Brexit leader Nigel Farage has had harsh words for England’s national football (soccer) team taking the knee for the Black Lives Matter movement during the belated UEFA European Football Championship 2020.
“Look, you cannot separate taking the knee from the Black Lives Matter movement,” said Mr Farage during an interview with the newly launched GB News network.
“It is an avowedly, openly Marxist organisation that wants to defund the police and wants to bring down the whole of Western civilisation — don’t take my word for it, just read the website — and you can’t separate the two,” explained the former UKIP and Reform UK party leader.
Farage had some compliments for England manager Gareth Southgate, but disagreed strongly with his pro-kneeling stance.
“When he said this week ‘We are about more than football’ — no, Mr Southgate, you are about football,” he insisted.
“The idea that it’s right for the football team to get involved with political gestures is a mistake, and that’s what the fans are rebelling against.
“And you’ll notice we’re pretty much the only team in the whole competition that are taking the knee,” he went on,
“I think [Gareth Southgate] has made a big mistake with this, I really do.”
Boris Johnson’s government, meanwhile, has been comparatively lukewarm on issues such as taking the knee, with the once-notoriously politically incorrect Prime Minister having in recent months defended Joe Biden against charges of wokery on grounds that there is “nothing wrong with being woke”.
He also issued a bizarre call for the post-pandemic world to “build back better” in a “more equal, and… in a more gender-neutral, and perhaps a more feminine way” at the G7 summit in Cornwall.
However, Home Secretary Priti Patel, regarded by many as the Cabinet’s strongest member when it comes to rhetoric — if not results — has issued an unusually unequivocal criticism of kneelers, telling GB News that she does not “support people participating in that type of gesture politics”.
“We saw last year, in particular, with some of the protests that took place, I speak now very much from what I saw on the impact on policing — it was devastating,” she went on.
“I just don’t subscribe to this view that we should be rewriting our history; toppling statues,” she said, declining to criticise football fans who have been booing England players for kneeling: “That’s a choice for them, quite frankly.”
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