouts as the bus kept turning off the main road, to nip into the bus stations of the various towns and cities on the way to pick up or drop off, seemingly one person in each. What I didn’t realise and hadn’t checked was that this meant that in Pinitar the bus station is conveniently located near the main coast road is was not near the beach where my hotel was on the other side of the town. And I still had no data on my ‘phone. Two German ladies were looking similarly lost at the bus station but I think they were a little cautious of a lone male, so I swiftly made my own way in what looked like the right direction and was very pleased with myself to arrive at my hotel 45 minutes later. I still had time for a leisurely meal and a stroll along the beach before bed.
I had done so well with not missing sleep, that I got up without the alarm, a rarity for me. I made my way down for breakfast to discover the breakfast room full of Scottish football supporters. The Welsh supporters were in another hotel. I still had many hours before the first football match , so time to see the town centre and stock up on provisions in a supermarket, trying to pick nice biscuits from unknown brands mainly. A very pleasant town centre of a medium sized town. Browsing the shops I realised how having a little Spanish makes things that bit easier. In the main square was a large pagoda full of children being helped make masks and doing face painting. I had also noticed a similar large tent by the marina.
Anyway, I was in a very relaxed holiday mode and had been a little blase about Google saying it being an hours walk to the stadium. So I was still a few minutes away from the stadium to hear ‘Flower of Scotland’ being blasted out from the stands from the outside.
Game 1 [of round 2 of the Pinitar Cup] was Scotland against the Philipines. I was surprised that there were several hundred fans in the ground for both teams. The Philipines had brought a large contingent across the continents and endless renditions ‘Pilipinas’ and a enthusiastic bunch of players that kept Scotland on their toes and had to work hard for their goals. This was my first international football match as a ‘neutral’, except Scotland are a kind of second team for me. I’ve lived in Scotland and have many Scottish friends, they have loaned me their support when watching Wales on the telly, and I’ve been happy to return the favour over the years. So despite my fellow Welshies being Welsh and supporting the underdogs in the ‘Wales’ section I was rooting for Scotland!
I had finally met up with my fellow Wales supporters and we almost all went to a local restaurant to get to know each other a bit, have a meal and do a bit of pre-match drinking, before my Game 2, Wales against Iceland. It was a bit cold in the stadium as Pinatar stadium is exposed to the wind. I’d brough some string this time so hung my Draig Goch up and there were maybe 40 of us belting out Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau this time. Sometimes we like to think of Wales as a small country, because it is with just over 3 million people and sometimes we like to think we punch above our weight in cultural output and sporting process, especially with the mens football team qualifying for the World Cup last year. However, we are dwarfed by Iceland, a nation a tenth of the size with around 300 thousand people (the population of Cardiff), their own language, great culture, they are amazing. I love Iceland, I’ve been there on holiday and would love to go again. They are my third favourite country for a reason. It was such a great game to watch and the only time I’ve not supported Iceland in anything! I took a friend to his first football match at home last weekend and was telling him how sometimes a 0-0 result can be an excellent game of football and this was one of them. A good result for Wales too, as Iceland are ranked above us in the world rankings.
Pinatar stadium is an odd place. At one end is a leisure centre with a nighclub. I remember watching the Pinitar Cup games last year with the flashing disco lights going in the corner of the stadium. It was there I ended up after the game. I really struggle to hear what people are saying in noisy places and after a few beers I just wanted to dance. So happy with the football I boogied the night away until gone 4 o’clock in the morning.
So, maybe I’m not as young as I used to be and maybe getting involved with rounds was a bad idea. For some reason, I missed breakfast and was a little worse for wear the next morning. When I did muster the energy to make it out I had no real plans about from finding a greasy meal somewhere. What I was not expecting was Carnival. That pagoda and bustling town centre with the face-painting was the town getting ready. This wasn’t the damp, twee excuse for Carnival we have in Wales. This was a full-on carnival as visually impressive as the films most of us have seen of Carnivals in a big cities of Latin America, an extravaganza of colourful costumes a street wide and occasionally as high as the lamposts. With seemingly endless Sound Systems each followed by troops of dancers coupled with enormous variety and creativity in the costumes: There were troops of Goths, Oompah Loompers, Witches, giant Swans , huge Spiders and endless feathery costumes dancing. I felt so priviledged to be there to witness it.
A fantastic experience, not just the noise, the colour, the sense of people celebrating life. It was the very pretty young women dancers, wearing very little apart from a few sparkly straps and a huge headress, shaking their bodies about, cathing your eye, which for a heterosexual male, was shall we say a pleasurably arousing expereince. But behind them they were were followed by middle-aged women showing those young things that they still had it too, often dancing with even more energy and then in the middle, the little ones just about doing the dances right, being shown the ropes for in a few years time when they would be the ones nearer the front. This realisation that these people do Carnival year in year out until they can’t do it anymore. You have three generations dancing togerther for hours on end. Then there are the men, not so many, but a few bearded queens giving it their all too.You get this sense of community and connectedness washing over you.
It just felt so Spanish, out there all day in the daylight. Whereas peak Welshness kind of happens in the dark of the evening huddled under cover somewhere when we burst into song and you realise you surrounded by a hundred people all joining in with Calon Lan, with a few doing the harmonies. For Spain it seems to be dance. These cultural events where everyone comes together to express our joy of being a community are rare, so I felt very lucky indeed to be in a foreign land when they were expressing their passion for their community and culture. At the end it was so lovely to see the dancers making their way home, looking utterly shattered yet with huge beaming smiles on their faces.
Next day was my last non-football day in Pinatar. I just wanted to maintain this wonderful relaxed feeling. I went for a stroll to explore the interesting salt dune system that keeps the waves out of Pinitar. It was fascinating to watch flamingoes in the wild and more life then we get in the colder Northern temperate parts of Europe. A pleasant stroll punctuated by simply sitting on the sands, not being too hot or too cold, reading my book watching the sea and being relaxed away from the hustle of bustle of everyday life. At such moments I could just about understand the appeal of British people coming here to retire, it was so peaceful. I even met some of them n a cafe, a Welsh couple, an English couple and some Germans. I do kind of get the appeal but I’d miss Welsh culture too much. I’m so lucky to live in Wales and know that this peace is just a short walk away up in the hills. Sure it’s a bit cold damp and windy at times, but I think I just like it more.
Anyway I found myself close to the stadium and so instead of a further hour of walking back into town, I would expereince being a proper genuine neutral. For Game 3 was the final of the Pinatar under 19 year olds competition. Hungary U-19 against Sweden U-19s. The thing is it’s so hard to be a neutral at football game. My friend last week was using We to describe Aberystwyth within 5 minutes of watching his 1st game. So after the anthems the Welsh section of the ground had a quick discussion, and we went for Hungary, sorry Sweden [we outnumbered supporters of the two teams in any case)! Technically, maybe I should have supported Sweden because I’ve been there and not to Hungary, but then I did live with a Hungarian for a while. Anyway Hungary it was.
I don’t take much interest youth games, I went to won after Covid because a work colleague was playing for the team. Because whilst technically these players were excellent, considering they were 18 and 19 year olds, they just lack that match awareness, that lack of development of awareness of space. I’m being aware in comparing these teams to full international sides, but this is why I don’t watch youth football. Nonetheless it was a fascinating encounter. Sweden took the lead, later Hungary equalised, then Penalties. I still think penalties are a horrible way to end a football match, but soon enough the Hungarian girls were going absolutely wild with delight on winning the trophy.
The final match day with breakfast with the Scots was a very warm hearted affair. One lady was in her 90s and had been to every Scotland game for decades. Then meeting up with some Wales fans for a coffee and a last look at Pinitar before heading home. It was raining, which just felt entirely fitting for a Wales Scotland game, meeting up in the bar for drinks, the pre-match rituals and soon enough we were all in the stadium again, bolstered by a few extra Welsh and Scots locals we’d bumped into along the way we’d persuaded to come along. Game 4 was another tight encounter. Scotland scored in the first ten minutes, but we kept going, bagging an equaliser and another draw. Some may say that going to Spain to see two draws isn’t that great, but it was. The best moments of these internationsls when you have a section of 30 or so people is a sense of bonding with the players. Some players come over to sign shirts,flags and hats, take a few selfies and a chat with the fans. It’s such a warm feeling, which you don’t get in the mens game.We went for pizza before returning once last time to the stadium for the last game between Iceland and the Phillipines.
So Wales at this point were on 5 points, Iceland on 4, Scotland on 3 and the Philipines on 0. If the Philipines won the game Wales would win the tournament (Iceland had a better goal difference if they were to draw). the other Wales fans were rooting for the Philipines. The Philipines had charmed everyone, were the lowest ranked team of the four and were thre only ones qualified and going to the World Cup this year (partly because Australia and New Zealand hosting make Asian qualifying a little easier). But this was Iceland, my ‘third’ team, they had I think 8 supporters in the stadium. I had a moments intenselty awkward dilemma, then made my decision and left the Wales section to say hello and sit with the Icelandic fans. It was a warm fuzzy decision and I think reflected Wales well in that one person went across to support the Icelanders. Komdu Island!
Kaelan Mikla one of my favourite Icelandic bands.
It was unfortunatly a rather one sided encounter. I think Iceland had worked out that the best way to deal with the Philipines was go on the attack and not worry too much about defending and just used their experience. It worked, Iceland were the victors 5-0, and deserved winners of the tournament. Football isn’t known to be a friendly sport where opposing supportes chat and support each other. That was how this tournament felt for me, or maybe it was just I like all four of the teams. I did feel guilty about not supporting the Phillipines in any of their games, but I shall certainly be rooting for them come the World Cup!
Then it was just the journey back home. Sharing a taxi back to Alicante. Worrying about making my flight waiting for the airport bus, and seeing a RyanAir costumed lady who would be one of my flight attendants on the bus soperhaps I needn’t have worried. Fortunatly the airport was quiet and no queues. I finally had a middle seat on a flight. They are horrible, if those next to you use the armrest you have nowhere to put your arms, if it was longer than the two and a half hour flight I might have struggled.
I’m glad I was going through Manchester, so I got to see the Leipzig against Man City in the Champions League game in Manchester on the telly in one of my old Manchester haunts [another draw 1-1). Manchester has got a bit more trendy since I was living there, I didn’t get my pint of Hyde’s Mild, which I’ve missed! Then a pleasnt morning having another look around town before the trains home. Including an hour and a forty minutes this time in Shrewsbury between trains, but this was fine as I found a few good Country records in a record shop and was home not too late this time!
I haven’t written about UK politics in a while,it’s hilarious but also incredibly sad, though there is hope that finally, at long last the British might just maybe slowly waking up to how awful UK governments an din particular the Tories [the Conservative party] are. So we’ve just had the shortest serving Prime Minster ever, but how did she end up as Prime Minister of the UK in the first place and what on Earth is going on in the UK?
A short stint as PM mainly because of the ‘mini-budget’ she put forward. The UK economy is not in a great state (the Tories have been in power for 12 years) we have a housing crisis, a cost of living crisis, rampant inflation and high levels of national debt. So Truss though it would be a good idea to enact £45 billion a year of tax cuts for the wealthiest in society and fund this entirely by borrowing more. The explanation and justification for this was to follow six weeks later with the promise of revealing a ‘growth plan’ and publication of the Office of Budget Responsibility statement. The markets did not react well, with interest rates on Gilts [how governments raise money on the international money markets} shot up, increasing the amount of governmetn revinue that has to be spent on serving debt, rather than investing in the economy. The UK became a lanthing stock, The Tories polling plunged to unprecedented below 20% figures and she was forced to resign.
It is obvious that both Truss and her chancellor Kwarteng have no understanding of economics. This isn’t a problem in itself, economics and politics are different skill sets. However politicians should be good decision makers and good decision makers will listen to experts to ensure what they are proposing is workable and likely to produce the desired effect. It’s fairly clear the Truss team decided not to listen to the experts and press ahead anyway. This is not a way to have a succesful government. There should surely be Sir Humphreys telling them politely but firmly that such things are just not possible.
I am a member of a political party. Political parties are made up of various factions with pet policies, such as a Green group or an anti-EU faction. There is a ‘greasy pole’ to climb to achive a prominant position within the party and the opportunity to stand for national elections and represent the party in legislative bodies. I don’t know how other parties operate but in mine any potential candidate is asked the question “Under what circumstances would you vote against the party?” If the answer is “None” there are barred from representing the party. My suspicion is that doesn’t happen in the Tory party, a party which seems to prioritise the party over the people and the nations they are elected to represent.
Climbing this greasy poll perhaps involved ideological purity, in particular for the modern Tories, a slavish devotion to the neo-liberal agenda, always seek to reduce taxes and regulation and reduce the size of government. Any economist will tell you that in some circumstances such measures are a bad idea, but that in others are a good idea. However I imagine an econimically savvy person in a party like the modern Tories would not get very far, be viewed as ideologically unsound. For surely pushing the mantra of ever decreasing taxes without any practical explanation is the position that will strongly help get you into the position to get elected for the party.
The upshot of this is that the elected Tory party consist of a body of people with no understanding of how national economys work. They are also a party where in recent times the Hard-Right Brexiteer faction has risen to dominance over the party. However Brexit isn’t going well, the government have been forced to spend more to deal with Covid and Putin’s willy-waving war on top of the Brexit costs, there is scant little left to cut in the UK economy without it causing a major economic crisis. The very last thing the UK needed was a disruptive management PM. But why didn’t they listen to advice?
Th simple answer is Brexit, not the actual leaving of the EU, but the whole campaign to leave the EU and the dominace of the Brexiteer ideology.
The Tories like the UK in general has always been a EU-sceptic place. There were the moderates who accepted that being a member of the EU was practical to ensure market access to the UKs biggest trading partner, the rest of the EU, and any gains from not being in the EU pale in magnitude from the costs of lost trade from not being in the EU. The Euro sceptics kept on grumbling, but the party and the UK in general accepted that EU membership whilst not ideal was probably the best compromise. Until that is Nigel Farge’s UKIP started beating the Brexit drum.
Then PM David Cameron was spooked by the rise of UKIP eating into Tory votes, yet he had just won the Scottish independence referendum by the skin of his teeth, but he was confident he could win referendums, so the Brexit referendum was promised and then came about.
Cue Brexit, a debate where the economics was never debated, the Brexiteers, canny campaigners having risen through the ranks on ideological purity had learnt every trick in the book to stifle debate. Leaving the EU would in theory give the UK parliament a little more control and be slightly more democratically accountable, however this one issue, of sovreignty was blown into the only issue, debate never got beyong the ‘Take Back Control’ mantra. Tory MP Michael Gove made a telling statement during Brexit “People have had enough of experts” to mean people don’t like being told what to do or what to think by people who have spent decades studying, testing ideas and thinking about issues. This was no longer important, your average persons on the street’s gut feeling was more important. ‘Do you agree that it would be better for decisions about Britain to be made in Britian rather than by other Europeans” 52% of the voting population said yes, ‘but it’s a little more complicated than that ” was drowned out.
So Brexit happened, however as there had only been this incredibly superficial debate, there was no plan for what to do after Brexit. I’m not joking, there was literally no plan for a post-Brexit Britain, none. Parliament couldn’t agree what to do. The Tories themselves split into various factions. There was but one thing to do, bring on Boris.
One Boris Johnson, an upper class ambitious bullying twit with Tory blood flowing deep in his veins, a man with no ideological ideas of his own beyond loyalty to the Tory party. Exactly who the Tories needed, someone flexible enough to keep the Tories happy and his tomfoolery would be a distraction from porr politics. His was elected on the simple mantra of just ‘Get Brexit Done’ no matter how badly it would be done, united the Brexiteers and his party and when no other option was left Boris would finally make a decision. That this meant that during Covid the UK has one of the highest Covid death rates and the longest periods of Lockdowns of any advanced economy, this didn’t matter, for he had achieved what Boris was elected to do, keep the Tory party together, his one and only glorious achievement.
Eventually the endless gaffs and stumbling idiotically from crisis to crisis got the better of him. But who to replace him with? The Tory MPs had now been selected for their loyalty to the idea of Brexit. A group of people now beholden to the idea of ‘not listening to experts’. In such a situation in became possible for one Liz Truss to becoem Prime Minister, a woman completely and utterly unsuited to be PM, someone even less suited to be PM than Johnson himself.
So as of today, we have Rishi Sunak as PM. How long he’ll last with the Tories in the UK parliament is anyone’s guess. He’s a subscriber to the neo-liberal agenda that has failed the British economy. He had a career with Goldman-Sachs, so has a good understanding of the finacial markets, but not of the wider economy. However it’s at least something more than Liz Truss had. We shall see how long he lasts.
The most hard-right, racist Tory party ever has elected a brown man and Hindu to be PM, mainly because there was no other relatively safe pair of hands available. The Tory party voter base is not entirely racist, but believe me, most of the racists in the UK support the Tories. There are no big easy wins for the foreseeable future as we head into a winter of high energy costs and a sluggish economy. He is leading a political party that has consistently put it’s own interests over those of the UK and there is scant indication there will be any change in this. With an increasingly angry public, we’ll see how long he lasts.
The United Kingdom has a new King and a new Prime Minister. In normal times, (remember them?) new incumbants get a grace period before being subject to criticism. Not so for Liz Truss, the newly appointed Prime Minister, whose chancellor delivered his emergency or ‘mini’ budget this week. Cue waves of depression from anyone with a smidgeon of understanding of economics. The UK economy is in a mess and needs a plan for growth, yet the one we’ve received looks more like a plan for recession. I’m no economist, I’m simply a graduate who has read a few economic textbooks and takes an interest and a budget that consists of borrowing money to fund tax cuts for the very richest during a cost of living crisis seems to be beyond dumb, but rather a more a wilful destruction of the UK economy. I wish I was exaggerating.
Economic growth is basically an economy producing more value over time, the goods and services that are produced have more value than those produced before. The main way of achieving growth is through raising productivity, i.e the amount of value produced by the economy. Or very simply, being able to make 11 of something in an hour, when previously 10 was produced.
The main way to increase productivity is through investment. Investment pays for new equipment, software, staff training, more efficient systems and so on, that allow productivity to increase. There are two main types of investment, public and private.
Public investment come from the state and usually concerns improvements to infrastructure of the economy. Such as improving the transport infrastructure so that goods and people can move around the country more quickly and more cheaply as a result of the investment. Similarly improving education gives an economy workers with more and better skills able to be more productive than less well educated individuals.
Private sector investment does the same thing, investing again in better equipment, buildings etc, but at the level of an individual organisation, to improve it’s productivity and this to improve it’s competitiveness in the market place. This individual organiastions success contributes to the economies productivity and helps public investment as it pays more in taxation.
Stop investing and things go into a decline. For example older equiment over time becomes less reliable and less efficient. This can also apply to nation states as a whole, if the infrastructure gets worse, productivity falls. UK productivity has overall flatlined now for over a decade, whilst other nations have managed to keep productivity increasing. This is a very general simplisitic model of the economy, but illustrates how the UK seems to be getting this very basic stuff wrong.
Getting this basic stuff wrong goes back to Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as UK Prime Minister in the 1980s. Thatcher’s understanding of economics at a nation state level was weak , however during the 80s an economic boom was engineered and the Tory party were percived as being the architects of this success. The modern Tory party now see Thatcherism as a kind of religion and Thatcher herself as some kind of goddess. She wasn’t and this was pointed out by the Left at the time. Growing up in Wales I saw it for myself, coal mines were closed and no new economic investment replaced them, those parts of Wales rapidly declined. I have never voted Tory and never will, but some have forgotten.
What Thatcher did in the 1980s was sell off national infrastructure from the state, energy companies, telecommunications, social housing, coal mining and so on to the private sector and cut taxes, particularly for the better off, creating a short term economic boom, atrick you can only pull-off once, lavishing the City of London’s financial services industries with cash at the expense of the UKs long term infrastructure and stability.
Roll onto the 2008 economic crash and the Tories return to power in 2010. The Cameron regime implemented a policy of austerity. The UKs national debt was seen as the greatest problem, so public investment was reduced to reduce the deficit. i.e weakening the productivity supported by infrastructure, to deal with the deficit. Interest rates were reduced to practically zero and quantitative easing introduced to liquidate (give lots of money to) the banks in the hope of encouraging private investment. Whilst it produced some investment, it wasn’t a lot. The UK was the last major economy to come out of the 2008 recession and little growth was produced.
All this was compounded by events, firstly Brexit, making it harder for companies to export goods and services to the UKs largest market, the rest of the EU, then Covid, effectively shutting down much economic activity and now an inflation causing energy price spike caused by Putin’s deranged invasion of Ukraine. Solutions to the current UKs woes are hard to find. The Lefts solution of increasing public investment to take the place of private investment until that recovered was rejected because it’s “socialism”. Hence the government rejected a broad range of economic strategies.
The new Tory regime beholden to their goddess Thatcher are essentially a one trick pony, all they know is reducing public sector investment and giving tax cuts to the already wealthy. Hence the basis for this budget is just more Thatcherism and this makes so little sense as we already know it doesn’t work and actually makes things worse. it’s just depressing.
Of course cutting taxes for the wealthy does improve the UK as an attractive place to invest in and give the wealthy more cash to potentially invest. However it is very very unlikely to produce a return on the estimated £144 billion of new debt to the Uk government, maybe as little as 5-10% of this figure will be new investment. Would not the £144 billion be better spent in public sector investment, i.e get 100% of the money invested just make more sense?
The second issue is the attactiveness of the UK as a place to invest in. Even if the taxes are lower, who is going to invest in a country that is weakening it’s infracture, reducing the productivity of it’s workforce and has a population with effectively lower wages who spend increasing proportions of their money on the relatively fixed costs of housing, energy and food, the basics of existence and whom will now have very little disposable income to spend in the economy. Or to put it another way who is going to invest in a country where the consumers have no money to spend on the products that investment will create?
We’ve already seen this since 2010. The wealthy top 5% had lots of cash, even if they didn’t they could borrow at near 0% interest rates, but this investment didn’t happen. Nothing has changed, so why is cutting taxes for the rich suddenly going to work now? Much of that money didn’t just sit in the accounts of wealthy organisations and individuals. It was spent on extractive rentierism, or buying property. This landlrdism has given greater returns than investments in companies that could raise productivity in a depressed market. In fact it has a negative effect on economies as businesses and individuals have higher land costs to pay, this reducing their consumption in the real economy. i.e people had less to spend so their was less consumption to support those who did invest in new products and services as few could afford them. which was why the potential investment went into property instead.
As someone who lives in the UK it’s so depressing. I cannot now as easily leave the UK to live in Europe, though many people already have and we face a rapdily declining economy with a weakening currency, seemingly without hope.
Yet hope remains. Firslty even the Tories are not convinced by this policy, it’s entirely possible they could vote down their own party’s budget and trigger an election and let the Labour party deal with the mess. Democratically this makes sense. The Tories are known not caring about Britain instead favour for feathering of their own nests and protecting the Tory party. It will be interesting. Alternatively we can re-build Britain, with independence for Wales and Scotland, new electoral systems and a fundamental reviews of economic policy, free from party political ideological dogma. i.e seek practical solutions rather than tribalism.
Squimple 