When a football loving prime minister comes to power, the English team has a successful run in the Euros and the country is subsequently engulfed in riots, the text to consult is Violation. Ken Russell’s smut-driven dystopic portrayal of a modern Britain in which football is the national religion has rightly faded into obscurity. But the concept rests upon seemingly ripe territory over the next decade: the politicisation of the beautiful game in a broken and divided realm. 

For the avoidance of doubt, Violation might well be one of the worst imaginative novels ever written in the English language. The plot is essentially a retelling of the gospels imbued with the fading outrage that once made Russell famous as a cult 1970s filmmaker. A would-be messiah is born into an England run by a totalitarian state committed to enforcing a love of the national game. Jette Black, “a sexy captain,” in the Sports Police —  a fusion of the Gestapo and the TalkSport studio — is tasked with bringing down this disruptive prophet. 

This is a world in which statues of historical figures have been replaced by Michael Owen

Much of what follows is a picaresque cycle of violence, irreverent boredom and casual sex that attempts to usurp the smothering influence of the beautiful game. This is a world in which statues of historical figures have been replaced by Michael Owen and the nation is bound together by the compulsory singing of football chants. Thinly layered over this precarious settlement is an ineffectual footy laden political correctness enforced by a jobsworth police state. 

It is especially disturbing then that re-emerging from the imaginative universe of Violation over the Summer of 2024 has been an eerily familiar experience. Prior to the election, an interview with football pundit Gary Neville served as a means to launder the soul of our new prime minister to the nation. Meanwhile, the Euros saw the nation indulge in its worst pastime: seeking in the national team, and its manager, a metaphor for anything it could get away with. Quiet confidence can lift a nation,” wrote Jonathan Freedland. Gareth Southgate, he argued, was the proto-Starmer: “low on personal pyrotechnics, high on quiet competence.” 

“Labour will be more Southgate, less Gove,” agreed Lisa Nandy in the first weeks of government, who read into the manager and his team not just technocratic competence but an “inclusive” version of modern Britain. “When kids were turning on their TV, she said of the tournament, “every single one of them will have been able to see themselves reflected in that team.” 

There is nothing the magic of footy won’t touch. Integration and cohesion are two terms thrown about in the midst of historic migration to Britain, and in appropriately self-parodying fashion it has been quietly acknowledged that football might well be the last institution capable of bringing people together. In the Southgate years, perhaps out of imaginative desperation on the centre left, it was strangely inferred that in between trying (or failing) to win football matches, the waistcoated manager was somehow trying to forge a new England.

“He is trying to build a new, workable version of English identity,” David Olusoga gushed at one of the many strange formal salons arranged to discuss this phenomenon. Britain’s state-driven multicultural settlement, and US-inspired diversity agenda, with its various community concerns and historic grievances, is by its nature forced to be unimaginative, precious and drab. It has a knack of soaking up vigour and authenticity from anything it touches. And in the national team, whenever its players are forced midweek to play San Marino, there is a chance to sit in a gastro pub in a replica shirt and take part in this display of mediated patriotism. 

How then has the game come to so artificially smother our politics and national conversation?

Sat on the sofa before the Sky Sports on a Sunday afternoon however, this hollow politicisation soon unravels. The modern game is successful by virtue of being global facing, mercenary and abundant. Both thrilling and corporate, it exists beyond a world of modern England’s parochial and exhausting search for a new national story. Yet still it gets press ganged into being a feasible postliberal paintwork for the New England and its communities. Blithely harking back to a mythologised era of noble hordes of fans weaving through industrial cities, a projection and fantasy of the post war socially democratic body politic. 

How then has the game come to so artificially smother our politics and national conversation? The answers lie in the world from which Violation emerged. Russell’s dystopia may be a terrible work of art,  but it has now emerged as a worthwhile curio in being the only deeply cynical critique England has ever had of football as a nation building force. 

Violation appeared in 2005, eight years into the revolution of 1997, and is undoubtedly a product of an age whose ruling class had cynically exploited the beautiful game. Blair’s 1996 campaign was full of stadium visits and a keenly stressed connection to Newcastle United. Even Peter Mandelson eventually converted. “Who’s the wanker in the scarf?” he was once taunted by Burnley fans as he sauntered across the pitch to see Alistair Campbell in the away end. Behind this PR effort it has since emerged there was also a fantastical scheming. Blair wanted to move struggling Wimbledon FC to Northern Ireland to shore up the union, while in-between trips to Washington he dreamed of English football fans pouring across the Scottish border to watch their team play Celtic. 

The return of Oasis has led to much discussion of the political role of “Cool Britannia.” But it was football that was really appropriated by New Labour. As Alwyn Turner writes in his book on the 90s, A Classless Society, the gentrification of the game presented a convergence of culture, in step with the decade’s attempts at a depoliticised classlessness of the “third way”. Perhaps out of embarrassment at such appropriation, the embrace of the game was accompanied with tokenistic fervour. “A tribal identity also had to be adopted, or feigned,” writes Turner, “If one wished to hold one’s own in polite society.”  If John Major’s vision was everyone mucking in at the Village Fete, then New Labour imagined the retired miner and the call centre yuppy fiercely debating the transfer market in their replica shirt on the terraces. 

It is out of this cynical, gormless and sanitised fandom that Violation emerged in 2005. This year should have been the triumph of New Labour: employment was at a record high, London was awarded the Olympics and Blair was president of the European council. But in hindsight it was also the dawning of a new Britain. The myths around Iraq were spreading like corrosive rust across the framework of New Labour. And with it came greater scrutiny of its economic model and its propensity for spin and broken promises. 

Monkey Dust, perhaps the last truly subversive comedy put out by the BBC, was the most unforgiving in this regard. Unsurprisingly, it took aim at the fraying glue of the new national religion. The winners of 1997 were stuck listening to David Gray and yapping about football at neverending dinner parties. Ageing John Major voters found themselves inexplicably vegetating in front of the white noise of Clive Tydlesley’s football commentary, distracting themselves from the noise of bored youths doing  surreal and inexplicable things outside. 

Russell’s own novel is full of allusions to this bleak High-Blair tapestry. This is a world of security cameras, social behaviour orders, ugly flattened high streets, concrete shopping centres and scripted conversations about the footy, peppered with vague threats around political correctness. “I could have reported you for sexism” characters are fond of telling each other in between excesses of violence and depravity. Russell’s extreme metaphor took the cynical appropriation of football under Labour to its logical conclusions: beyond the defenestration of anything stuffy and conservative under the guise  of renewal, modernisation and the post-political triumph of the third way, football as understood by the Blair Cabinet was perhaps the last vessel of identity England now had. 

For those who go in search of a soul behind Britain’s latest Labour government, it’s hard not to stumble upon a  similar dilemma. In his paean to the New England, Starmer’s hagiographer Tom Baldwin finds that a football is one of the few things he has placed on the rubble of all the nation’s historic myths he has torn down. Footballs are dribbled up the aisle of a stuffy church of England ceremony. The ghost of Enoch Powell is exorcised by crowds in Wolverhampton gathered to see “multi-racial, multinational millionaires.”  Stadiums are “cathedrals,” and “symbols of unity.” In true Starmerite fashion, Labour wants to pay homage to this world by introducing a regulator to “protect the fans.”

In Russell’s novel, the football regime eventually collapses in on itself. Football, after all, is a terrible ruling ideology. A game, whose vagaries lend itself poorly to questions of national identity and purpose. Teams lose, people grow bored of the highlights packages. Choruses of “Jerusalem” replace football chants in a bid to recreate Blake’s green and pleasant land.  There are festivals and gatherings, drippings of irreverence and excess that hark back Russell’s beloved late 1960s. Idealism seeps back into the grey tapestry of the regime’s beautiful game. If anyone can achieve a similar feat of somehow turning England against its favourite pastime, then it’s Sir Keir Starmer KC in his five-a-side bib.