It's only football -- or is it a blow against Brexit?

Classic Graun commentary on England v Germany in the Euros qualifier yesterday (before the match):

Patriotic hubris and old footballing rivalries are harder to sustain in a world becoming more closely connected

Noting that some of the players play for clubs in the opposing countries, the writer , one Philip Oltermann, who also has a book to plug, thinks this represents some sort of imagined Graun future where sporting rivalries offer

a story of increased international entwinement, at a time when Brexit has spun the two countries in different directions. As vessels for narratives about the nation state, for once, they no longer look fit for purpose. Instead, they look ahead of the curve.

So it is not just a game then?It does have some political and cultural significance? It can be watched by Islington luvvies? He offers them a few guidelines to reinfirce their cultural distance from ordinary fans. The English press  offered:

pictures of Paul Gascoigne and Stuart Pearce, Photoshopped to look like second world war soldiers, were published in the Daily Mirror in 1996 [!] alongside the headline “Achtung! Surrender”....Germany’s dominance on the football pitch and the tennis courts (Boris Becker and Steffi Graf won their respective singles tournaments at Wimbledon in 1989[!] )] touched a deeper paranoia about being sidelined by what was now Europe’s largest economy....When Germany knocked England out of the Euro semi-finals in 1996, John Redwood urged Times readers to “think again about the problem of Germany”...Tabloid attempts to frame that encounter in terms of martial conflicts of the past – “Let’s blitz Fritz” wrote the Sun in 1996 – look in hindsight more like desperate diversion tactics, a case of “Don’t mention the economy”

 Meanwhile the cosmopolitan and only slightly superior Germans:

have spoken of the clash in more celebratory tones. “To play against England at Wembley, that’s awesome”, said midfielder Leon Goretzka....One reason for this has purely to do with sport: Germany’s real grudge matches are against teams that have inflicted painful defeats, like Italy or the Netherlands. Matches against England, by contrast, tend to produce happy memories: England have won only six out of 24 matches against West and reunified German teams since 1966. Germany won England’s last match at the old Wembley stadium, and the first after it was demolished and rebuilt. “Four World Cups and three European Championships” is the correct response to England’s “Two World Wars and one World Cup” chant.

The cultural critics (with popular history books to write) just cannot move on. It's like all that stuff about the return of Teddy Boys and fears of Napoleon (elsewhere) their parents used to frighten them with.

The Times had a slightly different account from its man in Hamburg, incidentally, describing German fans singing not Ode to Joy but a parody of the UK national anthem based on their goalkeeper as king.

 

Meanwhile, the Gru report today of the England fans' reactions to the match and the win did not seem too hostile. 

[The mood] ranged from quiet confidence to bold optimism...“Germany’s not very good at the moment, and the English team are fit and young,”...“I’m nervous, I can’t lie, it’s risky. But I think the side is balanced and they’ll come through with a masterstroke. I see us going through to the quarter-finals,” said an assured Wasam.[probably not a white racist?]... “This is a new England. The side has good penalty-takers, they’re young, fit, confident – I believe we could win this,” said a vibey Ali as the pair bopped to Mas Que Nada [that old racist chant] ...“I reckon we’ll scrape by.”...“It just proves anything can happen,” said 26-year-old Sarah Asher on her way to the pub to celebrate England’s first knockout win against Germany in 55 years.

No-one mentioned the War.

 

 

The Graun balances on a sausage

Lots of background manoeuvring here over the provisions (sic) of the Irish Protocol and the end of the grace period in June after which we have to implement the full idiocies of EU policy on 'allowing' goods into NI from the mainland. 

 

Newsnight last night miscalculated and got the balance wrong and had 2 EU critics on for 1 supporter. One was a Trump delegate to NI who criticised Biden's reported approach to Johnson -- he had issued an unprecedented demarche (diplomatic rebuke) over Johnson's recalcitrance and had urged him to settle with the EU (confirmed today by the Times). N Dodds was allowed to voice his suspicion that the EU did not care about the Good Friday Agreement at all, as when it threatened to suspend it to block vaccine trade, and was using the issue to punish us for Brexit. Unlike the previous night, everyone's sound feed worked well too. E Maitlis did not rant either -- surely it cannot be that she only rants if she has the crowd behind her?. What happened?

 

The Graun had three pieces of various degrees of partisanship;

 

The first reported the official views of both sides (EU patience is wearing thin, UK is confident settlement will be reached), and made some simple debating points. The one I have never heard before is the EU point that the crisis can be mostly solved quite simply:

“If you are sending sausage, cheese or meat products to Northern Ireland the very easy solution is to just put the sticker on it: ‘for Northern Ireland only’, and … we agreed on a simplified export health certificate [which could still be the real problem?]. Do you think that one of these things has happened? No, none, nothing was done,” he said.

Other areas where substantive progress was not made, according to the UK, included freedom of movement for pets without passports, trusted trader status for agrifood suppliers, and tariffs on steel and parcels...Progress was made on guide dogs entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain and the EU’s repeated request for access to UK customs IT systems. The EU had promised further proposals on the supply of medicines and livestock movements, Downing Street said....

In particular:

In a statement, the UK side said no substantive progress had been made on the prospect of a veterinary agreement, which the EU believes could mean 80% of the agrifood checks disappear and could work as a temporary measure...Ministers have objected to the proposal on the grounds that it would mean London observing EU laws again, just six months after Boris Johnson went ahead with a hard Brexit, severing the country’s links to the bloc’s trade rules.

This gets us to sausages and chicken nuggets(eventually)

 

The second item explains in more detail:

the EU is insisting that the full gamut of ​​​​​​sanitary and phytosanitary controls will need to be imposed from 1 October on imports from Britain on meat, fish, eggs and diary [sic], including time-consuming export health certificates (EHCs), which need to be completed by a vet or other qualified person. This would be a killer for trade, making it overly expensive for products to enter Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK....The EU has so far demanded dynamic alignment, if only temporarily, between UK law and its rulebook for these controls to be dispensed with. That is not something the UK will countenance, largely on ideological grounds: they didn’t do Brexit to sign up to EU law

In particular:

From the end of this month, a grace period on an EU prohibition on the sale of chilled meats imported from outside the bloc is due to come into force. The UK could unilaterally extend the grace period on that ban again – but such a move would almost certainly lead to the EU taking the British government to binding arbitration and potentially enforcing tariffs on UK goods entering the single market in retaliation for breaches of their agreements....It is claimed by Frost that many of these difficulties, arising from erecting a regulatory border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, couldn’t possibly have been foreseen in the scale and scope they are now taking.

One final possibility, which again I have never seen raised before, certainly not in the Graun, appears in a third piece

Politico on Wednesday reported that EU officials and diplomats had floated the idea of checking all goods coming from the island of Ireland into the rest of the single market. Such a plan, if confirmed, would mean throwing Ireland under a bus so is unlikely to be a runner. However, it will fuel the UK’s position that the EU is prioritising the single market over peace in Northern Ireland.

Overall, an unusually balanced,almost 'investigative' piece from el Gordo. Perhaps it is detecting a change in the wind. After all, the Times reports that:

New polling and research by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) found that the majority of those surveyed in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Austria now held the view that the European project was “broken”....[In particular] Around 62 per cent French people polled perceived the EU as “broken” rather than “working well” ahead of their own presidential elections in April.