by Oliver Brown, Telegraph
At last sport is beginning to cut links with Stonewall’s polarising, decade-long obsession with virtue-signalling gesture politics
It will never be admitted publicly, but football is finally coming to terms with the fruitlessness of gesture politics. In one fell swoop, the Football Association and the Premier League have ended their acquiescence to Stonewall, ditching the Rainbow Laces campaign, and reduced the rote enactment of taking a knee to just two rounds of fixtures over an entire season.
Just five years ago, both these actions would have been unthinkable. In 2020, trumpeting of the laces was so de rigueur that the FA would issue a checklist to ensure blanket compliance, while kneeling was such a core element of the repertoire of piety that “Black Lives Matter” replaced players’ names on the backs of shirts. Five years on, the pushback against such compelled speech has begun.
Not that the game, addicted for so long to the cosmetic projection of its own virtue, can quite bring itself to go cold turkey just yet. The world’s wealthiest league is vowing to launch an in-house inclusion campaign to coincide with LGBTQ+ History Month in February and to persevere with taking the knee on two separate occasions during Black History Month in October, in stark contrast to the Lionesses’ decision to abandon the ritual altogether. That still leaves plenty of room for it to mark Pride Month, or Transgender Awareness Week, or International Transgender Day of Visibility, or any of the innumerable dates where performative shows of solidarity somehow acquire greater importance than sincere conviction.