After blabbering on about the wonders of the King James Bible, the House of Windsor’s long serving, immaculately preserved top dog, tried her hand at something a little more common; the earthly wonders of sport. In the context of her hopelessly ahistorical understanding of the real repressive role of Christianity (and indeed all religion) and the much hyped Protestant version of the Bible, her cliched sentiments on the role and value of sport are consistent and equally inept. No mention in our monarch’s speech about the cheating, the corruption and the national chauvinism that is the daily staple of globalised sport.

No mention of the corporate greed that has totally transformed an honest working class diversion into a new global religion, a new opiate for the masses. No, for old Lizzy, it’s still all about the Victorian spirit of muscular Christianity and ‘abiding by the rules’. The dear lady, as if mimicking a headmistress from a snooty public girls school, spells it out to her plebeian subjects: Apart from developing physical fitness, sport and games can also teach vital social skill. None can be enjoyed without abiding by the rules, and no team can hope to succeed without cooperation between the players. This sort of positive team spirit can benefit communities, companies and enterprises of all kinds.

All this from a woman who gets her sporting rocks off by hunting down and shooting near defenceless animals. What world does this woman live in? There is however a possible sub-text to this year’s Queen’s speech. It may not be wholly coincidental that Her Majesty, she who is sitting on a giant fortune of stolen land and stolen jewels from the colonial era, should choose to raise the contemporary topic of sport given that the coalition government recently tried to wipe out school sports altogether. Forced into a partial but snivelling U-turn on the paltry ¬£150 million, the government might just read this year’s Queen’s speech as a subtle but firm rebuke. Of course, who actually cares what the Queen may or may not think? Certainly not Rupert Murdoch and his ever expanding media empire. Why so many Britons still defer to a monarch in the 21st century is totally beyond understanding, but as the old adage goes, ‘those with a slave mentality deserve to be slaves’.

Anyway, a new year has arrived but nothing in the sporting arena has been resolved. And why should it, you add. Professional sport is now a fully integral component of global capitalism and its contradictions are the very same contradictions experienced in the sporting industry. And as capitalism’s contradictions become more acute so too do those in the world of professional sport.

On every continent, football, the so called beautiful game, has been shown to be suffering from chronic match fixing; in Asia, in Africa, in the Americas and in Europe. Along with this rampant culture of cheating and profiteering comes an equally corrupt international governing body Fifa, which seems, for the moment, to be totally immune from the growing clamour for some form of transparency and accountability. And now, with money flowing into international cricket, the same ugly patterns of corruption are emerging. And the least said about boxing, athletics, rugby, motor racing and cycling the better. All are embroiled, to varying degrees, with drug taking, blatant cheating and financial impropriety and self-enrichment.

On top of this culture of blatant cheating and profiteering comes the intransigent problem of leveraged debt and unaccountable corporate ownership. Despite some honest manoeuvring by Uefa the situation in professional football is getting worse.
It all sounds identical to the crisis in the international financial markets. And so it is. Firstly individuals and families are destroyed by the juggernaut but we turn the other way and say it can’t be helped. Then whole communities begin to suffer and we start to feel the heat. Small companies begin to fold and we shrug our shoulders but then we witness the giants of the corporate world falling prey to the rapacious appetite of capital and we begin to fear the worst. Then entire countries fall victim and we sense there is nowhere to hide. In the end whole continents look venerable and we know the game is up.

In response, come at first a trickle and then perhaps soon a torrent of disillusionment, alienation and outright defiance. In sport, AFC Wimbledon and FC United of Manchester may well be the advanced guard of a future army of discontent. Murdoch’s growing stranglehold of the global sporting industry will desperately attempt to halt the rot but rebellions often take on a life of their own. Despite the natural urge for cynicism with all things sporting, there is still a strong case that sport, particularly at the grassroots level, has a useful and positive part to play in human affairs. We humans are obviously both highly individualist and competitive but also capable of wonderfully intricate forms of social cooperation. Sport, as much as anything we have come up with, seems well suited to express that never ending dialectic.

But sport, like any cultural pursuit, does not exist in a vacuum. Cultural superstructure inevitably reflects the economic base, and in our current times, that economic base can only be described as viscously rapacious. Everything in its wake is tainted by its insatiable thirst for profit. Everything and everyone becomes a commodity to be bought and sold. Nothing and no one is immune. The juggernaut takes no prisoners. Capital relentlessly moves to the highest point of return. Even the heroic working class exploits of a Manchester United or a Liverpool FC are reduced to mere play things for far away corporate gain. And make no mistake, things will get a lot worse before they can begin to get better.

None of this doom and gloom of course was in the Queen’s speech, either explicit or implied. Instead we are offered sickly sweet platitudes about the moral goodness to be found on the nation’s playing fields those that have not already been sold off to pay for neo colonial wars. When the banks collapse again, as surely they will, and we are forced to bail them out yet again at the cost of trillions of pounds of public money, what message will the queen have then for her long suffering subjects. What hope for community sports then, when the exchequer is empty and the social fabric is in ruins? Still, we’ll still have the King James Bible for comfort. It will hopefully burn nicely for winter fuel.