The World Cup is drawing towards its close today and one benefit means we will get to hear less from Gary Neville, the left-wing right-back who has never met a camera he didn’t like. You would think perhaps that a man like Neville – a multi-millionaire working for the Qatari state broadcaster – might be wary about entering the political fray, given his public humiliation on Have I Got News For You last month. Not a bit of it.
The card-carrying Labour member, who appeared on stage with Keir Starmer at this year’s party conference, instead opted to hijack the World Cup final today to muse on the situation here in Britain. Appearing in the comfortable surroundings of the ITV studio in Qatar, Neville was asked about whether the Middle Eastern state ought to have been chosen as the host nation.
With a better side-step than he ever managed in his playing career, Neville sneered that ‘I always thought it was a nonsense that you shouldn’t have a World Cup in the Middle East and in the Arab world’, adding that ‘I think that’s been put to bed.’ Really, Gary? Having suggest that the World Cup had brought this ‘troubled region’ together, the former Man Utd star pivoted instead to suggest that, somehow, the situations in Doha and London were analogous:
I think that’s become more balanced throughout the World Cup but it doesn’t change the working system which, right the way through the region, and a working system through football that conversation has started. It’s abhorrent and we should detest low pay, detest low pay and poor working conditions and that is something we can never accept in this region or in any region. It is just worth mentioning in our country, there is a country that is demonising rail workers, ambulance workers and terrifyingly, nurses. So in our country, we have to look at workers rights but certainly where football goes now, we have to pick up on worker’s rights wherever we go because people have to be equally treated. We can’t have people being paid a pittance to work, people in accommodation which is unsavoury and disgusting, we can’t have that. It shouldn’t happen with the wealth that exists and it shouldn’t happen in our country where nurses are having to fight for an extra pound or two pounds.
Perhaps ITV ought to preface Neville’s remarks with the time-honoured words: ‘And now, a party political broadcast on behalf of the Labour party’….
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