4. Abandon Social Engineering

It is interesting to note that opposition to organised games virtually disappeared in the 20th century. A century ago, the English sports project was opposed in general by Marxists, Indian, Chinese and German nationalists, the Boy Scout movement, many American educationalists and a variety of religious organisations, among others. American and Irish nationalists opposed the content if not the principle. What converted almost all of these movements - and almost all governments - was a series of instrumental arguments about the benefits of sport for national identity, national prestige, juvenile delinquency and physical and mental fitness. The statement of mine which has been most quoted (it is from my edited book, The Politics of Sport, published in 1986) is the banal observation that "Sport creates usable political resources". It does, partly to its benefit, but also to its cost. Governments support sport, but see it in terms of social engineering and political prestige. We used to complain that sport was too little studied, but now there are conferences full of young researchers talking about how sports clubs can and must be used to further programmes of social inclusion. All of which undermines the voluntary principle because if it is hard work being the secretary of a sports club, it becomes intolerably hard when you have to spend most of your time filling in forms about anti-racism, lottery funding and child protection. You may say that no club has to apply for funding and this is clearly true of wealthy real tennis and golf clubs. But try taking that view when your members are rapidly defecting to the club down the road that has been awarded lottery funding for new facilities.

In short, sport should be treated like the arts. It would not be acceptable for Arts Council funding to be dependent on the ideological projects of the government of the day because we would consider their existence had a value as an end in itself or, at least, that they had a broad, if ill-defined, instrumental value which had to do with spiritual freedom and the quality of life. So it should be with sport.

More Difficult Issues

So far, I have been outlining approaches to policy which follow fairly directly from Conservative political principles and methods. But there are some important issues which pose much more subtle dilemmas for Conservatives. Perhaps the most obvious is the power of the Singo (to give it its jargon acronym) - the Sporting International Non-Governmental Organisation, of which the most powerful are the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Fifa. The construction of global power by these Singos has been impressive: strong will in the context of favourable circumstances has transformed the balance of global power. In the 1970s, Lord Killanin, as IOC president, spent his time pleading with governments, trying to persuade them not to boycott the Games and to interest them in hosting them. For a time it seemed that there wasn't a city on the planet prepared to put a plausible proposal to host the 1984 Olympics - it eventually went to Los Angeles, but at the cost of the IOC abandoning its long-held principles against commercialism, including sponsorship. But by the 21st century, it was a case of governments pleading with the IOC, as Tony Blair did when he successfully flew to the IOC meeting in Singapore in 2005 to put the case for London 2012. The competitors were Paris, Madrid, Moscow and New York!