I’ve just finished reading Gary Imlach’s splendid My Father and Other Working Class Football Heroes, and I can heartily recommend it to anyone interested in football and its place in our social history. Stewart Imlach was a footballer from the pre-Premiership, pre-Sky days of the maximum wage and when footballers were traded like commodities, with little or no say in their own destiny.

I see the Premier League, and all of the razzamatazz surrounding it as a pretty good metaphor for New Labour. Sky TV and the Premier League have almost reinvented the game, as if everything that went before was irrelevant or of little genuine consequence. The hundred years that went before conveniently forgotten or treated as some sort of historical relic. So it seems too with New Labour.

The days when the Party would oppose madcap privatisation of essential services, or have a genuine dialogue with the trade union movement, are regarded with the same sort of puzzled scorn that young football fans reserve for grainy black-and-white images of Tom Finney or Jimmy Greaves. Never mind the fact that Greaves easily outscored Shearer, or that Finney had to display his skills on a mud heap rather than a billiard table surface. And the Preston plumber would rather have quit the game than rely upon cheating like the diving Ronaldo and his fellow prima donnas.

Of course, with the old Football League, and Old Labour, nostalgia can give the old spectacles a rosy tint. I don’t yearn for the days when the only people treated with less respect than the players by a football club were the spectators themselves. The terraces, open to the elements, were a disgrace, the toilets were worse, and the ‘refreshments’ on offer were anything but refreshing. And on the pitch itself the levels of physical violence would lead to games being abandoned for two few players in the current disciplinary climate. Nor for the days when women were welcomed by the Labour Party to make the sandwiches for the socials, and black people and other minority groups were regarded with suspicion and worse. The days when trade union general secretaries would wield the votes of millions, without having to trouble to consult the poor bloody infantry.

Perhaps it is just a case of the older generation saying things were better in my day, I don’t know, but nostalgia has never been a big thing with me. I tend towards the Loudon Wainwright III lyric… “The good old days are good and gone, that’s why they’re good, because they’re gone.” But back in the day, both the game and the Party seemed to be about more than money. Way back then the right wing of the Party used to manipulate us in order to get their policies through, not because someone was offering them a windfall on a second mortgage or a new kitchen from John Lewis.
And because then, our footballers and politicians came from us, and lived amongst us. And they had passion for what they did because they loved it, not because it paid well. And both were essentially working class.