27.05.1999
New cricket test
New Labour’s official ideology of anti-racism has now reached the normally conservative world of cricket.
Mathew Engel recently won the praise of reviewers for his comments in the 1999 edition of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, in which he criticised “clannish” cricket clubs for their “passive discrimination, a refusal to go the extra inch and welcome outsiders”.
He lamented the fact that ethnic minority players gravitate towards their own clubs, with poorer pitches than their white counterparts: “In an informal, unspoken, very English way cricketing apartheid has become accepted practice in England” - with the result that the development of future black English world-beaters may be held back.
“County scorecards are starting to be enriched by names like Habib and Mirza and Sheriyar, all English-born. But there would be a great deal more if the white majority made a greater effort to encourage them. This is a moral issue. But for English cricket, it is also a question of self-interest.”
The attitude of the establishment to ethnic minority groups has changed. In 1990 former Conservative Party chairman Norman Tebbit, fighting for tougher immigration controls, declared that migrants from the West Indies, Africa and the Indian subcontinent - and their children - cannot be classified as properly English because they would not support the England team in test matches against the country of their (or their parents’) origin.
In cricket’s World Cup, as Nick Harris wrote in The Independent on May 12, “Spectators happily fail the Tebbit test”. Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and West Indian communities are fully accepted as English, even though they support their own national cricket teams, so long as they accept the values defined by Trevor Phillips as “the secret of Englishness” - “decency, tolerance, respect for privacy and individualism”.
Harris rejoices in the fact that visiting teams such as India and Bangladesh have a large following in England, and that tickets for games involving them have long been sold out, as eager support for all the participating teams will enhance the ‘carnival of cricket’ atmosphere the tournament organisers were aiming for.
The Independent published a list of potential UK-based support for each of the 12 competing teams: for example, England - 50 million; Scotland - 3.5 million; South Africa - 100,000 “long-term UK residents as defined by embassy”; India - 900,000; and West Indies - 500,000.
In the days of Tebbit, some sections of the establishment still questioned the right of Pakistan or West Indian cricket fans to be counted as truly British because of their allegiance to Imran Khan or Viv Richards. Today supporters of such a line are a dying minority. Diversity is welcome - so says official Britain.
However, the experience of the 500 or so Bangladesh supporters who came to see their team play highlights the limited, reactionary and chauvinist nature of bourgeois anti-racism. Free movement of workers across national boundaries is not in the interests of the capitalist class - only the product. Indeed, in conditions of permanently high unemployment, unlike in the 1950s when there was a labour shortage in Britain, immigration by low-skill labour must be curbed. Fans from India, Bangladesh and Pakistan on their way to the UK were questioned by immigration officials to assess their knowledge of cricket - a new version of the ‘cricket test’. The immigration officials suspect that among them may be those using the World Cup as a way to sneak into Britain. While capital moves across frontiers, workers who seek to do the same are subject to the most stringent of restrictions. Those who try to avoid them are criminalised as ‘illegal immigrants’.
Supporters from the Indian subcontinent who failed to correctly name the captain of Bangladesh or Pakistan’s leading batsman have been turned away. Apparently followers of the Australian team were not sent back to Sydney for failing to give a coherent account of the lbw law.
Official anti-racism only goes so far. Routine discrimination on the ‘racial’ grounds of being low-skill labour remains the norm. The CPGB calls for the free movement of all workers - scrap all immigration laws, not just ‘racist’ controls. We also demand full citizenship rights for all workers - our only ‘test’ is six months’ residence.
Mary Godwin