Author: welland2

Manchester City and sportswashing


Questions behind the club’s treble win

June 2023

The news and sports pages were full of Man City’s win in Istanbul securing them the magic treble. There were clips of the various goals, a celebratory homecoming and interviews and profiles of the various players. Fans were exultant. There were reportedly 100,000 of them to greet the team back in Manchester and considerable attention was paid to one of the players, Jack Grealish and his actions after the win. The tabloids had pages of coverage and hundreds of comments joining in the celebrations. For the owners of the club, it could not have exceeded their wildest dreams. Masses of positive coverage. There is talk of a photo of the club appearing on the cover of the next Oasis album.

So it may seem a little churlish to mention background to the win and to say something about the owners of the club who are an oppressive state. United Arab Emirates who have poured vast sums into the club – around £500m to enable them to buy the best players – are no strangers to criticisms of their human rights record. Many activists and academics are detained and their families often harassed by state officials. There are arbitrary arrests and the used of torture is widespread. Trials are unfair and victims are denied legal counsel. There is no press freedom or freedom of speech generally. There are forced disappearances and stoning and flogging are still practised. The state is near the bottom of many international measures of human rights and press freedoms. What they have is vast wealth from oil and that wealth is being used by a number of middle east states to buy their way into the sporting universe.

Other examples include the World Cup held improbably in Qatar and Saudi Arabia’s purchase of Newcastle United Football Club. Just recently, the Saudis have taken over the PGA (golf) and merged it with the smaller LIV series. The gulf states are in their various ways engaged in using sport to enhance their reputations in what is called sportswashing. They have realised that sport brings huge reputational benefits and the millions who watch or spectate sport show little interest in where the money comes from so long as their team or hero wins a trophy of some kind.

However, it does matter for a number of reasons:

  • Manchester City, and the other clubs going down this high money road, have effectively become state sides. It is not Manchester City but the UAE trading as Manchester City which has become a kind of front for a repressive regime. They are merely serving a purpose for this state to launder its reputation, safe in the knowledge that the supporters simply want to revel in success. It may only have been Channel 4 which raised questions about ownership along with the financial cheating the club is alleged to have engaged in (which they deny).
  • Other clubs will have little option to follow and seek funding from some country wanting to launder their reputations. Until the Ukraine invasion, Russian money from the oligarchs was the main source of wealth for example Chelsea FC and Abramovich.
  • The acceptance of funding from gulf states such as UAE and others ignores the moral dimension completely. Sport sits happily at the back of most newspapers or at the end of TV news bulletins where the breathless talk is of who won what, league tables, the activities of sporting stars, who has been injured and so on. That the states hosting these events or funding clubs and competitions, are engaged in inflicting misery or death on those who disagree with them or who wish for democracy, scarcely gets a mention.
  • That sportswashing helps entrench their power is also seemingly of little concern. The people of Manchester are naturally overjoyed at their club’s success (unless you are a United supporter that is). Telling them that their favourite club is a ‘front’ for a fairly despicable regime is not something they are likely to want to hear.

The use of sport to enable these regimes to gain political respectability is likely to increase as others see how successful it is. It helps facilitate arms sales and the entry of the regime leaders into polite society. Our Royal family for example, from the late Queen down, often hosted visits from the likes of Sheik Mohammed because of a shared love of horses.

Such is the significance of sport now and its use as a political cover, it maybe time for it to emerge from the back pages and for us to start asking questions about its role as a cover for anti-democratic states. Sporting success should not be the be-all and end-all.

Sources: Guardian, Private Eye, Wikipedia

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Group minutes – June


June 2023

We are pleased to attach the minutes of the group meeting which took place on 8 June 2023 thanks to group member Lesley for compiling them. They contain reports on the refugee situation and on the death penalty as well as details of forthcoming events.

June minutes (Word)Download
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Human Rights and poverty


June 2023

Poverty a key element in depriving people of their rights

One of the criticisms of human rights and those who seek to promote them is the proliferation of what is regarded as a ‘right’. One such critic is Prof Eric Posner who has argued that the numbers and proliferation of rights makes them less and less effective. Others have joined in including the current Home Secretary who cites Posner in her various criticisms of human rights and how they are applied in the UK. On examination, much of what is termed ‘proliferation’ is in reality a refinement of a basic right often in the light of current circumstances. The world of social media and electronic communications with its contingent threat to the rights of individuals due to increased surveillance by states and others, would not have been anticipated by the drafters of the UN Declaration after the war. Increasing corporate power and globalisation has enable firms to move or outsource their manufacturing operations to countries with limited or no regard to the rights of their workers.

In its summer 2023 magazine, Amnesty International focuses on poverty as a key human rights issue. As James Griffin notes in his book On Human Rights (OUP, 2008) rights have little value unless people have the means to exercise them. Article 17 gives people the right to own property for example which is of little significance to those unable to get a mortgage, increasingly a concern for young people today. The government’s own statistics on poverty paint a dire situation in what, after all, one of the richest countries in the world. 11 million are in relative poverty before housing costs and 14.4 million after housing costs and there are 2.9 million children in poverty according to the report. We can argue about definitions (and these are explained in the report) but the fact remains that those who cannot afford to eat three meals a day and have to resort to food banks, who live precarious lives with low paid, uncertain jobs, or on zero hours contracts, are not going to be able to exercise many of their rights. Poverty is thus a key underlying factor.

It is one of the problems of a legally based system of rights. The law is only of comfort to those who can afford to gain access to it. For the vast majority it is expensive, extremely uncertain and of little direct value. Tackling poverty means addressing the ideas and politics which are the root causes of the problem.

Amnesty is part of a group ‘The Growing Rights Instead of Poverty Partnership‘ GRIPP. In a report it says ‘[It] reveals how the UK government has created a system that keeps communities poor, ill, divided and isolated then blames them for the conditions they are living in.’ It was submitted to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR). The government would argue that they have introduced a variety of schemes to tackle poverty but fact remains that very large numbers of people are struggling. Recent rises in food prices – which hit the poorest the hardest as they spend a large proportion of their budget on food – rising interest rates and energy prices will have made matters worse for many. Article 25 of the UN Declaration says that ‘everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for health and wellbeing.’

What is clear about poverty in the UK is how regionally disbursed it is. There are extremely prosperous areas and by contrast, large areas and numbers of communities where there is widespread deprivation. No one can argue that all those in such areas are somehow deficient or are responsible for their collective disadvantage. Clearly it is a systemic issue and a matter of political will or lack of it. Politicians have spoken about the problem and action has been promised, most recently with the levelling up programme. It does not seem to make a difference. The result is a significant number of people and shamefully, young people, who for no fault of their own, have significantly reduced life chances, health outcomes and opportunities mostly to do with poverty.

Poverty is thus a key factor in individual’s ability to secure a range of rights which, for the more prosperous, is taken for granted.

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Refugee report – June


Refugees continue to generate considerable political tension in the UK

June 2023

We are pleased present our monthly refugee report thanks to group member Andrew for preparing it. Refugees, immigration and the boat people continue to generate a considerable degree of political and media heat in the country.

The latest immigration figures for 2022 give a total of 606,000 arrivals, but most of these are legal, and mainly students. There were 7,000 applications for asylum (by 91,000 people). In the first quarter this year 3,793 applications were received, compared to 4,548 last year. It is worth noting that the numbers are higher in France, Germany and Spain. Arrivals in the UK amount to just 7% of the European total.

Arrivals to the UK are just 7% of the European total

20,000 claimants were in detention in March, 20% fewer than last year, but the average period of detention was longer.

Few forced returns based on asylum claims have taken place, the majority of them being to Albania, where the new agreement has resulted in 90% of arrivals from Albania being returned there.

The Illegal Migration Bill is this week in committee stage in the House of Lords, and a vast number of amendments are being debated. The largest bone of contention currently is the lack of an economic impact assessment of the measures, which the government has said it will produce “in due course”. The BBC has claimed that the cost of the new rules will be up to £6 billion over the next two years. The Refugee Council have more precisely reckoned it at £8.7 to 9.5 billion over 3 years. The Home Office have admitted that numbers would have to be below 10,000 for the Act to be operational. On the plus side for the Government, former senior judge Lord Sumption has argued that justification for overruling their Rwanda plan by the ECHR would be “slender.” On this point, the Sun is reporting that the Home Office think they can make their first flight to Rwanda in September if the Court of Appeal rules in their favour.

The Prime Minister, on his visit to Dover this week, claimed that his policies were working, as the number of asylum seekers arriving in small boats was down 20% this year. Others have suggested this has had more to do with the weather in the English Channel, and the fact that most crossings take place between July and September.

It is reported that the two new vessels commissioned to house asylum seekers are cruise liners. Apart from the plan for a barge to be moored at Portland, other locations are presently unknown.

The Refugee Council has been protesting this week about the size of the accommodation made available to claimants. Operation Maximise is a deliberate initiative to cram as many claimants as possible into the available accommodation. The leader of Westminster Council has said it “defies common sense and basic decency.”

The UNHCR has produced an audit of the UK asylum system and declared it to be “flawed and inefficient.”  The report particularly points to a lack of training at the Home Office, inadequate information on claimants, lack of skill in interviewing, and an inability to assess children’s ages accurately.

An article in Coda Media has drawn attention to the EU’s International Centre for Migration Policy Development, a shady body based in Vienna that has been supplying Maghreb governments with material to aid disempowering boats aiming to cross the Mediterranean.

AH

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Death penalty report – May June


June 2023

We are pleased to attach the monthly death penalty report thanks to group member Lesley for her work in compiling it. It covers a number of events in America as well as other countries such as Saudi and Iran. As ever it contains no information from China which is believed to execute more of its citizens than the rest of the world combined but details of which are a state secret.

Report May June (Word)Download
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Apartheid in Israel


Report of our forthcoming talk on this subject in the Salisbury Journal and elsewhere

June 2023

Past event

In today’s (8 June 2023) copy of the Salisbury Journal is a piece about our forthcoming talk and it refers readers to this site to get details of the published reports about the apartheid system in operation in Israel. A link to those reports and some further background can be found here. The talk takes place on 13th June starting at 7:30 pm in the United Reform Church in Fisherton Street. It is free with a parting collection.

There is another post with a link to the UN report.

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Covid enquiry objections


June 2023

The Conservative party has made no secret of its desire to either abolish the Human Rights Act or to replace with it with a Bill of Rights, removing some of the protections within the HRA. Some members of government want to go further and withdraw us from the European Court of Human Rights largely connected with its desire to deport immigrants to Rwanda. At least three of their election manifestos have made plain their distaste for the act.

Both our local MPS – Messrs John Glen and Danny Kruger – have spoken against the act and the analysis of their voting records by They Work for You shows that they generally vote against human rights issues.

So it comes as a surprise to discover that in the current row about the release of information and WhatsApp messages etc to the Covid enquiry, the government is deploying … the Human Rights Act, the very act they want abolished.

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People in the Park


May 2023

Members of the group took part in this event for the second time. The sun shone and there was a respectable interest in our activities. Friendly passers by signed the 40 letters of petition (on behalf of Vladimir Kara Murza)  produced by group member Tony, so that we had to get another 10 printed making 50.

Three people expressed interest in the group and gave emails.

Refugee factsheet March 2023Download
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May minutes


May 2023

We are pleased to attach a copy of the minutes of the May meeting, thanks to group member Andrew for compiling them. They contain details and links to current activities and concerns including immigration, the current laws being processed through parliament to limit campaigning activity and the forthcoming talk about apartheid in Israel . The People in the Park event took place after the meeting.

May minutes (Word)Download
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Israel apartheid talk


This evening – 7:30

May 2023

Further details of the planned talk on 13th June are available

Garry Ettle, a prominent human rights activist is coming to speak in Salisbury at the invitation of the Salisbury group of Amnesty International (AI) and Sarum Concern for Israel Palestine (SCIP). The evening meeting is the latest in a long series of events designed to fulfil the request of the residents of Bethlehem to ‘Come and see, go and tell.’

The Nakba 75 commemoration, in May, which included an address by the Dean of Salisbury, filled the Quaker Meeting House to capacity.

Garry Ettle, a committed and highly principled human rights activist has opposed the Israeli authorities’ system of apartheid for years. 

Peter Curbishley, from the AI group based in Salisbury said that the talk would be based on the Amnesty report on the apartheid system in operation against the Palestinians in Israel. The Amnesty report is detailed and follows other reports by B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch on the same subject. There will be an opportunity to ask questions.

  • The talk APARTHEID AGAINST PALESTINIANS? will take place at the United Reformed Church in Fisherton Street, Salisbury on Tuesday 13 June starting at 7:30pm – free with a parting collection.

   Zaytoun Fair Trade produce will be on sale.

The crime against humanity of apartheid is perpetrated when particular serious human rights violations are committed with the purpose of establishing and maintaining’ a system of domination by one racial group…..over another and systematically oppressing them.

  • UN apartheid convention 1973

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