AN English Tory MP has said he will not be supporting his national team at the Euro 2020 tournament because he disapproves of players taking the knee.

The symbolic gesture of taking the knee before kick-off in support of the Black Lives Matter movement was performed by the England squad before a friendly with Austria last week. Some fans who attended the game in Middlesborough were heard to be booing the gesture.

Now Lee Anderson, Tory MP for Ashfield near Nottingham, is saying he will not be supporting the English national squad due to them "stoking division" by taking the knee.

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He told Times Radio that his view was the "perception of a lot of supporters that go to these games".

Anderson went on: "They feel like they're being dictated to and told that we are an incredibly racist society and we're not.

"They just want to go and watch a football match, they don't want to get politics rammed down their throat. They pay their money - the 50, 60 quid or whatever it is - it's expensive to go and watch England.

"They want to see our boys in white putting a shift in, winning games and winning championships. They've not done that for about 50-odd years, so concentrate on winning football games rather than party-political broadcasts."

Describing players taking the knee as "very divisive", Anderson said that the country had been through a lot in the past few years with "the wounds" of Brexit just beginning to heal and the pandemic also creating division.

He said: "Now we've got some of our biggest sporting stars inadvertently stoking that division and, quite frankly, I've had enough of it. People just want to crack on with their lives. They want to go to the pub, they want to watch the football, watch the cricket and they don't want to be embroiled in all this sort of nonsense."

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Anderson then said that he is "not a big fan of government interfering too much" and that it is for the people to "vote with their feet" like him in not supporting the team.

He then theorised that if football grounds were full, players would not be continuing to take the knee as they would be "booed off the park".

He's the latest Tory MP to take a controversial stance on footballers "taking a knee" after Brendan Clarke-Smith compared the ac to throwing up a Nazi salute.

While being careful to say that he does not believe that England’s football players are communists, he claims that BLM is. He says that it and English football are now “inextricably linked”.

The Tory MP then compares the players’ decision to take a knee against racism ahead of playing their Euro 2020 games to the English football team in the 1930s giving a Nazi salute.