The Premier League football (or “soccer”, depending on where you’re reading this) season has just kicked off over in England, but the real new sport appears to be branding the fans as potential racists.

Teams have announced they will be taking the knee prior to six games throughout the year in honour of Black Lives Matter once more, as they have been doing since 2020 when George Floyd died his completely football-irrelevant death over in Minneapolis. “Diversity is central to the success of the game,” said the Premier League in an official statement. If that’s so, why does the sight of the players bending down on their literal knees in obeisance towards the Great God DEI cause so many fans to turn off the television and do something else immediately?

With the recent race-riots across England in mind, the Premier League and other sporting bodies seem to be taking it upon themselves to promote wider social cohesion amongst their fanbases by such means, rather ignoring the fact that by doing so they actually just run the risk of alienating many supporters even further.

British police have somewhat dubiously sought to link organised bands of roving football hooligans to the co-ordination of the summer riots, leading some in Government to seek to ban those allegedly involved from attending games in future. Instead of allowing such hooligans into the stands, the BBC reported that Lisa Nandy, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, now “wants sporting bodies and clubs to promote cohesion and tolerance.”

Unfortunately, the first time this particular measure was tried out, back in 2020, it didn’t work out especially well …

The Battle of Bended Knee

Jake Hepple was a white Burnley FC fan who briefly became infamous four years ago when he became so annoyed by all the unnecessary knee-taking before games that he helped crowdfund the hiring of an aeroplane to fly over Burnley’s Turf Moor stadium during a match between his club and Manchester City FC on 22 June 2020. He also paid for a special banner to be manufactured and then trailed behind the vehicle, reading “WHITE LIVES MATTER BURNLEY”. For this, Hepple received a lifetime ban from the ground. According to Burnley’s then-captain, the equally white-skinned Ben Mee:

“They have missed what we are trying to achieve. These people need to come into the 21st century and educate themselves. They don't represent what we are about, the club is about, the players are about and the majority of fans are about … It is not right. We totally condemn it. These people can learn and be taught what Black Lives Matter is trying to achieve.”

So can you, mate. Possibly you could have taken some lessons directly from Nottingham Forest FC’s then-striker Lyle Taylor, a black man who correctly identified BLM as being “a Marxist organisation”. Talking to LBC Radio, Taylor explained why he had personally taken the decision not to take the knee:

“I took the decision because I felt that enough was enough ... not enough people have looked into the organisation that has brough this all to the fore … we are hanging our hat on a Marxist group who are ... looking to defund the police, they’re looking to use societal unrest and racial unrest to push their own political agenda, and that’s not what black people are [for], we’re not a token gesture or a thing to hang your movement on.”

But maybe that’s precisely what black people are for in the view of certain figures like Burnley’s Ben Mee? Some whites appear to patronisingly view blacks as nothing but handy little mascots to abuse in the name of publicly signalling their own virtue, or else simply to insulate themselves from censure by left-leaning governments and media: “Look at me, I’m kneeling down in solidarity with all the poor little Africans; I’m a good person too!” But are men like Mee really doing all non-white people a favour with this kind of gesture?

Just before the start of the 2024/25 football season, Lisa Nandy, Labour’s above-mentioned new Culture, Media and Sport Secretary, a lady of Indian heritage (as in, her dad Dipak Nandy was an actual outright Marxist and “coloured Communist” university professor from the subcontinent), held a video-call with the heads of various sporting bodies about how to act in light of the recent race-riots. In attendance were representatives from the Rugby Football Union (RFU) and Rugby Football League (RFL), who later said that, as “inclusion is in rugby’s DNA”, they encouraged all their clubs to “put your arms around your respective communities and keep yourselves and your neighbours safe” from evil white supremacists, urging supporters to “respect each other [and] celebrate the diversity of our communities” in order to “show the world the best of rugby.” I’ve conflated the separate statements of the RFU and RFL here, by the way, but this isn’t disingenuous of me – in the true spirit of modern “diversity” [sic], each said precisely the same thing, just in slightly different words. 

But what is the actual effect of such quasi-enforced diversity on the sportsmen involved? Does it genuinely help bring them together, or just introduce wholly unnecessary racial and political divides between them? Technically speaking, taking the knee before Premier League football games is not compulsory, but in practice almost the only players who have actually felt able to refuse to comply have been black ones like Nottingham Forest’s Lyle Taylor. Taylor himself feels the reason for this is obvious: if they refuse to participate, white sportsmen will automatically be “branded racist”, when in actual fact they may just not be committed Marxists like Lisa Nandy’s dad was.

And even the black refuseniks don’t escape free from all consequences; Taylor himself says he has been “racially abused” by other black people for refusing to take the knee himself. What a wonderful example of “promoting cohesion and tolerance”, as Lisa Nandy wanted to achieve – turning not only whites against non-whites, but also different black people against one another as race-traitors.

Banned for a banner

In terms of Jake Hepple and his “WHITE LIVES MATTER BURNLEY” banner, Hepple was soon also sacked from his role as a welder by his employer, Paradigm Precision, who said it “did not condone or tolerate racism in any form”, except when it was being expressed against white people like Jake. But, according to Hepple, neither did he. “I’ve got lots of black and Asian friends,” he told reporters. He and those who had funded the banner “were not trying to offend the movement or black people. I believe that it’s also important to acknowledge that white lives matter too. That’s all we were trying to say.”

In subsequent online posts, Hepple argued he had acted after seeing news of three white men being stabbed in a park in the English town of Reading by a Libya-born Islamist asylum-recipient, Khairi Saadallah, something whichHepple considered an equally important tragedy to George Floyd dying in a distant land across the Atlantic – yet only one of these events was then receiving blanket UK media coverage, he complained on Twitter:

“I’d like to take this opportunity to apologise … TO ABSOLUTELY F*CKING NOBODY! It’s now apparently racist to say white lives matter (the day after 3 white people got murdered in a park in Reading, but all we’ve seen on the tele is black lives matter after George Floyd got murdered) what a mad world we live in.”

Controversial words, but surely just a matter of personal opinion? According to Hepple, the purpose of his banner was to “make the point that not just Black Lives Matter but so do white ones and all other ones.” But was he telling the truth here?

Online images soon emerged of Hepple holding a finger over his top lip, interpreted as an invocation of a Hitler moustache, and of him meeting well-known English anti-Islam agitator Tommy Robinson, of whom more below. Furthermore, he had used the racial insult “Paki” online, something he attempted to defend by saying he sometimes gets “a bit coked up and uses offensive language”.

It also turned out he was a member of the now-defunct English Defence League, often taken to be a quasi-Far-Right organisation – but a perfectly legal one. Indeed, after being reported to the police for his banner and tweets, Hepple was visited by officers at his home, who he says specifically reassured him he had not “committed any crime”, and actually asked him if he wanted any protection “just in case people try to target me.”

For you, Tommy, ze war is over!

So, just four short years ago, it seems that British police still sometimes used to protect free speech in their country, not automatically try to suppress it. Fast-forward to Great Britain after the August 2024 race-riots and matters now seem rather different.

One of the main online voices accused of stirring up the riots by certain critics was none other than Tommy Robinson, who was on holiday in Europe at the time, spending much of his days tweeting about the disturbances. As some tweets said things like “get there and show your support. People need to rise up [against mass immigration]”, bodies like Stand Up To Racism have argued that:

“Tommy Robinson is deliberately stoking up racism and Islamophobia, whilst on the run [Tommy asserts that such detractors appear to have misinterpreted the concept of a foreign holiday here …]. It’s no accident that the riots took place days after Robinson mobilised 15,000 in Trafalgar Square last week [for an anti-immigration meeting]. Fascists are emboldened.”

The implication of such words seems to be clear: stop Tommy Robinson tweeting, and you’ll stop all future riots! As such, there have been “helpful suggestions” from some in public life that Robinson could perhaps be prosecutedunder UK laws, with a 2023 amendment to the UK’s Online Safety Act allowing someone to be charged for knowingly spreading false information online, “if the person intended the message, or the information in it, to cause non-trivial psychological or physical harm to a likely audience”. Robinson shared one social media post referring to the Southport mass stabbing of little girls at a dance-class which initially sparked off the riots containing the inaccurate query “Why has our government let this Syrian fella in” to stab “innocent children?” when the main suspect was not a “Syrian fella” at all, but a British-born black man of Rwandan parentage. It has therefore been asked if possibly Tommy could be charged with spreading false information?

Personally, I find the idea Robinson was orchestrating the riots from his sun-lounger rather implausible. As I have argued on this very site, the riots had much deeper origins than a few tweets, no matter how widely viewed. Had Tommy never been born, I’m pretty sure vandals would still have been out there smashing up asylum hotels and mosques and hurling rocks at police. If a certain minority of asylum seekers and Muslims will go around continually stabbing the natives and gang-raping their children, then eventually some of said natives will take it upon themselves to rebel of their own accord, no tweets from Tommy necessary.

But, handily enough for those who would like to argue otherwise, Tommy Robinson had a past as a convicted football hooligan – indeed, “Tommy Robinson” is not even his real name, just a nom de guerre stolen from a prominent Luton Town FC fan-thug of that same name. As such, he is often accused of having a number of football hooligans amongst his followers, who attend his regular anti-Islam rallies throughout the UK. Therefore, whilst looking for easy scapegoats to blame for the riots, besides largely imaginary nationwide cabals of neo-Nazis, some police and politicians also sought to blame football fans, promising extra vigilance once the new season started. After all, said Labour Party MP Nick Thomas-Symonds, “Far-Right groups could seek to exploit” the new football season to launch a new fascist revolution or something.