The recent entanglement of government in the racism scandals that have rocked football in recent weeks has brought culture secretary Jeremy Hunt to the middle- to forefront of social awareness. Most of us would be lying if we said that we had dwelled much on Mr. Hunt and his policies of late, or considered him one of the political heavyweights during the Conservatives’ last year and a half in power. In fact, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that his last and only major appearance in the public domain was as the recipient of an unfortunate mispronunciation of his surname.
Nevertheless, he is in the news again, along with the Prime Minister himself, expressing concern over the recent high-profile cases of racism in the Premier League. In fact, the furore surrounding these incidents has escalated to such an extent that Cameron will be taking the matter up with governing bodies and players’ representatives.
I have been following the Suarez/Evra and Terry/Ferdinand sagas not only because my football team is embroiled in one of them (on the good side), but also because the government’s decision to involve itself in them marks the second recent instance of Westminster’s wading in on issues not strictly political.
We ought to first note that there is nothing intrinsically bad about government butting in on affairs that are not within its stipulated remit. In scenarios like this one, people may argue over whether the insults hurled in the heat of the moment on the pitch warrant a ban or a slap on the wrist. But there is an unequivocal consensus that racism is a bad thing, and that nobody wants football to fulfil its potential to revert to being a festering, miasmic breeding ground for the stuff. That the government wishes to engage in a constructive process towards countering a trend that we all agree to bad, is thus not objectionable in the slightest.
But it does typify the kind of action that can, in other circumstances, be alarming. Recent parliamentary pressure on Stephen Hester to give up his bonus at RBS may or may not be one of these cases. Opinion is divided as to whether he ought to have received additional compensation for improving RBS’s lot after he was hired by Gordon Brown’s Labour to rescue the bank. There is just a little unease, though, at the setting of the precedent of politicians dictating (albeit through cajoling) how corporations pay their employees.
Jeremy Hunt acknowledged people’s qualms when it comes to state involvement, during an interview with Andrew Marr, although he was talking at the time about freedom of the press. “Everyone agrees that we don’t want the state regulating content”, reassured Mr. Hunt. “The press makes life for me and my colleagues very uncomfortable, but that’s what keeps us on the straight and narrow”. It’s good to hear that the government is sensitive to the implications of a melodramatic crackdown on the journalistic industry (though there is of course room for debate on how harsh the response to the Leveson enquiry should be). As long as the state intervenes when the outcomes are agreed to be good, and steers clear when it recognises the undesirability of intervention, everyone’s happy. But there is still a good case for mechanisms that restrict the government to a more specific purview, even if we do trust the judgment of those currently in power. As Marr said to the culture secretary at the start of the interview, by way of questioning the effectiveness of any journalist-run regulatory body: “self regulation is self regulation. And it hasn’t worked in the past.”
