If you judge a man on what he does and not just what he says, then it seems obvious multimillionaire Labour activist Gary Neville is in reality a Tory.
‘I’m not a socialist, I’m a capitalist,’ the former Manchester United defender turned Sky Sports commentator and plutocrat businessman told the world on Instagram this week. ‘I believe in entrepreneurialism. I believe in companies making profit. I believe in lower taxes. And I also believe that distribution of profit should be spread amongst us.’
It goes without saying, these are sentiments with which Margaret Thatcher herself would have nodded in ecstatic assent – particularly when uttered from the lips of a working-class boy done good from the north of England.
Last year, Gary, who voted for Jeremy Corbyn at the 2019 election and at the start of this year officially joined the Labour party, told the Times: ‘I believe in private education. I was state-educated, but my two children now go to private school… Yes, I travel first class on the train. I’m not going to apologise.’
Certainly, the 47 year-old does not seem to possess a natural affinity for the left’s foundational desire for the proletariat to seize from private ownership the means of production and distribution.
In fact, Gary has profited massively over decades by doing exactly the opposite, working first as a player and now as a presenter for privately-owned organisations that have done so much to price working class football fans out of their beloved sport.
Companies House records show that his businesses have assets in the region of £70 million. He has interests in a hotel, an estate agency, restaurants and a media production company. He is also part owner of a loss-making football team – Salford FC – that has required millions in funding simply to stay afloat.
It’s easy to understand, perhaps, why Gary wants to be seen as part of the left, even if it sometimes grates to hear him attacking ‘elites’ he is far wealthier than.
He’s described his father as ‘staunch Labour’ and he wouldn’t be the first celebrity to experience class guilt over quite how far success has transported him from humble beginnings.
But he’s also made no secret that his political outlook is shaped by his decidedly uncommon experience of top-tier football – a place of scarcely credible excess, where lavishly remunerated young men from all over the world compete for prizes ultimately worth billions of pounds.
‘The Premier League is a great representation of what England should be’, he said last year. But is it really?
Perhaps Gary means a bit more competition might be just what’s needed to save the NHS, or that the threat of some kind of relegation might be required to get the nation’s unemployed back into work, but one suspects not.
What is clear is that Gary seems to believe that exorbitantly talented foreign footballers playing in England is a template for a British immigration policy post-Brexit (he was a remainer, naturally).
He told the Times: ‘My politics is driven by what I saw in the changing room, tolerating different people… You imagine the upbringing Gary Neville had compared to Nemanja Vidic in Serbia. You imagine the upbringing of Gary Neville compared to Eric Djemba-Djemba from Cameroon.’
‘Completely different. We are different cultures, different religions, different skin colours, but we were all one. We fought as one. We weren’t divided.’
There is something sufficiently naïve about this equivalence between the Manchester United first team changing room and the day-to-day experience of the rest of the nation that it is almost touching. But it’s a naivety consistent with much else of Gary’s political thinking.
When a member of the public had the temerity to ask him on Twitter if he considered himself ‘a champagne socialist or a limousine liberal?’ he replied: ‘I’d like a world where everyone can drink champagne, be in a limousine but still look after one another’ – a remark that reveals he does at least hold one core belief of the left: the existence of a magic money tree.
Gary Neville is by no means the first multimillionaire celebrity to use his profile this way. Gary Lineker, for example, is also only too happy to promote leftish causes – his role as the supposedly politically neutral BBC’s highest paid talking head notwithstanding.
Likewise, comedian Russell Brand is another good example – a man unafraid to attack the evils of capitalism despite having amassed more money than most people could ever dream of possessing.
But Neville is different. He isn’t just another famous face. Instead, increasingly he’s a business magnate who through his various impressive commercial activities is generating wealth and creating opportunities not just for his hundreds of employees, but also for many thousands of people in his community.
That Gary is prepared to state publicly he is an entrepreneurial low taxation capitalist and not a socialist is to his credit, especially given the pressures to say otherwise by the Labour leadership he seems to want so much to impress .
But why not go further? You can still be a working class hero and a Tory, Gary. You just have to admit it.
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