Where’s the moral outrage at England’s cricket tour of Pakistan?

Everyone on the television agrees: seeing an England team give succour to a repressive regime by playing prestigious fixtures on its soil is deeply troubling – or ‘problematic’ to use the latest horrible buzz word. A society that represses gay people and women and whose ruling class routinely engages in corruption to further its own interests should not be ‘normalised’ via world-class international sport, runs the argument. 

But all these conditions apply in Pakistan just as they do in Qatar. Yet has anyone heard a squeak of broadcast media complaint about the England cricket team’s tour of that country?

Far from agonising about whether to take a knee, wear a rainbow armband, boycott the country altogether or engage in some other novel protest, our cricketers were pictured this weekend happily ambling through Benazir Bhutto International Airport in Rawalpindi to start their first tour of Pakistan since 2005. The official England Cricket twitter feed proudly shared the footage, declaring: ‘Touchdown in Pakistan for our men’s test squad!’

Why the double standard? Of course, it could fairly be argued that a cricket test series is nothing like the football World Cup in terms of its global impact and reach. 

But in Pakistan cricket is a sporting religion and the recent scarcity of international touring teams – largely due to the threat of Islamist terror attacks – has been deeply felt. To have England, where the game was born, arriving for a test series is a huge coup for the Pakistani government (pun intended). If it is unable to ensure the population has bread – or basic public services – then at least it can give them the finest of circuses for the next three weeks or so.

Nobody should kid themselves that Pakistan is any less repressive than Qatar, either. The UK government’s own official assessment warns that provisions in the Pakistan Penal Code ‘suggest that any same-sex sexual acts that involve penetration could be prosecuted under sharia provisions and may be punished by death’.

Women’s rights are in practice repressed with equal ferocity, despite some constitutional protections, with a US State Department report of 2021 noting: ‘The government did not effectively enforce the Women’s Protection Act, which brought the crime of rape under the jurisdiction of criminal rather than Islamic courts.’

If one is going to use the power of sport to spread western societal norms across the globe in true cultural imperialist style, then a little consistency would be appreciated. There is no logical reason why our nation’s footballers should be expected – or should expect themselves – to become roving social justice warriors when the same expectation is not applied to our cricketers.

One suspects that the biggest reason for media hesitancy in holding Pakistani society to the same standards it applies to Qatari society is more prosaic. The size of Britain’s Pakistani-heritage population is estimated to be well over a million and there would be uproar among it if such a thing were to be done. Our broadcasters simply don’t have the bottle to do it.

But the most noxious aspect of British liberal inconsistency when it comes to human rights in Islamic societies – which is what we are talking about – is surely the absurdity of protesting far more zealously against the application of Islamic standards in Muslim countries than against the spread of those same Islamic standards in western countries, such as our own. A Gary Lineker half-time sermon against that is not something we are ever likely to hear.