Ahead of the final, Mark Perryman of Philosophy Football ponders the meaning of Kane, Southgate and Sterling.

Said the Socialist Worker on Tuesday: “If football comes home, it’s going to Johnson’s house. Let’s not stand at the door begging to be let in.”

With dreary predictability, one section of the left, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), has come out with a well-worn argument on the false consciousness of supporting England (they seem to have mislaid Scotland and Wales) at the Euros.

This kind of miserabilism isn’t restricted to the SWP — there’s plenty of others on the left who grasp their ideological pearls nervously at the sight of England, St George, and football. 

What are they all so afraid of? 

This summer, Harry Kane, Gareth Southgate and Raheem Sterling have done more to challenge popular racism than tens, hundreds, thousands of Socialist Worker placards. In contrast, the manager and players have taken on, and won, the argument around race, protest and its place in sport.

The racists haven’t disappeared, but they’ve been firmly isolated. That Tory MP Lee Anderson, who says he’s boycotting England games over taking the knee, is now looking pretty stupid — and very lonely.

The racist Twitterati who the morning after the semi-final the night before tweeted a picture of Sterling captioned “What Englishman would cheer this team on,” going anything but viral with their hate, have also been left lonesome with only their hatred to make up for nobody listening to them. 

The SWP derides all these shifts as the product of “plastic rubbish,” which is a fundamental misunderstanding of how popular racism can be challenged and shifted. All the more surprising, and worrying, from the main backers of the Stand Up To Racism campaign.

Fifty-five years ago, the all-white England team of 1966 represented the English society of that era. The 2021 line-up could hardly be more different, including the manager. They symbolise and ignite a conversation around race, national identity and Englishness on a nationwide scale that conventional politics could only dream of. Instead, from their political pulpit, they preach, deride, and absent themselves, incapable of contributing or contesting.

Which is to treat fans as bucketheads. Anybody who seriously believes that an England win will be celebrated as a victory for Johnson has clearly never been to an England game, sat in a packed pub watching an England match, or chatted with their workmates about all these England victories and the team that achieved them. 

The idea, should England win the Euros, that fans will credit Johnson with the team finally lifting a trophy again is so ludicrous to actually be quite funny. Harry lifts the Euro 2020 cup and all around Wembley “There’s only one Boris Johnson” rings out. Really? I’d like to see the person trying to get that chant going. 

It’d be a trophy won by a team, according to right-wing critics, stuffed full of Marxist influences for taking the knee. I’ve no idea if a quick read of The Communist Manifesto is part of the players’ pre-match warm up, but perhaps self-professed Marxists and others on the left could learn a lesson or two from this collective – resolutely working class and multicultural in their composition – on how they articulate their anti-racism.

Of course there’s a wide variety of political outcomes from an event like these Euros. The Tories will whip up the martial and imperial while defining a viciously racist English nationalism to see off Scottish independence and at the same time reasserting their forlorn “global Britain” post-Brexit project.

It is surely the job of politics to seek to confront the possibility of such an outcome on the popular cultural terrain, of which the England football team is so obviously a big part, where these ideas manifest themselves and take hold.

This means stepping outside of the cosy world of placard-wavers, paper-sellers and meeting-goers to find the means for conversation and contestation, rather than beating a headlong high-minded retreat after the fashion of a miserabilist tradition which, on very first impression, spots an England flag being waved, worn or painted on a face and doesn’t like what it sees. 

In and amongst all those waving and wearing the St George come 8pm tomorrow will be plenty of workers, and as an England fan I’d hazard a well-informed guess there’ll be more than a sprinkling of socialists too. 

Perhaps the next time anybody on the left seeks to write us all off as a lost cause, they might ask what we think rather than presume he or she knows already and write us off accordingly.

Mark Perryman is the co-founder of Philosophy Football. The outfitters’ England winners’ T-shirt will be available on Monday (they hope).