According to numerous press reports, like this one in the Gruniad Morning Star and this one in the Daily Scum Mail, England's players will be 'expected' to sing the national anthem before games at the forthcoming World Cup. If true, then this 'expectation' is one of the most sick and most wicked things this blogger has come across in a very long time, dear blog reader. That's, to repeat, if it's true. Yer actual Keith Telly Topping had always believed - wrongly, as it turns out - that we live in a democracy in Great Britain where freedom of political and spiritual beliefs as well as freedom of action (within, of course, the boundaries of the law as it currently stands) is something of a given. It would seem not. So, as in totalitarian knobcheese dictatorships like China and Iran (and, historically, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany) our sportsmen and women are now, apparently, 'expected' to show their blind allegiance to the head of state. And, in the most Stalinist way imaginable, by 'a public show of loyalty', no less. Presumably those England players who are 'expected' to sing the national anthem but chose not to - as is their right - will subsequently be dropped from the side, suffer public humiliation for their Thought Crimes which will then be followed by a lengthy spell in the salt mines as 'correction' for their 'unpatriotic' ways. And that's before we get onto the fact that the song in question is both crassly jingoistic and racist (check out the anti-Scots fourth verse for proof of that). It's odd, isn't it, whenever we see images of one hundred thousand North Koreans in Pyongyang in a public show of glazed-eyed sycophantic brown-tongued 'deference' to Kim Jong Un we see it for what it is, an example of ludicrous - and quite sinister - state control. And, we repulsed by it. Yet, when between one and eleven Englishmen may (or may not) wish to have the right not to do something similar, they're criticised for it. Did we fall asleep and wake up in 1984? Didn't we fight a war in the 1940s in support of the values of freedom to do - or not to do - whatever the hell we liked and against being forced into just this kind of lickerty-split cow-towing to authority, or did I just dream that? What next, I wonder ...? Well, this is the sort of thing we end up with when we start down that slippery slope.
