Fintan O’Toole: Southgate’s properly patriotic football team has wrong-footed Boris Johnson

After Brexit, there was always going to be a battle for the soul of England. What was not quite so predictable is that it would be fought on the football pitch.

When England fans sang their mantra “Football’s coming home”, they probably did not want to consider how difficult that four-letter word – home – has become for their country. Its meaning is bitterly disputed and the national team has, like it or not, become a major player in that contest.

One of the big things that happened in the 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU is that English nationalism found a way to express itself. To most Irish people, and to many others around the world, this may seem an odd claim: as a force in history, the English have hardly been shy and retiring. But from the 17th century onwards, Englishness was wrapped up in two other closely related concepts: Britishness and Empire. As a thing in itself, as a way of belonging to a specific part of a specific island, it was submerged.

[Ingerland] is, of course, most obnoxiously visible in a drunken, aggressive, threatening form of football fandom

Thus, no less a figure than Winston Churchill, himself an embodied icon of Britishness and Empire, could complain: "There is a forgotten, nay almost forbidden word, which means more to me than any other. That word is England. Once we flaunted it in the face of the whole world like a banner. It was a word of power… But today we are scarcely allowed to mention the name of our country."

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But England did not go away. It produced a toxic variant: Ingerland. The yobbish, belligerent, chauvinist strain that exists in all national cultures has flourished in the subsoil of an “almost forbidden” Englishness.

Ingerland is real and potent. It draws on an embedded culture of militarist masculinity. It is, of course, most obnoxiously visible in a drunken, aggressive, threatening form of football fandom.

It is a subculture oddly fuelled, not by success – of which English football teams have been starved since 1966 – but by repeated failure. It wallows in a resentment sustained by a sense of entitlement: England has a right to win, so when it loses, it is being robbed of its just deserts.

What outsiders have most disliked about the English national side is not the actual team but this subculture that surrounds it. There is, admittedly, plenty of Anglophobia, but there is much more Ingerlandophobia.

It is easy to forget that most English fans and most English people are Ingerlandophobes too. But before the Brexit crisis, they could avert their gazes and take comfort in a broader sense of Britishness. Far from lying back and thinking of England, they preferred, most of the time, not to think of it at all.

Boris Johnson and his cabal assume that the yobbish, belligerent beast is the one they must tame and ride and feed with phoney wars and anti-immigrant paranoia

Brexit made the English question unavoidable. It is, overwhelmingly, an English phenomenon, driven by English resentments, many of which had very little to do with the reality of the EU. It gave a name and a cause to feelings of being “forgotten, nay almost forbidden” that had been gathering strength since the turn of the century, at least partly in response to Scottish separatism.

But if Brexit is the momentous consequence of this rise in identification with Englishness, it is a curiously unsatisfying outcome. Precisely because the EU was not the real source of English discontents, leaving it can do little to heal them.

The English question has therefore not been answered. And oddly both Leavers and Remainers have tended to misinterpret it in the same way.

They have done so by confusing Englishness with Ingerlandishness. Boris Johnson and his cabal assume that the yobbish, belligerent beast is the one they must tame and ride and feed with phoney wars and anti-immigrant paranoia.

But Keir Starmer and many liberals make the same assumption: that Englishness is an innately negative force. Where they differ from Johnson is that they see it as a beast, not to be ridden, but to be kept securely locked in the stables.

There is, and always has been, another England. It is proud and patriotic – just as Ireland and France and Italy are. But it is also open, tolerant, diverse, multicultural.

This has been the real forgotten England. The Brexiteers have not wanted to acknowledge it because they don’t like it. Their opponents have not wanted to acknowledge it because they are afraid that it will turn nasty.

And then along comes Gareth Southgate’s football team. It is passionately, proudly and properly patriotic. It is also progressive, actively anti-racist, committed to social justice and gloriously diverse: 13 of the 26 members of the squad were qualified to play for other countries, including Ireland, Jamaica, St Kitts and Nevis, Nigeria, and Trinidad and Tobago.

It is this combination that has wrong-footed Johnson and his aggressively anti-immigrant home secretary Priti Patel. They pandered to the Ingerland fan base, either supporting or refusing to condemn those who booed the team for taking the knee. They laid the ground for a wider narrative: this team failed because it is fatally weakened by wokeness.

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And then, when the team thrived, they tried to get back onside. When the Ingerland instincts kicked in with the racist insults against the black players who missed penalties in the shoot-out on Sunday, they found themselves in a no-man’s land, caught between the ugliness they had courted and the widespread love for these decent, dignified, gifted young men.

The other England found its voice in the hundreds of notes and love hearts spontaneously attached to the mural of Marcus Rashford in Manchester that was defaced with racist graffiti. Prominent among them were England flags and the word "proud". This is a pride in nationhood that is more about "us" than "them".

At stake in all of this is that sense of “home”. England is being reconstituted as an imagined community, a primary locus of belonging.

It is no longer a question about whether or not this is a good idea. It is happening. What Southgate and his players have shown is that it does not have to happen in a sour and destructive way.

If international sport always has an element of politics by other means, the challenge for English politics now is to become football by other means. There is a deep desire for role models of leadership that can embody dignity and decency, compassion and fairness, as well as excellence and achievement.

Football players and managers can go only so far in satisfying that desire. Politicians, too, must be able to “speak for England”.

The white spaces on the St George’s flag are there to be filled in – with racist slogans or with pride in an identity that revels in its multiplicity. In England v Ingerland, it is half-time and all to play for.