Millwall’s racist fans and defending the indefensible

It is hard to decide what was more abhorrent: the booing of players at The Den, home of Millwall FC, when they took a knee prior to the match against Derby County in solidarity with Black Lives Matter recently, or the squalid defence of the booing by such as Paul Embery, someone on the left in Britain who’s gained himself a deserved reputation in recent years for defending the indefensible.

Let us not pretend. Support for an entity in Britain referred to as the ‘white working class’ is support for a politics rooted in ethno-nationalism. It is pandering to nativism dressed up as defence of community and tradition. It is, in the last analysis, a politics that comes perilously close to the BNP — only with a bit of public ownership thrown in. For just as it doesn’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, it doesn’t require you to be ‘woke’ to know that a section of left in Britain has become corrupted by right wing ideas and tropes.

Britain’s cultural problem with bigotry is only hard to discern for those who, when the political going gets tough, choose to go along to get along instead of taking a stand on the side of its victims regardless of how difficult or unpopular such a stance may be.

The idealisation of the working class is not socialism. Defending a section of the working class when…