England’s footballers speak for the new generation better than any politician | Owen Jones

The team are typical of Britain’s progressive young people, unafraid to voice their anger with the status quo

Instead of a trophy, England’s national team have inherited something far more precious: the mantle of the official opposition.

For most of the nation’s under-40s – the generations known as millennials and zoomers – Tory Britain represents a double-pronged onslaught on their economic security and deeply held social values. When Marcus Rashford – a “23-year-old black man from Withington and Wythenshawe”, in his own words – shamed the government into feeding hundreds of thousands of children, he was leading a rebellion on behalf of that most voiceless demographic, the young working class. Since 2010, when the Conservatives came to power with the help of the Liberal Democrats, 800,000 children in working households have been driven below the breadline; however momentarily, they were handed one of the nation’s loudest megaphones. When the England team took the knee, they affirmed the value of the lives of Black people in a nation whose government has cynically fanned racism for electoral ends, up to and including constructing a hostile environment that deported Windrush-generation Britons from their own country.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3kgN4Xi