But the sports fans
Sports matter; women do not matter.
England’s men’s cricket team should play against Afghanistan in the Champions Trophy, despite calls for a boycott in response to the Taliban regime’s assault on women’s rights, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy says.
Female participation in sport has effectively been outlawed since the Taliban’s return to power in 2021.
A cross-party letter, signed by nearly 200 UK politicians, has been sent to the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) calling for England to refuse to play in the Champions Trophy match in Lahore on 26 February.
But Nandy thinks the match should go ahead, because sports.
“I am instinctively very cautious about boycotts in sport, partly because I think they are counterproductive. I think they deny sports fans the opportunity they love and they can very much penalise the athletes and sportspeople who work very, very hard to reach the top of their game and are then denied the opportunities to compete.”
That’s the point. A boycott is useless if it doesn’t hurt anything. Yes of course it’s unfair to the athletes, but so is the Taliban’s termination of women’s sports.
International Cricket Council (ICC) regulations state full membership is conditional upon having women’s cricket teams and pathway structures in place. However, Afghanistan’s men’s team have been allowed to participate in ICC tournaments seemingly without any sanctions.
Which is a damn good reason to boycott the whole thing.
Sir Keir Starmer was asked directly about the matter at Prime Minister’s Questions earlier this week by Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi, who authored the cross-party letter addressed to the ECB.
The prime minister said “the suppression of freedom” should be “condemned in the strongest terms” and said the government was speaking with international counterparts on the issue.
But it’s not some abstract “suppression of freedom,” it’s the very concrete suppression of women and their freedom and rights and ability to participate in public life.
Sportspeople, eh? Because it wouldn’t do to forget that there are both men and women involved in sports. Welllllll, except of course for the Afghani women that have been shoved out of – not just cricket – but all of public life.
Out of sight out of mind I guess.
It seems to me that the whole history of boycotts has been one of knee-jerk moral escalation. We started out with a primary, narrow boycott in the form of a refusal to countenance sporting competition with South African teams selected on racial selection criteria rather than on merit. That was succeeded by a secondary boycott targeted at a country (New Zealand) for imperfect adherence to that primary boycott. That was succeeded by a western boycott of the Moscow Olympics with regard to a specific foreign policy action of the Soviet regime. That was succeeded by a tit-for-tat boycott of the Los Angeles Olympics over general foreign policy actions of the US regime. When it came time to target Israel, because “those Jews are a bit weedy”, it had to be an academic boycott rather than an athletic one in order to “hit them where it hurts”. We have ended up with an a la carte boycott menu from which people get to choose based on “yah boo, my grievance is worse than yours!”.
And from what you’ve been covering, they barely have the ability to participate in private life, except, of course, taking care of men, feeding them, and being their sex slaves.
While I’m inclined to believe that most boycotts don’t work, especially in this era of global commerce where one lost demographic could be filled in by another, this seems to be a bit more than ‘my feelings are hurt’. The ICC appears to be allowing flagrant violations of their own rules, set to allow women an opportunity to play. The Afghanistan team should not be allowed to play if they do not follow the rules.
iknklast: I agree that the specific boycott at issue here falls much closer to the initial (narrowly reasoned justification) end of the spectrum. My point was more that the very existence of the spectrum places a government minister in a no-win position where he/she is probably best advised
keep as quiet as possible. I personally think that this boycott should apply, but, in so far as there is a government interest through public funding for sports, I think that disagreement on the part of the government with the ECB’s judgement would best be expressed by politely inviting the ECB to consider the best points made by MPs (ideally through a select committee chair) while respecting their (the ECB’s) independence. A hopelessly native expectation, I know!