Sport

We need to talk about Kelvin

As is now very well known, the response of the Sun newspaper to the Hillsborough disaster was to mount a front page attack on the fans. Under the fateful headline “The Truth” the paper printed the vilest lies about the victims of the horrific event. The supporters, it was alleged, urinated on police, stole from their own dead, beat up rescue workers, and caused the problems in the first place through widespread drunkenness. The editor of the paper and the man who decided on the headline was Kelvin McKenzie. On 10 September McKenzie issued the apology he had spent the last 23 years aggressively...

Hillsborough - the ruling class cover up finally exposed

After 23 years of struggle, the Justice for 96 Campaign has forced out the truth about the 1989 Hillsborough disaster and the deliberate cover up and smear campaign by the ruling class to shift the blame onto the fans. The report of the investigation by the Hillsborough Independent Panel has not only vindicated the campaign by the victims' families, it has made plain the cover up was much more widespread and calculated than even they realised. This was a entirely avoidable and also entirely predictable illegal killing. From the 70s onwards, fans, journalists and managers had been pointing out...

Left Foot Forward 2012

On Sunday 9 September, the AWL’s five-a-side football team took part in Feminist Fightback’s “Left Foot Forward” tournament of left groups and campaigns — and won! Thanks to Feminist Fightback’s organisation the all-women and mixed-gender teams took part in a relaxed and friendly competition. In future tournaments, the AWL should make efforts to get an all-women team together. Working towards that “goal” we’d like to encourage women to get involved in Feminist Fightback’s Sunday morning football training in Victoria Park every Sunday,. For all levels of fitness and experience. Complete...

Call centre exploits prison labour for £3 a day

Becoming Green, a company which markets environmentally-sustainable energy to homeowners, has been exposed using prison labour on slave wages in its Cardiff call centre. Almost 20% of the call centre’s staff in July and August were inmates from Prescoed prison in Monmouthshire, around 21 miles away from the centre. The prison workers were paid just £3 per day for their work. Becoming Green had been employing the prisoners for 40-day periods, but as there is no centralised regulation on how long external employers can employ prison labour on “training contracts”, Becoming Green could keep...

Racism in football has not been "kicked out"

Many within British football claim the problem of racism has gone. Within European football virulent racism is still displayed in stadiums. Before the European football championships in Poland and Ukraine, the BBC aired “Stadiums of Hate” a Panorama documentary, featuring Polish fans giving Nazi salutes and a group of Asian fans getting attacked at a match in the Ukraine. “We are not like that” is the strong message the programme gave out. In the 70s and 80s racist abuse from supporters was common place and the far right had a strong foothold on the terraces in the UK. Paul Elliot (the first...

The Olympics: “A cloud of 21st-century consciousness”

“It’s so exotic, so homemade.” Paul Scofield narrating Patrick Keiller’s film “London”. I couldn’t stop myself from watching the Olympic opening ceremony. I predicted hours of torture as I tried to stifle my discomfort, but actually, the event was more interesting than I expected. Essentially, director Danny Boyle attempted a representation of Britain from the industrial revolution on up, via a romanticised, feudal pastoral scene, an unnatural “zero moment”. Phallic chimneys split the ground, replacing the phallic maypoles and jingoistic Oak tree, and planted the “dark satanic mills” of Blake...

The other side of the Olympics

On 15 July, the Daily Mail reported on the slum accommodation that has been provided for Olympic cleaners. A portable-cabin village, which has been likened to a prison or a slum by residents, has been erected away from public view near the Olympic Park in Newham. Cleaners are sleeping 10 to a room, there is one toilet between 25, and one shower between 75. Workers were promised employment immediately but were horrified to learn when they arrived that they would have to wait two weeks to start. Meanwhile, they still have to pay £18 a day (£550 a month) for the “accommodation”, many units of...

A workers' Olympics?

Most people on the left have greeted the London 2012 games with healthy cynicism or hostility. This is understandable, given the profiteering, the property development, and the exploitation that comes to town with the Olympics. In all the debates going on about the political nature and social effects of the games, are there any models for socialists to look to when it comes to staging big sporting events? Is there such a thing as “workers’ sport” or “socialist sport”? For a brief period in the 1920s and 1930s, the international workers’ movement was strong enough to organise and stage its own...

Whose Olympics?

The London Olympics will begin in just under three weeks, but the accompanying security measures and marks of privilege in the city have been visible for some time. Be it the 17.5km electric fence around the Stratford site, the warnings about travel delays, or markings appearing to identify specific roads for Olympic traffic only during the event, one thing is clear — the Games have come to town. Activist groups covering a range of issues have come together to form the Counter Olympics Network (CON), stating in a press release that “CON helps to provide a co-ordinated voice for a wide range of...

John Carlos: a life of protest

The black-gloved salute from the podium at the Mexico City 1968 Olympics is one of the most riveting images in the history of protest, surpassing its sporting moment. This autobiography of one of the central protagonists illuminates why John Carlos deserves to be regarded as a hero and a true champion. John Carlos came third in the 1968 Olympic 200 metre final. His US compatriot Tommie Smith came first and broke the world record. Carlos was just pipped by the Australian Peter Norman. For the medal ceremony, the two Americans wore long black socks and no shoes to protest black poverty. They...

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