Ruth Wishart: ‘Team GB’ at Tokyo Olympics can’t disguise this abomination

Yet how very useful it must be for the UK Government and the Unionist camp ­generally to have the term Team GB ­bandied about so ubiquitously. And how often do you hear homegrown medallists and commentators talk about “making the nation proud?” The fact that GB is not a ­nation (nor great) is neither here nor there.

How gratifying for the Better ­Together band of brothers and sisters to have ­everyone photographed under a Union flag, and wearing sports clothing ­emblazoned with it. Without lifting a campaigning ­finger, they can invite us to bask in the warm glow of joint endeavour.

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Imagine poor wee shilpit Scotland trying to garner its own medals rather than being a part of something bigger and better ­funded. Actually I don’t have to, having watched two Commonwealth Games in Scotland and seen the real euphoria which greeted those winning in a Saltire vest.

Commonwealth Games do not have the glamour nor the cachet of the Olympics, the pinnacle to which all top athletes ­aspire. Yet they do tell us a lot about how that sense of national pride and achievement can be intensified when the home nations represent their own actual countries.

And within the structure of the Olympics lies a rather unlovely seam of class division. This week a young BMX biker won herself a gold. She only got to Tokyo via a public appeal, her Olympic funding having been cut by UK Sport. Compare and contrast the shedloads of money poured into rowing.

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Although that latter sport did less ­spectacularly than usual, just consider how small a pool we fish in for rowing success. I know of no state schools who offer ­rowing to their pupils, though I’d be more than happy to be proved wrong.

Winning rowing medals takes years of grit and commitment, as it does for any sport, but we can’t pretend it’s a pastime of the masses. Or as likely to capture teenage imaginations as, for instance, BMX biking.

In Scotland at least, golf is enjoyed by a wide cross section of society, but I’m not sure that having a group of sporting multi millionaires flying the GB flag is ­emblematic of the original Olympian principles.

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You could argue that having women’s football represented by a GB team for only the second ever time would be something which would appeal to all soccer fans. Then again the “GB” squad contains 19 ­English, two Scottish and one Welsh player.

Undoubted stars like Chelsea’s Erin Cuthbert, whose soaring talent was ­evident in her Glasgow City days, failed to make the cut despite having been ­nominated in 2019 as player of the year.

I fear this particular Team GB it is something of a Trojan horse for those who would like to see a single men’s team ­compete as well.

And you may gauge the depth of ­knowledge of the women’s game from the Eurosport screened commentary which assured us that Kim Little had “140 caps for England”. News, I’m sure, to ­Arsenal’s Scottish star. (Somehow I can’t hear someone celebrating Harry Kane’s 50 ­appearances for Scotland.)

There is a political not so subtext to the Team GB tag which embeds the subliminal thought that Britishness still matters, despite the dwindling numbers of Scots who still self describe as such, and the ­undoubted emergence of a fairly rabid little Englander mentality, especially in south east England.

That World War Two obsessed strain of “team GB” has triumphed over values like the virtues of alleged fairness which ­Gordon Brown sought to sell. As its ­poster boy, Nigel Farage, keeps on ­proving, you don’t have to be pig ignorant to gain celebrity, but it helps.

We seem to be reverting to the days when England and Britain were used ­interchangeably, while it’s beyond ­dispute that many governments on mainland ­Europe and elsehwere think the current UK Government has lost its marbles. As indeed does what’s left of what used to be one nation Conservatism.

Meanwhile we are gearing up for weeks of the BBC Proms, which are indeed a musical treat even for those of us ­unlikely ever to be able to hear them live. Yet here too what purports to be an exercise in a multi-national, multi-cultural celebration of world class music hosts a finale which is little more than a jingoistic ­embarrassment.

It’s certainly not the fault of the organisers that Covid and all its works have meant that bringing in major foreign orchestras would have been a logistical nightmare this year. And it’s a real stroke of imagination to create an orchestra comprising hard hit freelance musicians – whom I fervently hope will also be drawn from furth of London.

Yet as no less a luminary as Sir ­Simon Rattle has just observed, the last night with its apparently obligatory Rule ­Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory is not something in which he ever felt able to participate. And now he’s off to work in Germany where he lives anyway; a country which glories in its many world class orchestras.

(Rattle openly admitted that he might not have taken his current job with ­London’s LSO had be known Brexit would happen. Thus, like thousands in other sectors, he’s pledged his future to Europe.) It’s that endless need to look at life in the rear view mirror, that the Last Night represents, which makes so many people, including many English people, deeply uncomfortable.

Nobody could gainsay the potency of Elgar’s music, even if the Last Night lyrics jar more than ever in this miserable post Brexit landscape. But worse yet is the sheer xenophobia embedded in Rule ­Britannia, substituting a picture of a golden age that never was for a realistic portrait of a truncated future designed by a myopic government.

Far from Britons “never ever” being slaves, huge tranches of the UK population are just that; living from hand to mouth in a society which has jettisoned their employment rights whilst studiously averting its eyes from the monster salaries now paid to chief executives. There has never been a time when living standards in the UK have been as polarised as they are now. Rule One Per Cent of Britannia is where we’re at.

INTO all this GB mood music strides the Chancellor of the Exchequer coming amongst the Scottish natives to advise us how fortunate we have been to be the beneficiaries of Treasury largesse. He takes regularly to twitter to make his points does Rishi Sunak: “all across the UK our #PlanForJobs is working, with the number of people on furlough falling to the lowest level since the star of the pandemic”.

He had rather less to say about the fact that the upcoming withdrawal of ­furlough payments and the revoking of the £20 uplift in Universal Benefit will ­penalise those already struggling. Like the cut in foreign aid, it seems that the UK ­Government prefers kicking the poor to taxing the rich or getting serious about its alleged commitment to tackling tax evasion and avoidance.

Then again, Mr Sunak, effortlessly smoother than his gaffe prone boss, will never have to worry where his next 20 quid is coming from. His wife’s shareholdings in her billionaire father’s company make her richer than the Queen. Admittedly the Sunaks don’t run to several palaces, but homes in California, Yorkshire and Kensington don’t come cheap.

His cabinet colleagues are perhaps the richest group ever assembled round that coffin shaped table at Number 10. They can well afford not to give a damn about poverty.