Twelve years. England and the rest of Europe has had 12 years to make a real stand against the hosting of the World Cup in Qatar.
Twelve years, countless investigations and a slew of insights into the plight of migrant workers, who have died building stadiums for the festival of football starting in less than a fortnight.
Twelve years to boycott the tournament on those moral grounds. To take advertisers and the public with them by highlighting the many cases of the workers losing their lives in punishing heat for pitiful pay. A rejection of a World Cup in Qatar would have crippled those plans before they’d even had a chance to get off the ground.
Instead, since December 2010 when world football’s governing body FIFA gave it the green light, the rest of the world sat on their hands.
Even in 2015 – when FIFA confirmed the tournament would be switched from the summer to this winter – the other nations could have protested. No country signed up for that. They could have forced a re-vote.
Instead, only now do they want to stamp their feet, clench their fists and scream and shout about human rights. Makes them look good, you see? Saying something when they know full well that nothing can be done about it.
Trouble is, it’s also hard to complain about human rights in Qatar when you have migrants held in inhumane conditions at processing centres in Dover and Heathrow here in England.
It is hard to look over there when the world is looking over here at the increasingly reprehensible rhetoric of our Home Secretary Suella Braverman, referring to small boat arrivals as an “invasion”.
Harder still with examples here such as Manston, where detainees are being held for up to 32 days instead of the 24-hour maximum.
Where the capacity should be 1,600 but instead is around 4,000 with filthy toilets, infectious diseases, incidents of sexual violence, self-harm and suicide attempts among the many issues being highlighted. Where detainees have to throw bottles over fences to get word out to the outside world about the conditions in which they are being held.
Who are we to lecture the likes of Qatar when a trade union representing Home Office staff is joining a legal action against Braverman on this very basis?
That’s before you even get to an official report into UK police vetting failures last week, exposing racism, the senior officers pursuing women for sex, the watching of pornography on duty, the officers cleared to work despite convictions for robbery, drug possession, drink driving and domestic abuse.
Maybe the Qataris should be campaigning to highlight the issues over here.
With migrant workers deaths far outweighing the trivia of football, the English and Welsh Football Associations, big on branding and gimmicks, have been insistent that the players representing their countries at the World Cup will defiantly wear armbands promoting inclusion and rejecting discrimination of any kind.
Er, what will that achieve? Why is it being stuck on the players to wear them and to speak up anyway when their bosses – the people with the power – have been so spineless up to now?
And why complain about the many things fans can’t do out in Qatar when the UK didn’t have the courage to do one of the things it could have done in the first place and made a stand?
Insert your own answer. In the meantime, the stable door is swinging in the wind with the horse disappearing over the horizon. Outrage about how bad they are over there is lip service, a misdirection.
Especially when we are as bad as we are over here.
