Making Your Mind Up: How Eurovision Caused Brexit

I enjoyed this, both for the humour and the content more generally, but also because it got the synapses firing a little. Apologies for the following lengthy post. I dare say the following is not something Tom would have been able to get into given the remit and required length of his presentation!

Unless I am reading Tom’s underlying thesis incorrectly, he appears to be saying that there is something about the UK’s mentality towards Eurovision that is reflective of its attitude towards the EU more generally. I would go the whole hog and suggest that this attitude can be found writ large in many areas of the UK’s (possible just the English?) attitude to life in general, not just the European project. To talk about this more coherently though, I am going to need to steer this to a subject that I am far more comfortable with: sport.

Taken together the books “Why England Lose” (later titled Soccernomics) by Kuper and Szymanski and “Inverting The Pyramid” by Jonathan Wilson go into some detail as to the underlying causes for the underachievement characteristic of the English international team and its increasingly desperate forays into tournament play. Where both hit on the same reasoning, it comes down to what K&S term “knowledge circles”. Football tactics underwent a series of cross pollinating ideas on the continent throughout the 20th century (thesea are continuing right up to today), with these knowledge circles expanding the idea of what formations, styles of play, tactics, etc, were possible and effective. The English were not included in these circles and, so the argument is presented, consequently stayed in tactical stasis. The reasons for English exclusion are many and varied – a sense of superiority (we invented the game so not engaging, our club sides did well in European competition throughout the late 60s-early 80s so what can we learn, etc), the language barrier, lack of interest, all play a part. Subsequent attempts to parachute in people to catch England up (Sven, Capello) have failed. In other words, a short term fix, copying patterns that work elsewhere, hasn’t worked. If the English want to win, more fundamental reform and more open football culture is probably required (coaches and players working abroad would be a good start, the football public being accepting of new ideas, instead of incredulous, would also help). As in football, so (arguably) in Eurovision.

Now we’re in a period where, if you read the soccer blogs, English opinion of the international game is declining precipitously. There are those that say the standard is low – which is almost certainly true by comparison to Champions League football – but there’s also a creeping sense that the English public is withdrawing interest because we don’t win and thus the international game is slowly rendered less important than club football. This attitude is given the lie by the players themselves – Messi was distraught when he missed out for the umpteenth time with Argentina, retired from international football and then swiftly unretired. He hasn’t won – and clearly wants to win – an international tournament. Ronaldo put himself to the sword for his country (and eventually appeared to be managing Portugal from the touchline in the final) during the last Euros – these players know that an international tournament win is a crowning achievement for their careers. The deep run the Welsh made in the same tournament is a source of great pride for them. Meanwhile, the English are retreating from this, to the extent that you’re even seeing people in the game saying that it’s worthwhile not being in European club competition, so as you can concentrate all your efforts on winning the domestic league.

There are, I think clear parallels, here with Eurovision (we’re dominating club football in the 60s-70s-80s = we’ve got The Beatles, The Stones, T Rex, Bowie, Led Zep, The Pistols, Duran Duran, etc, are both sticking plasters over failure elsewhere; we’re failing internationally, so withdraw interest and concentrate on ourselves, etc) but I think it goes even deeper than that small island mentality.

The UK has had massive international sporting failure before, many times in fact. Prominently, there is the 1996 Olympics, where only one gold medal was won (the seemingly guaranteed Steve Redgrave/Matthew Pinsent medal). All the UK’s track stars were getting old/had retired (Linford Christie, Colin Jackson, Sally Gunnell), were prior to the full blossoming of their potential (Denise Lewis got a Bronze which she would later turn into Gold in Sydney) or underperformed (Jonathan Edwards in particular). Chris Boardman had jumped to pro road racing, so was no longer able to marry his legs to British engineering in track cycling, and came 3rd in a much more competitive road time trial. Ben Ainslie was 19, I think, and not quite ready to start his run of domination in sailing. Swimming was in the doldrums.

All of this has turned around for one reason. Investment. Of time, effort, resources and, obviously, pots of money. Winning the bid to host in 2012 gave the UK further impetus in this regard. 20 years later, the UK won its most Golds at an Olympics in living memory. This is down to slow, painstaking work, mostly hidden away from the public gaze. It also required the integration of coaches and ideas from around the world into our sporting culture. Openness and investment reaped dividends in the end.

All of which brings me to my point – the UK seemingly no longer really wants to invest in things, accept due diligence as a necessity, do the painstaking hard yards. We don’t want to do it in football – we want to parachute in coaches from around the world rather than teach our kids to play football in a way that will make them more able to enact different tactics and we want to spend money, so our club sides can win now. We don’t want to do it in Eurovision – we want to copy ideas from other parts of Europe and then moan and withdraw when we get nowhere. We don’t want to do it in Europe – where the money spent has created positives but in ways that the public considers unknowable and therefore valueless (helped by a press culture that wilfully obfuscates any achievement coming from the EU). And I would say, we don’t want to do it in government or society more generally either. I would say is the backbone of the “age of austerity”; acceptance that we must cut and have less, rather than investing and reaping the benefits later, from both government and a quiescent electorate.

You can see this in the NHS – turning around some of the issues there, will require years of hard work and investment. The country as a collective seemingly has little appetite for this. The government certainly doesn’t – instead, cutting and cutting to make the numbers fit as a quick fix, rather than accepting the necessity and responsibility for hard decisions and difficult work (this difficult work of course also being able to sell slow incremental change to the public, as being worthwhile).

Why did it work for the Olympics? I would argue that it’s because the big reveal happens every 4 years. No one focused on the boring, hard work that was being done. It also worked because the outcome played into Britain’s sense of its own exceptionalism. For most, it’s a magic trick that confirms their own beliefs. You can’t do that with public services that everyone sees every day, are used every day, are reported on almost every day. Short termism is the real British malaise and, I think, is the root cause of Eurovision failure and much else besides. It will be the death of us.

Thanks. The credit is yours too though – wouldn’t have thought about any of this stuff without the right material to consider it altogether as a piece.

Thanks very much Andrew.

I don’t write anywhere really – at least other than in the comment boxes here. I’m a market researcher by trade (which is how I first heard of Tom and wound up here), who currently is finding it very difficult not to see everything through the prism of politics, whilst working in house for a large entertainment company.

Maybe I should write more regularly, if only for myself without publishing anywhere, just to let out some of the frustrations that I have with the current situation and direction in which things appear to be heading. My comment above was not intended (and still isn’t!) to detract from Tom’s presentation, or to particularly move the conversation away from Eurovision, but it was at least somewhat personally cathartic. Might have saved me from bursting a blood vessel screaming at the news for another day, at least.

Will @12: yeah, I obviously hedged explicitly at least once on whether this is Britain or England I am describing. England is obviously such a dominant voice in the state of the UK that that conflation is in one sense true and, in a whole lot of more important ones, not true at all. I’m trying to learn more about politics in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in my spare time reading, mostly through the perspective of current events but there’s a whole load of history (some of which I am aware of, some of which I am absolutely not) that needs unpacking too, to understand why the current situation stands for those nations before I can say with any real certainty that it would be fair to tar them with the brush I’ve got out at #4 above.