Speechless

I am not really sure how to start this blog. I thought about something daft, like a comment on the quietness of international weeks. I considered something grand and sweeping about sport, money, politics, football and fascism. In the end I just decided to settle on saying I just don't want to write about, think about or watch football at the moment. This is a strange situation for me. I am one of the game's great suckers, a sad sack obsessive and statto, the one who reads every article, craves every rumour, devours every statistic, joins every forum, argues, lives and breathes every moment of every Ipswich Town match.

I have always had strong political views, but beyond occasionally commenting on the general forum on TWTD, I have avoided getting them too mixed in with Ipswich Town. I don't use my regular blog for my political hobby horses, I try not to make people endure them on the football social media I frequent (even if they may occasionally slip out). Football, like all human life, has questions of power and therefore of politics running right through it, but that does not make it a place where we want to endlessly play out our partisan party allegiances. I try to hold myself to that.

It seems obvious to me, but apparently not to the club hierarchy, that "the football club", as Mark Ashton loves to refer to it, should hold itself to the same standard. I could bring up a number of specific reasons why allowing Reform UK's Nigel Farage's visit to Portman Road, allowing his use of our stadium, our branding, our club, to promote his party is divisive and bad. He's attacked migrant and refugee diasporas exactly like those that gave us Anis Mehmeti and Jaden Philogene. Our first team is laden with Irish players and a Northern Irish Catholic manager and Farage is on record attacking Irish sovereignty and the rights of Northern Irish people under the Good Friday Agreement. We had him in the dressing room, his printed shirts replacing those of our players.

Personally, I could also bring up the most recent by-election, where Reform stood a candidate who was on record questioning the right of non-white Britons (like my partner and my child) to consider themselves English. As a younger man, I attended a demonstration against the British National Party and ended up with my picture on the Neo-Nazi hit list Redwatch, earmarking "reds" to be targeted with violence. These kinds of people serve as advisers and activists within Reform UK's electoral machinery now. I have been fighting this politics my whole adult life.

Yet that's not really the point here. I have never demanded that my football club join me in taking a stand against these things. You might reasonably turn round and say you disagree with my characterisation of Reform or even be angered by it. Really though I don't expect Ipswich Town FC to have any politics at all. Football is supposed to be for everyone and the club is the civic heart of the town. How can it fulfil that role when, for the low low price of a stadium tour, it grants a political party the right to use our stadium as a film location and the use of our shirt and our badge (the thing the fans and players are supposed to die for) for their own ends? How can I be expected to shrug my shoulders, show up to the next game, wear that shirt, wear that badge and cheer us on when that badge and the club are being used by those attacking my values?

When a section of the fanbase takes up the baton from Farage's visit, as some surely will (you already see far right themed Ipswich Town stickers posted up from time to time), am I to ignore it and thus let that become the loudest and therefore dominant element of our support? I can not and will not, thus the division that we could let lie silent for 90 minutes every Saturday becomes something we have to live with on matchday, bright and angry. We can only be the fanbase that pushed this politics out or the one that welcomed it in and coddled it. Farage and the club hierarchy have taken the option to be 'normal' and 'apolitical' away from us.

Football clubs are at the heart of everything in their town. Sometimes that means expressing support for values that are important to the community and sometimes those values may have political overtones (remembrance events, anti-racism, rainbow laces etc.). Sometimes that also means they must rub along with politicians. They might have to discretely glad hand elected officials from time to time as the cost of doing business. This isn't that. Farage isn't an Ipswich MP or even a Suffolk one, he's not head of the local council or a government minister. There is no need to invite him to the club as a civic courtesy. If he wishes to pay for the stadium tour he can do so under the strict proviso that he not use it to create party propaganda. If he does so anyway, remind him of that agreement and demand he desist from using our brand (and Halo's brand and Ed Sheeran's brand) to promote his party.

Otherwise what do you leave? Thousands of loyal fans, long-standing season ticket holders, foundation supporters, people who have spent decades and decades living and breathing Ipswich Town, with the sensation that the club just isn't for them. That the things they hate in politics must inevitably encroach on their weekly escape, their haven. That they have to fight to make the club not stand for things they hate. That our support and our money filter into building film locations for what we see as fascist propaganda. I am left with the heart-breaking feeling that I have had for the past three days, that I just don't want to go to our next game and I couldn't care less if we win it. A sensation I have never had for a single second since my first taste of live football at Portman Road thirty-three years ago.