I’m a QPR fan and have decided to create a substack blog about following the team this season. After 16 months of writing about COVID-19, I thought it would be a blessed relief to write about football for a change. Although having said that, no aspect of our lives is unaffected by the virus and the English Football League may well insist on vaccine passports as a condition of going to games. On London Calling a few weeks ago, James Delingpole and I had a discussion about what would persuade us to get jabbed. He said he wouldn’t do it for £50 million, whereas I said I’d do it if it was the only way I could go to QPR games. I’ve had COVID-19 (been there, got the antibodies) so pose less infection risk to other football fans than someone who’s been double-jabbed. But if the EFL, in its wisdom, decides that a recent antibody test or a recent negative test isn’t sufficient and only those who’ve been fully vaccinated will be admitted, I’m still not 100% sure what I’ll do.
The blog is free to subscribe to, although if you become a premium subscriber you can access the full archive – and if you become a founding member I’ll take you to a QPR game. Way-hay!
I wrote the first post last night, which you can read here. Here’s an extract:
England’s three lockdowns didn’t cause me much suffering. I don’t have a shop selling ‘non-essential’ goods (e.g. books) that has now gone out of business. As a freelance journalist, I was never at risk of losing my job and didn’t need to take any hand-outs from the Treasury. I don’t have a life-threatening disease so I was never going to die because my local hospital wouldn’t admit me. I only have one elderly relative and she was in our ‘support bubble’. The biggest downside was the intermittent closure of schools, not least because one of my children was doing her A levels and another his GCSEs. No end-of-exams celebrations for them. But I was probably better off than 95% of the population.
The one thing I really missed was going to the football, which I had naively thought might be possible in the 2020-21 season. I even bought two season tickets to my beloved QPR – one for me, one for my 13 year-old son Charlie – and nonchalantly ignored the deadline for applying for a refund. At one point, the club announced that a few hundred fans would be allowed into the ground and Charlie and I eagerly put our names in the hat, only for the offer to be withdrawn when the ‘rule of six’ was introduced. The next best thing was going to the stadium’s posh restaurant on match day – which the club made possible for our game against Cardiff on October 31st. But it was £60 a head and we were told we wouldn’t be able to go over to the window to look out over the pitch. We would have to make do with a big screen. That sounded even more frustrating than watching the match at home, knowing the ground is only a mile away. (Although we did beat Cardiff 3-2.)
It was only when football started being played behind closed doors that I realised how much I valued the weekly ritual. And I say ‘weekly’ because Charlie and I had taken to going to away games, too, criss-crossing England by train. QPR’s away record isn’t great, so more often than not we’d find ourselves on Saturday evening in a carriage strewn with empty beer cans and KFC boxes, listening to middle-aged men in QPR shirts grumbling about missed chances and poor substitutions. Before the second half of the 2020-21 season, our home record wasn’t great either. We finished 13th in the table in the 2019-20 season and 19th in the season before that. Why, then, did I miss it so much?
Worth reading in full.
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It’s significant and frightening how little UK politicians care about free speech and the culture war in general. They’re quite happy to see an unpoliced left wing lynch mob terrorise ordinary people.
We need an absolute free speech Act of Parliament that overrides all ‘hate speech’ laws. There are already plenty of anti-incitement laws. We’re at the point where you can be arrested for speaking at Hyde Park Corner, which proves how far we’ve fallen.
Conservative MPs are now mostly liberal leftists, Conservative in name only. We need a populist party to emerge and kill the Tories off.
Yes, I’m in total agreement. This ‘uniparty’ bullcrap has gone on for too long. At this stage the name ‘Conservative Party’ ought to be had up on trade descriptions!
Yes but Free Speech is dangerous to totalitarians. They need always to control the language to keep themselves in control of the argument. What free people must say is this ———-“I have an education and I own a dictionary and I will choose my own words and sentences, and no government will choose them for me”.
This is Matt Taibbi’s opening statement – worth watching in full, very rousing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEeaVOzqwAY
What was even more fascinating was a Democrat “questioning” Taibbi by spending his entire tine making a polemic about anti-semitic posts increasing since Elon Musk took over Twitter, without asking a single significant question.
His unstated conclusion would seem to be that because some people express racist ideas on a public platform every intelligence agency in the country needs to have a hotline to censor everything that they deem goes against government policy.
Apart from anything else, I find myself wondering if US racial violence or the holocaust actually occurred because bigots among the public expressed their prejudice, or rather because authorities fostered hatred through Jim Crow laws and Goebbels propaganda.
The Democrats have fallen a long way
“Wondering if US racial violence or the holocaust actually occured” ? You absolute disgusting twerp. Did you read nothing? See nothing? Listen to nothing? Manage to not hear every testimony?
Do you wonder about the Gulags, the Great Leap Forward? The Cultural Revolution? The Killing Fields?
Piss off and spew your vomit somewhere else.
It does help to read before you shout.
As Einstein said “There is a difference between intelligence and stupidity, intelligence is limited”
I have often found that the stupidest shout loudest.
I watched the videos of both their testimonies. It does make me wonder about extent of censorship going on in the EU and the UK.
The UK has long had a problem linked to its EU membership. Our system historically has few laws, rigorously enforced, whereas most EU countries have so many regulations, it’s impossible to police them all, so they don’t.
Consequently, the UK has been flooded with EU regulations and is trying to enforce them all rigorously, the way we always have. That’s led us to police state territory and people getting reported on spurious grounds.
I’m often attacked for saying we need to shrink the state, but we do: its tentacles are reaching into every aspect of our lives entirely unnecessarily.
Recently a street preacher was arrested, charged and prosecuted for mis-gendering someone, WTAF!
Ironically, the biggest threat to the first amendment in the US comes from the EU and their own censorship agenda.
Some of us have known for sometime that there is “Science” and then there is “Official Science”. You can certainly fool a lot of the people some of the time but maybe not all of them all of the time. But it seems that enough of the people are being fooled and that is all the is important to the propaganda machine which makes Goebbels look like a total novice.
In Canada the Liberal Trudeau govt is trying to bring the internet under govt control so that the govt, with the social media giants, will control what people can read and what they can upload.
For example, do a Google search and, if passed, these bills will allow the govt to control what you see first..