First came the boos. This much, at least, could have been predicted. Ever since the England men’s football team and their coach Gareth Southgate announced that they would be kneeling before every game at this summer’s European Championships as a protest against racial injustice, an angry backlash had taken hold among large sections of the country. Right-wing commentators and politicians gleefully fanned the controversy, advancing various nonsensical theories as to why this peaceful and apparently unobtrusive gesture of solidarity was so objectionable.
One Conservative MP, Lee Anderson, said that he would be boycotting England’s games in disgust. Another, Brendan Clarke-Smith, claimed that by taking the knee – a form of protest most closely associated with Colin Kaepernick, who first employed it in the NFL in 2016 as a means of highlighting police brutality against black Americans – England were also intent on “crushing capitalism, defunding the police, destroying the nuclear family and attacking Israel”.
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