This week it was announced that Manchester City FC – which has dominated English football in recent years – has been found guilty by an independent panel of 114 charges relating to the breaking of the Premier League’s financial rules.
- The essential charge is that the owners of the club – in essence the Government of Abu Dhabi – spent more than they were allowed to. Money was funnelled through various off-balance sheet means.
- I am not sure I am using “balance sheet” correctly.
- The judgement leaves little room for doubt. There were only ever 115 charges. The Premier League’s language is not diplomatic.
I doubt that the “appeal” will amount to much. - I am in two minds about the rules themselves. On the one hand, I think people should be allowed to waste their money in any way they choose. On the other, I don’t like seeing clubs go bust.
- Everybody knew. This always stank.
- The investigation only came about because emails were hacked and published in – of all things – Der Spiegel. Before that the Premier League in traditional British style had turned a blind eye.
- Manchester City seem to think that denial and obstruction is the way to go. They have to know that is not the case. This may be a cultural thing.
- And a political thing. The Prime Minister has thought it a good idea to wade in. It is even beginning to look as if British politicians can be bought. Well, to those who didn’t already think that British politicians could be bought.
- Such machinations do not bode well for the integrity of the government’s recently-formed “independent” football regulator.
- Politics and sport don’t mix. The whole point about sport is that it takes you away from politics.
- This is about sporting integrity: the idea that everyone is playing by the same rules, on and off the pitch. And it is not just the principle of the thing. Sporting integrity sells.
- The Premier League must understand it will take a hit from this. A huge hit. The only real question is how big and for how long. A few years ago I took to watching the Indian Premier League (that’s cricket). It turned out that the team I had been supporting had been bribed to throw games. I haven’t watched cricket since and I doubt I ever will.
- The punishment must be severe. It is the only way that sporting integrity can be rebuilt and shown to be being rebuilt.
- There could be all sorts of claims for compensation: “…We would have had this player. We would have won this. We wouldn’t have been relegated” etc. This could take years to settle.
- Punishment must also be swift. The fans will have their say. There is going to be a very unpleasant atmosphere every time Manchester City take the field. If they take the field… What would happen, I wonder, if clubs refused to play them?
- None of the above has anything to do with the fact I am a Watford supporter and am looking forward to the day when my team wins the FA Cup despite suffering the biggest-ever defeat in a final.
It would be interesting to see if the HMRC choose to investigate if any laws have been broken.
I think this is a very fair summation.
I support Manchester United. The owners have for years been taking money out of the club. In the case of City, the reverse is true. However, they did so in breach of the rules of the Premier League, and they knew it.
The owners “topped up” the money from sponsors by hidden payments. In years where actual sponsorship was about £10 million, they declared it was £100 million, and paid the balance into the club as if it were sponsorship money. This is quite simply false accounting, and a criminal offence.
The upshot is that City could afford to buy and pay the wages of the best players, whom they could not have afforded on their true revenue. It is cheating.
I believe that City needs to be ejected from the Premier League, and indeed the Football League. They can start again in non-league football.
They need to be fined the same amount they cheated other clubs by, namely £900 million.
All the trophies they won when they were cheating should be forfeit.
Going forward, it is clear that sovereign states should not be allowed to own football clubs.
Culturally, this fiasco seems to derive from the fact that City were owned by an Arab absolute monarchy. The rulers are not subject to the rule of law in their own country, and do not seem to understand that Manchester is not Abu Dhabi. They are corrupt, and corrupt everything they touch.
Probably shouldn’t be letting foreign governments own outright or a share of UK companies and organisations full stop. Poisoned chalice
I mean strictly speaking Abu Dhabi United Group is a private equity group, but the owner is a member of the Abu Dhabi Royal Family and the UAE’s Vice President, and the accounts are managed by the Abu Dhabi government.
The problem for me is that those least responsible for the wrong doing, that is the Manchester City fans, will be the most affected by many of the proposed punishments.
FWIW, I find analysis of this really hard to do because it rests on something I find utterly insane, which is to say how many people commit so much of their resources into supporting sports teams. Teams that often treat them as dirt, as fools to be exploited, as the great unwashed masses to be milked like a cow.
Don’t get me wrong, I like a good football game, I grew up supporting (Glasgow) Rangers and so enjoy watching them, and I have grown to love and appreciate American football too (I am utterly baffled by what people like about baseball though.) I coached all my kids in miscellaneous sports, so I am not some basement dwelling culture hater.
But what I don’t understand is how it went from an amusing pass time to an life altering obsession.
I used to live about a quarter of a mile away from Ibrox (where Rangers play) and at another time even closer to Tynecastle (where Hearts play) and actually grew up most of my childhood at the top of the hill above Hampden (which is the SFA’s national stadium.) Just thinking about it I am surprised how much of my time I lived near major football stadiums. And so I saw some of the horrific behavior of sports fans. Trash, drinking and puking, outrageous amounts of fights and violence and all the worst parts of humanity in a tribal setting.
Why do people want a part of that? I mean how did a fun game out with friends and family turn into the worst of humanity. I remember the first time I watched the Bears play at Soldier field I was shocked to see that fans supporting different teams all sat together. In Scotland they have huge high fences keeping the sides apart, and different entrances. The police go to great lengths from allowing the fans of opposing teams to get too near each other.
And for the privilege you have to pay many hundreds of dollars for tickets and grossly inflated concession prices. The whole thing seems exploitive to me. I mean people can do what they want, but the whole think with European and British soccer just reeks of madness, insanity, tribalism and humans at their very worst.
FWIW, Americans do sports MUCH better than Europeans. It really is a fun day out for family (though ticket prices are quite as equally insane.)
One of the biggest con jobs these sports teams have is the idea of team loyalty. You have to support your team through good times and bad, and if you don’t you are a fair weather fan, which is about the worst thing you could be. What other business has conned their consumers into thinking they are bad if they stop buying the product is it becomes more inferior? Surely a business should win the loyalty of their consumers by doing a good job? By winning matches and tournaments? By improving the experience? But somehow it is a sign of a true sports fan if you accept any old crap they shovel down your throat.
“The problem for me is that those least responsible for the wrong doing, that is the Manchester City fans, will be the most affected by many of the proposed punishments.”
Um how exactly? If Man City were to be forced to play in the lower echelons of the UK’s footballing pyramid for a number of years, how exactly does that make the fans ‘most affected’? Have they lost any money? Are they going to lose their livelihood by being made redundant? Is something they have invested maybe 10 years or more of their lives to achieve about to be taken away from them? Of course not, they would still get to go to their stadium every other week and watch their allegedly beloved team kick a ball around. All they’d lose is the reflected glory of being a supporter of a sports club that’s been very successful, albeit via cheating on an industrial scale. Its hardly the salt mines is it?
I think the employees of MC who may be made redundant and the players (including many youth team and marginal squad members) whose professional careers may be massively impacted or even ended have a far greater claim to be the most affected by this scandal, despite having zero input into it happening. Equally there may be all sorts of projects and businesses around the football club that rely on the money that Man City’s on field success has brought to the locale, who will also suffer significant losses. But the fans? Nah, most of them will just up sticks and support whoever is the next winner. Meet the new team, same as the old team.
The Sage of Kettering would no doubt remind us that it was Mussolini who first had a Minister for Sport, (albeit the Soviets might have had some Commissar), and I think most of all of East Germany (which seems to have gone so far West as to now be in England), and yet we have a Minister (or rather Secretary of State) for Culture, Media and Sport (or whatever) and next to no one seems to think it bizarre or totalitarian that a government should concern itself with the private affairs of a group of football teams and how they run their businesses. A loser will be the UK government if Man City go bust and/or get expelled (and the owners would surely abandon it if chucked into a non-League situation) as so much tax on players’ wages would be lost.
And under British employment law, come 2027, if the players were dismissed or had their wages cut they would have claims for potentially unlimited compensation for loss of earnings, only avoidable if the Club were facing insolvency.
Still, it’s only a game and the rules are only a contract between parties.
It’s the “circuses” part of bread and circuses.
It provides an outlet for frustration that ISN’T aimed at government. It saves government itself from being faced with “madness, insanity, tribalism and humans at their very worst.”
I think those expressions come through to some extent in every society. This is one way in which Europe chooses to channel theirs away from anti-gov sentiments. They have a LOT of anti-gov sentiment in Europe.
Imagine soccer hooligans without soccer but mad about illegal immigration. I would imagine that much of a violent anti-government mob would be made up of those same soccer hooligan types. Sort of a near-complete Venn overlap.
Soccer mobbing keeps them from overthrowing gov.
There is plenty of precedent for demoting them to a much lower league. These are old cases, but involving major clubs.
— Fiorentina were denied a place in Serie B because they were broke. Which was the final nail pushing them into actual bankruptcy. They reformed and were back to normal in a couple of years.
— Olympic Marseilles were demoted for financial irregularities. (And bribery, which I would not rule out with Man City — if you are going full on fraudulent, why would you stop at just irregularities?)
And there are plenty of cases of much smaller financial crimes getting serious punishment in the UK.
In every case the club survived, so a severe punishment is unlikely to spell the end of Man City. Though hopefully of the current owners.
@Chester Draws, there is a much better example, namely (Glasgow) Rangers, who were the top team in the Scottish leagues and had been (in competition with Celtic) for over a hundred years. Due to financial improprieties and tax issues in 2012 they were dissolved and then reformed. The league made them start at the VERY bottom, and over the next few years had to work up until they got to the top again, and are currently second place in the Scottish Premiership second only to Celtic.
It was quite a thing to see when they were in the lower Scottish Leagues playing against teams that normally had a couple of hundred people turn up, and have tens of thousands of Rangers supporters turn up.
Yes Mr Ed – and the department should be abolished. Sport was very much part of British life even in the Great Depression of the 1930s – and we did rather well in international competitions, yet there was no government funding.
There was no central government funding or control of the arts either – yet museums and art galleries were free, and a private opera company was so popular (popular with ordinary people) that it had its own private train and went all over the country.
If (if) the British people have become degenerate then no amount of statism will correct this – of one thing I am certain, moral improvement of the people will not come from the state (Gladstone), indeed statism is the very thing that has led to the degeneracy. There was a time when people did not vomit in the streets, or leave litter (including drink and drugs stuff) everywhere, or defile war memorials – and people were not richer then, they were poorer.
As for Mr Burnam – his involvement long predates his time as Prime Minister, as “Mayor of Manchester” (really the head of a regional authority – NOT the Mayor of a City in the traditional English sense) he was involved up to his neck in all this.
But he will not have to resign – as the puppet masters have decided he is “popular” (popular for no policy reason – just because the media say he is popular, endlessly, tell large parts of the public that someone is popular and they will like him – they will make him popular, because they have been told he is) – and useful to them.
Nothing that Mr Burnham suggests is really his idea, such things as Regional government (falsely described as “devolution” when it is really the opposite), have been pushed by the establishment for a long time – but Mr Burnham is a plausible “front man” (or “presenter” – to use a kinder word) for the establishment collectivist policies.
The state in Britain has been expanding, even as a proportion of the economy, for a very long time (since the 1870s – yes as far back as that) and society and culture have been in the process of being undermined since at least the 1960s – but “Andy” Burnham may indeed be the end point, not because there is anything special about him (there is not), and not because any of these ideas were thought up by him (they were not) – he will just happen to be Prime Minister (chosen by the powers that be – if “puppet masters” is thought rude) when the system finally falls apart.
“There is a lot of ruin in a great nation” – so there is, and Britain was indeed a great nation (note the word “was” – not “is” Jacob Rees-Mogg) – but the “educated” have had a very long time to ruin this nation – their task is almost complete.
As for this specific case…
No Football Club has to be a member of the Football Association – people can play football by Association rules without being members of the Association.
So if club (including a GOVERNMENT OWED club – which is what Manchester City is, it is owned by a foreign government) does not like Association rules – it should leave the Association.
People could still play football on their day off work – which is what many of the Football Clubs were originially about, they were indeed “clubs”.
Before anyone points it out – yes I know that statist experiments (especially in IRELAND – which was used a sort of test lab for various statist ideas – national police force, state education system, crushing Poor Law taxation….) were popular with important members of the British establishment, such as Lord Russell and Lord Stanley from at least the 1830s – but, as a proportion of the economy, the state, at least in England and Wales, actually shrank till the 1870s – and only then started to grow, as a proportion of the economy in England and Wales – for example with the establishment of government schools from 1870 onwards and the increase of income tax after 1874 (income tax reached its low point in 1874 – AND there was also free trade, whereas there had once been tariffs – in the pre income tax days).
There was also change in other ways – for example the rise of “Public Prosecutions” rather than Private Prosecutions, the Licensing Laws for pubs (bars in Irish and American English), obstruction (so called “peaceful picketing” – dry water, friendly intimidation) backed by the state in 1875 – and-so-on.
However, I would say that Britain was still a good society (certainly more good than bad) at least as late as 1964 – but that leads us into a discussion of cultural change (cultural change very much imposed from above – it was not really an organic development), and we can have that discusssion another time.
But certainly the decay is continuing – for example this is not the society (the nation) that it was in the 1980s.
Look how long it took for the establishment to get rid of Margaret Thatcher – eleven years (1979 to 1990) – Liz Truss (Mary O’Leary) was gone in a month or so.
And Liz Truss very much believed the same things that Margaret Thatcher believed (they are the only two Prime Ministers of my life time that I give a damn about – all the other Prime Ministers of my life time have been a waste-of-space) – and did not “crash the economy” – although the brainwashed public believe the lady did that.
The difference was that the establishment (for example the independent Bank of England – dominated by people devoted to the Collectivist agenda of the “International Community”) was vastly stronger in Britain in the time of Liz Truss than it was in the time of Margaret Thatcher.
What took them 11 years in the case of Margaret Thatcher – took them only a month or so in the case of Liz Truss.
@Fraser
My personal observation is that professionalisation ruins sport. It turns a sport into a business and businesses do as they will to stay in business. This includes (perhaps) exploiting their paying customers.
Some thoughts from moi:
This could severely strain relations between the UK and the various Gulf states that have bought assets in the country, and not just sports teams. The UAE and various emirates have bought into “trophy assets” as a sort of international “flex” and attempt to paint a certain self-image for the world. If the Premier League, which is not a state body, remember, tells Manchester City it is being expelled, this could hit the UK. The owner of the club might urge the various Gulf allies to sell UK gilts, which given the dire nature of UK public finance, is not a happy thought.
Whataboutery from Manchester City fans that “they all do it” are pathetic. No, they don’t. When cheating has occurred on a smaller scale, teams got points deducted and in some cases, went down a league.
Agree with JohnK on all his points. States should not own football clubs, and that includes sovereign wealth funds run by autocracies.
There could be grounds for the Crown Prosecution Service to get involved, if actual false accounting has taken place. If the owners claim immunity, deport them.
The regulator is not necessary. Existing authorities, including police, HMRC and so on, should step up.
Man City fans claim that arch rivals Manchester United were guilty of loading up a club with debt. But that debt pile caused by the Glazers’ leveraged buyout of the club 20-plus years ago reduced the ability of Sir Alex Ferguson and other managers to buy hot players. Revenues had to be stoked up to service the debt. ManU lost ground to oil-backed City and oligarch-backed Chelsea. ManU fans are understandably gloating about talk that Man City will be stripped of all the honours gained in the 2009-2018 period covered by the charges. Well, I am an Ipswich fan, and I am also gloating.
This will hit Manchester’s economy if City (pronounced up there, “citeh”) is relegated down a league or two. Not good for Andy Burnham, I guess, who makes much of his Manchester mayorality. He would be well advised not to get involved. I fear he won’t.
Agree that sport and politics don’t mix. But that ship has sailed. Look at the disgraceful treatment of Israel football fans at a game at Aston Villa in Birmingham earlier this year.
The English Premier League will suffer a big loss of global prestige; banks and others will be less willing to sponsor teams because of reputational damage. A few years ago, Italy’s Juventus went through a big match-fixing scandal and the club was relegated. Italian club and arguably national football has suffered great damage.
This sort of thing isn’t a good image to sell to soccer-mad kids. It is awful.
I am a proud Ipswich fan.
In my book, Sir Alex Ferguson rightly is the greatest football manager of modern times, and recent events only solidify that.
Fun fact: Nottingham Forest, which as a relatively modest club in the 1970s achieved the remarkable feat of winning the European Cup twice under Brian Clough and Peter Taylor, has an Italian link: Garibaldi. The great Italian nationalist and freedom fighter famously wore a red shirt, as did his comrades, during the unification of Italy campaigns. He was hailed as a hero by British politicians and was hugely popular among the mass public. When he and his fellows came to the UK in the 1860s, he travelled around the industrial towns of the UK and treated like a celebrity. One of the places he visited was Nottingham, and this was around the time that association football, aka soccer, got going in England. Nottingham Forest was born, and it chose a red shirt because the locals loved Garibaldi. Ever since, the red shirt of NF is known as “the Garibaldi”.
I prefer this sort of story to the idea of an oil-rich autocrat buying a club and engaging in fraud to achieve success.
“Politics and sport don’t mix. The whole point about sport is that it takes you away from politics.”
May be the whole point to you, but sport is often mixed up with identity and politics. Obviously this applies a lot to international sport – the Miracle on Ice, England vs Argentina, the West Indies vs South Africa rebel tours.
But happens at club level too. Glasgow Celtic vs Glasgow Rangers is hardly unpolitical. Hapoel (“the workers”) Jerusalem vs Beitar Jerusalem, founded by the betar nationalist movement. Real (i.e. “Royal”) Madrid vs Barcelona (many of whose supporters want an independent Catalan republic). Or the Barcelona derby against RCD Espanyol – the “R” stands for “Reial”, and the supporters are more likely to support Spanish constitutionalism. Similarly Real Madrid against Rayo Vallecano de Madrid, whose left-wing Bukaneros ultras are firmly republican. And “anti-fascist” enough that they effectively kicked out a Ukrainian player from the club in 2017 after he was revealed he’d been supporting Ukrainian army in Donbas during Russia’s proxy invasion (chanting “Zozulya, you are a Nazi!” until the club removed him… wonder if he’d have been treated with more sympathy in 2022 when the political winds changed, and Ukrainian nationalism and anti-Russian sentiment became acceptable in polite society again).
Then there are some sports or sporting movements whose entire purpose is or was political, like the Gaelic games movement, Maccabiah Games, the British Empire/Commonwealth Games, Putin’s “World Friendship Games” while Russia was excluded from most international competition.
Personally I think it’s nice – and good for social cohesion – to have somewhere that’s an escape from politics, something people from different political backgrounds can share in or talk about without everything descending into an argument. More so given how the field of culture and entertainment seems to have decided “everything is political” (and, in a sense, they’re probably right to think that – my main complaint is whose politics is being represented). But sport is never going to be a perfect escape from all that. Not sure where is. Nature’s a bit of an eco-battlefield. Gardening maybe, if you ignore the loud “decolonialise gardening now!” crowd on some online forums and at educational institutes, and mentally zone out all those “this estate was purchased with the profits of the slave trade” signs that curators seem very keen to put up these days. Light entertainment is a bit less politicised than high culture. TV quiz shows are one of the few remaining apolitical bubbles of shared national culture, though in decline as TV viewership plummets in general – and it’s not hard to find people sounding off about how “eurocentric” the questions are.
I presume :
1. that the rules that citeh are alleged to have broken, ie which could be manipulated by manipulating sponsorship income, were intended to allow a “level playing field” for a better competition, for
2. …if it was just about avoiding bankruptcies which might disrupt the competition, then making yuuge losses would be fine so long as you kept on topping up the capital. It would just be about balance sheets.
3. But if you allow teams with more sponsorship income to spend more on players, then you haven’t got a level playing field have you ?
4. So I deduce that the sponsorship thing was insisted on by the big clubs precisely to preserve their advantage
5. From which I deduce that while citeh should lose its titles, they should not be reawarded to the runners up. Because the runners up were never really interested in a level playing field in the first place.
Most unfortunate for citeh, that there was an investigation at all. They should have asked for the Cambridge solution – water under bridge, let’s not have an invesigation after all these years. Or at least the time honored British government solution, most recently to be seen with the Covid enquiry – choose the terms of reference carefully and the “investigators” even more carefully.
JP’s comments about Garibaldi take the biscuit, he (Garibaldi) is not only commemorated in Newcastle, there is a small plaque commemorating his tour on Grainger Street, and he was even fêted in Fowey, a small but delightful port in Cornwall, where the town museum makes much of his visit.
I think there is considerable force in the argument that football is now the ‘opium of the people’.
Johnathan Pearce and Mr Ed.
And the government that Garibaldi helped establish, the “united Italy”, was far worse than the governments, states, he helped destroy.
Higher taxes, conscription in places that had not had it before – such as in Sicily, language persecution (one form of Italian imposed – spitting on centuries of history and literature in other parts of Italy), and brutal repression with many people killed over many years (Sicily again). The great emmigration from southern Italy came AFTER “unification” – and even in northern Italy such places as Tuscany had lower taxation before the conquest by Piedmont (sorry I mean “before unification”).
And yet Liberals in the 19th century celebrated “Italian unification” – just as they celebrated “German unification” (which also led to higher taxation and-so-on).
Something had gone very wrong with liberalism – even back then. If you are on the same side as Otto von Bismarck – you are on the wrong side.
As for Garibaldi himself – even the new Italy he established was not bad enough for him, he ended up singing the praises of Karl Marx.
On foreign governments owning things in Britain.
How is this not state ownership? Just because it is foriegn states does not make it good.
And these powers are not really our friends – not deep down.
The UAE is threatening to pull billions of dollars/equivalent from the U.K. if the Football League relegates Man City and harshly punishes it. This is what happens when a football club is bought by a foreign government seeking to use sport as a sort of international “flex”. There are conditions. Eventually the integrity of a sport is undermined.
We shouldn’t allow private property to be sold to a foreign state.
This also explains the dangers of the U.K. encouraging domestic wealthy people to leave because of increasingly high taxes. It makes the country even more reliant on outfits such as the Gulf autocracies and China.
Paul: there was nothing inevitable about Italian taxes being higher after unification: it’s not as if the individual bits of Italy were models of good governance before. Much of it was run by Austria. And the south was very poor already.
Anyway, I thought it was an interesting fact that a football team chose its shirt colour this way.
Garibaldi represented a kind of liberal nationalism: think of Greek independence in the 19th century and the liberation movements in Latin America. (Several of these were supported by former British military personnel from the Napoleonic Wars.)
Johnathan Pearce.
Italian “unification” was the conquest by relatively high taxed Piedmont of relatively lower taxed areas – such as Tuscany (but the south was also much harder hit after “unification” than it was before), just as German “unification” was the conquest of relatively low tax places, such as Hanover, by relatively high tax Prussia.
The relatively high taxes went to pay for the army – which was used for the conquest.
And if you end tax-competition, and regulation competion, which was the point of “unification” (to end tax and regulation competition) then of course it is inevitable that taxation and regulation will increase – in Italy, Germany or anywhere else.
By the way – on the UAE investments.
The government keeps telling us that we have the rule of law in Britain – that everyone is treated the same by the “justice system”.
Are you suggesting that the government is not being truthful? That the political and economic importance (all that money) of the UAE might influnce legal matters?
I am shocked Sir! Shocked to the core of my being that there are whores in this brothel.
By the way – I do not deny that Garibaldi would have been an interesting man to meet. Theodore Roosevelt – was a similar type, I do not agree with any of his opinions, but I would like to have met him (Woodrow Wilson had similar “Progressive” opinions to “Teddy” Roosevelt – but I would rather have watched paint dry than meet Woodrow Wilson – a man without a personality).
And I rather like Garibaldi bicuits.
Paul, was the purpose of the Risorgimento to end tax competition within Italy? Was it framed in that way? I doubt it.
Italian regions and cities seem to relish their differences. It’s not just north/south thing.
Johnathan Pearce – was it framed that way? No it was not. Was that the purpose – yes indeed it was.
It was not so obvious as in the German lands – where Bismarck made it blatantly obvious (obvious apart from to the deluded “National Liberals” who supported him – even though he hated them, indeed he had made it obvious that he hated liberalism as early as 1861 when he increased taxes without the consent of the Prussian Parliament – but, please note, the liberals did not oppose the increase in taxation – they just wanted the bigger military under the control of Parliament – not the monarchy, so they had “sold out” from the start), but it was also the purpose for Piedmont as well.
Prime Minister Carvour of Piedmont did not care about Italian traditions – for example he got rid of monasteries that had existed for centuries, he cared about power – increasing his own power and increasing the power of Piedmont – and creating a new state in which people like him could be powerful.
The very first thing the “unification” forces did in Naples was to loot the gold reserves from banks.
Language persecution, conscription in places that had not had it before (such as Sicily), mass killing (again in Sicily – year after year – with any resistance being described as “banditry” – including women).
No wonder “liberalism” became discredited in Italy – as it meant higher taxes, language persecution, religious persecution, conscription, wars in Africa, and-so-on.
But rather than turn to real liberalism – the Italians got Fascism instead, Fascism took the horrible policies already enacted – and made them a 100 times worse, the only good thing about the, despicable, Fascists is that they did not pretend to believe in freedom – they admitted that they were the opposite of real liberalism.
Sincere liberals (and there were some) were driven to despair by what “unification” turned out to be (what it was always intended to be – by the people who were really in control of the process) – one ended up sitting by a lake in Switzerland writing about how everything is really the wire pulling of a small (and vicious) group.
I think he went too far – not everything is one elite group being replaced by a worse elite group, but I can understand why he became depressed – everything he had hoped for had turned out to be a lie.
Liberal support for “unification” in the Italian and German lands was a horrible mistake – they got manipulated by people who despised them.
Oddly enough it started in Switzerland.
No one can honestly claim that the central government forces in 1847 were “trying to end slavery” – as there was no slavery in Switzerland, the brief war in Switzerland was a power grab – and Cantons that did not support the power grab (such as Appenzell Innerrhoden – which just wished to stay out of the fighting) got fined.
Yes (yes) it was a very modest power grab – the new government created was quite limited, but it was bigger than the old government – and a precedent had been set – Cantons who did not like new policies (say the banning of religious orders that the new government decided it did not like) could NOT leave the Union. That was a precedent that has been built on over time. It is also interesting that the rising forces did NOT like the old government by the open air meeting of the citizens (in Cantons they took control of – this was abolished) – professional government by educated officials is what they wanted – although they did NOT fully get that (thankfully).
Switzerland kept the name “Confederation” – but it had really become a Federation. The difference being that in a Confederation it is the Cantons (or States) that have the ultimate power – and in a Federation it is the central government that has the ultimate power.
Again – a very moderate example, but carried very much further in the Italian and German lands.
As for Garibaldi – he ended up rejecting the new Italian state, but only because he wanted it to be vastly WORSE (worse from our point of view).
I suspect (yes I am speculating here) that, had he been around later – he would have gone on the same journey that Mussolini went on, from Marxism (he ended up singing the praises of Karl Marx – although I doubt he had any clear understanding of Marxism) to something else – with the Red Shirts (people who made violence a romantic cult – writing poetry about it and so on) becoming Black Shirts – many of the early Black Shirts were also romantic poets, writing poems about their own violence.
By the way…..
If a single household had voted the other way in the Canton elections in St Gallen in the 1840s – then there would have been no “liberal” government in St Gallen – and no majority in the Confederation Swiss Parliament for using violence against dissenting Cantons.
History turns on small things – such as the vote of a single household, for Switzerland set the precedent that was followed in the German and Italian lands – and elsewhere.
Pareto, sitting by the lake in Switzerland, became so disgusted by what “liberal democracy” turned out to mean, that he flirted with Fascism (although his letters make clear that he did NOT believe in Fascism) – he hoped it might so discredit statism that people would turn away from statism altogether.
That is a bit mad. Basically “let things get vastly worse – so the whole putrid mess is destroyed” (which is mad) – but I can understand his despair.
Billy Connolly said: “The desire to be a politician should bar you for life from ever becoming one.”
He was just mirroring what had already been written by Douglas Adams and Plato before.
That people spend their lives plotting and scheming to rule over the rest of us is beyond my understanding.
Philip Aggrey – Prime Minister Cavour, architect of Italian “Unification”, was such a stereotype of a politician.
Want good media coverage? Bribe newspaper owners to support you – and close down newspapers that refuse the bribes.
Talk about Freedom of Speech – and exile anyone who speaks against your stealing of church property (and other property).
Set up state railways, and state lots of other things, whilst talking about the free market.
Talk about fiscal probity – whilst increasing the national debt six fold (600%).
Get involved in the war to prop up the (despicable – vile) Ottoman Empire in the 1850s – just to show that you are important.
And get your position in the first place – by backstabbing your “friend” the previous Prime Minister.
“But at least he was an Italian patriot!” – not really, for example he gave Nice and Savoy (the House of Savoy was the monarchy of Piedmont – and of the future Kingdom of Italy, and Savoy was where Garibaldi came from – so you have made him a foreigner) to France – in return for French support.
A scumbag. And there are memorials to his “greatness” all over the place.
“Politics and sport don’t mix. The whole point about sport is that it takes you away from politics.”
Not always. Chariot racing in the Byzantine Empire was extremely political. As was football in Glasgow (Rangers versus Celtic).