CRICKET: Constructive Engagement revisited
Why shouldn't England visit Zimbabwe?
Few people come out of the decision by England to play their Zimbabwe-allocated matches in next month’s Cricket World Cup. Certainly the England Captain, Nasser Hussain, did himself and his peers no favours by advancing as a ‘defence’ the line that — we can’t be expected to take decisions on where we play cricket, that’s for politicians, and we’re too stupid to understand the issues. There was a time when people wrote elaborate codicils bequeathing treasures to the nation, instructing that the perpetual trustees must be the ‘Prime Minister, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Captain of England’ of the day. The reason why Mr Hussain sought refuge in ‘no comment, I’m thick’ is that patently he believes touring Zimbabwe to be wrong, whilst equally he is quite intelligent enough to realise that, as the Government won’t finance any breach of contract by England, the game’s afoot. His fear is unwarranted, and seeing why says depressing things about the ability of the Right to remember why it was right in the past, and, what we should do with such victories as we achieved.
Once upon a time, the issue of sporting boycotts against dictatorial regimes in Southern Africa was an easy one for most Tories to come to grips with: we were against them. When, during the long sporting and cultural boycott of South Africa, decent, humane liberal types looked at us with an especial horror, our explanations for this stance were plentiful and sincere. We pointed to the hypocrisy — why subject innocent and guilty alike to this collective punishment, when of all the unSwedens on the go in the world, South Africa was demonstrably far from being the worst? Then there was the utility argument: what evidence was there that this policy, which made (some of) us in the West feel good, was actually going to do anything concrete to achieve its objective?
It’s fashionable now to attribute the ceding of power by whites in South Africa to a sense of shame, brought about by this ‘white on white’ moral suasion, but that’s only a theory. Another one, and in my opinion, much more convincing it is too, is that FW de Klerk cut a deal because he, rightly or wrongly, calculated that the force his regime rested on was essentially running out. That the RSA’s security agencies, predominantly black and getting blacker, were beginning to become distinctly unreliable, and the time had come to get off the stage with dignity. Who knows what caused one politician to lead his faction to make the settlement it did, still less whether, by that faction’s own lights, they made the right set of choices, but the recorded historical impact of the sporting boycott on the leadership of the old National Party is negligible.
At the heart of right-wing opposition to the sporting boycott of apartheid South Africa was not so much an argument about them, but an argument about us. Which was that we should be free to make our own moral choices in life, and that this applies to those who play games, just as much as it applies to everyone else. Indeed, there was a positive reluctance to allow the state to make our minds for us, as to whether personal repugnance of statist racialism in a foreign country was best discharged by an involuntary sporting boycott at the national representative level. Military action could have been the response of the state, or again government could have expressed our common abhorrence at what was going on in South Africa by comprehensive economic sanctions, but we never did go down this road.
The ‘front line states, those harpies like Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, and Zambia screamed loudest at Commonwealth conferences for Western countries to impose all manner of sanctions on South Africa, but, of course, they never entertained for a moment the idea that they might do likewise. It was thus only the elite sportsmen who carried our morals forward for us — not, naturally, that they had any choice in the matter. Mrs Thatcher never really did have much luck in imposing her opinions on sportsmen either because, given half the chance there is little doubt that she would cheerfully have allowed England to play test matches against South Africa. The responsible sorts in her governments, however, always scared her off with terrible claims as to what the results would be (the results for British ‘prestige’, not the cricket scores). She didn’t even get her way when it came to the 1980 Olympics, held in Moscow in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Prime Minister wanted British athletes to boycott the games, but not the blindest bit of attention was paid to her. And this was as it should have been: sport is too trivial to become the plaything of politicians. When ministers regulate even the games we play with each other, bureaucratic tyranny has reached down much too deep.
What the presence of British sportsmen in Moscow in 1980 also shows is that rage against the regime is selective. There’s surely little doubt that the USSR wasn’t a hugely nice place in 1980, possibly even more revolting that the NP’s Republic of South Africa. Yet our beloved liberal left didn’t take to the streets to protest against ‘our’ track and field paladins bringing back all those gold medals. Nor for that matter did the Right produce a Peter Hain of its own, agitating continuously against this seeming subservience to Communistic militarism. Though that’s changed today, for a mere quarter of a century or so on, we have the slavering figure of Michael Ancram, demanding that government stop England from travelling to Zimbabwe, and in his wake, countless Conservative propagandists make the charge of ‘hypocrisy’ against all those anti-apartheid activists in the Labour government who campaigned so ardently for the South African boycott. The government doubtless is being hypocritical, but only in as much as every Tory who was sceptical about sanctions against South Africa in the 1980s, yet calls for them against Zimbabwe today, is equally so. More fundamentally, the reasons why the Tory arguments of two decades ago were right then still hold good: not least that in Zimbabwe we have a moral matter far less pressing than that presented by Red China, home to the next Olympic Games.
Australia, under the usually inestimable John Howard, made the early running for the ICC nations to boycott such World Cup matches as have been scheduled in Zimbabwe. In part this stems from Mr Howard’s leading involvement in the Commonwealth troika that has been invigilating Mugabe. The other, typically Australian, motivation has been the need, once the possibility of a boycott was raised, to ensure that if Australia unilaterally refused to meet a fixture in Zimbabwe, she wouldn’t simply lose her qualification points by this action. Hence the official Australian line has been, ‘we want everyone to pull out, but we’ll only put out if everyone else does’. Up against this impulse, for both the English and Australian boards, has been the very real fact that if they break the contracts they’ve signed, they are liable to be sued (this is the first World Cup where the sport’s governing body, the ICC, has negotiated the rights, and therefore the profits and liabilities itself). Our own government has made it perfectly plain that it won’t be compensating anyone, and especially not broadcasting companies, due to any fit of moralism.
We argued in the 1980s that government should take a back seat from an arena that wasn’t any of its legitimate concern: that if sportsmen wished to play in South Africa, that was their affair. This argument ran along more general lines too. ‘Constructive engagement’ held that if there were lots of e.g. British multi-nationals operating in South Africa, their progressive Labour policies would work against the maintenance of a segregationist economy — if you got a decent rate of pay from the subsidiary of a British PLC, you weren’t liable to work for less at the Boer alternative. You in this instance being poor and black and wanting a chance in life, and having more important issues to deal with in your everyday life than whether one lot of very rich people played games in your country or not. The final vindication for this way of thinking didn’t, sadly, occur under Mrs Thatcher, but when the ANC’s South Africa obstinately faced down the British and Australia Labour governments of the late 1990s, and refused to impose sanctions on the Nigerian dictatorship precisely because they’d disproportionately affect the most disadvantaged most.
That the idea that playing cricket in Zimbabwe would be a bad show has percolated into the mind of Nasser Hussain has a lot to do with the publicity success of the Conservative Party in convincing him that this is so. They, it would seem, appear to believe that although trade should continue with Zimbabwe, and despite the self-evident truth that this pathetic gesture will do nothing to relieve black or white suffering in that country (an invasion would, but advocates of that are thin on the ground), England being obliged by ministerial fiat to dodge their matches would be a Good Thing. Michael Ancram is a very nice man, with a long track record of doing stupid, if not culpably wrong things — his time as a Northern Ireland Office minister is hardly wreathed in moral glory — and he is true to form here. England, the cricket team, should be free to decide whether they go to Zimbabwe during the World Cup: and if they do, it won’t do a single thing for Robert Mugabe’s chances of staying in the office we put him in so long ago.
John Rugby, January 19, 2003 11:05 PM