Read this shite from Nick Cohen....

The death of Zac Cox is more than a horrible industrial action but a metaphor for modern sport: the scale of its corruption and the readiness of  its fans to tolerate the intolerable as long as we are entertained.
Mr Cox was 40 and working on a World Cup stadium in Qatar when a catwalk collapsed underneath him. He fell 130 ft and didn’t stand a chance. To the authorities he was a nobody, and his death was an embarrassing inconvenience. A report into the accident was completed within 11 days, but the firms building the stadium did not pass it on to his family in Britain. One of the contractors, the German firm Pfeifer, had the brass neck to tell the Guardian it was an internal document and therefore a private matter.
That’s the way it rolls in the Gulf. Qatar, Bahrain and the rest of the monarchies operate a modern version of Apartheid. The dictatorial rulers have turned the native Arabs into a racial elite. In Qatar’s case, a mere 10 per cent of the 2.1 million population  are Qatari nationals. Underneath them are low-paid migrant workers, from Asia and Africa, and occasionally the West.
Qatar, like rich nations and men before it, is desperate to increase its status. This is why it spent lavishly to acquire the World Cup and buy Paris St Germain, and why Abu Dhabi joined in the competitive conspicuous consumption and bought Manchester City.  As part of its rebranding, Qatar announced it had ‘reformed’ its labour laws. Inevitably the changes were more cosmetic than real. Migrants remained under the control of their employers, as Human Rights Watch explained:

Workers typically pay exorbitant recruitment fees. Employers regularly take control of workers’ passports when they arrive in Qatar. Many migrant workers complain that employers failed to pay their wages on time, and sometimes not at all.

I once tried to say the migrants were Helots to the Gulf Arab Spartans, but wasn’t sure comparisons with a warrior aristocracy were quite the right analogy for Qatar’s flabby princelings. The Helot line holds up better though. Qatar’s migrants are in a modern version of serfdom: a race-based serfdom, like Apartheid, but a serfdom that allows the elite race to import and deport its menial class rather than lord it over the majority native population.

White expats from the rich world do better, as you expect, but not noticeably so when there is a scandal the authorities want to bury.
Zac Cox’s family are articulate, knowledgeable people. Gavin Kelly, chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, and deputy chief of staff in Gordon Brown’s Downing Street, was his brother-in-law. No good did their experience of dealing with bureaucracy do them. The Qatari authorities decided to blame an innocent man and arrested Cox’s friend and colleague on the site, Graham Vance. They accused him of negligence and threatened to imprison him for a maximum of three years. The Cox family not only had to cope with their grief but with the awareness that Zac’s death had led to the framing of an innocent man. (Vance was allowed to return home to South Africa after 10 months, only because his friends and family flew in a lawyer to represent him.)
The reason why the Qataris were so keen to blame a little guy became obvious in the inquest in Brighton last week. The coroner, Veronica Hamilton-Deeley, said World Cup stadiums in Qatar were being built with substandard equipment ordered by managers who should have known the risks of a ‘downright dangerous’ environment. Zac Cox is not the only casualty of this misbegotten World Cup. The heat and humidity in Qatar kills scores of construction workers
How will football fans react when the tournament begins? We don’t have to look as far ahead as 2022 to guess. We have this year’s World Cup in Putin’s, crony capitalist gangster state, which appears to be able to murder at will on British soil. Closer to home, we have the example of Manchester City.
The record shows there will be no reaction at all. Fans will not turn away and say that they cannot watch a tournament because it is built on rotten foundations.  My colleagues on the Guardian football desk have done solid work in exposing conditions in Qatar and dissecting the hypocrisy of Pep Guardiola, who denounces the arrest of Catalan nationalists while staying silent about his paymasters’ abuse of human rights. I suspect few want to  listen to them.
There are times, indeed, when I don’t want to listen to them. Manchester City is one of the most glorious ‘English’ teams I have seen. To bang on about the filthy source of its money or Guardiola’s double standards feels joyless: you sound like the type of nag who cannot enjoy a Georgian country house without declaiming that it was built on the exploitation of slaves or Manchester’s working class. Supporters of other clubs envy rather than criticise Manchester City. If Gulf billionaires, Putin’s oligarchs, or the devil himself were to buy their team, they would not care as long as they threw enough money at it.  If the Russian and Qatari World Cups are successes, the same will apply. The overwhelming majority of fans and sports journalists will be happy and say not one word about the regimes whose prestige FIFA is boosting. Boris Johnson says that if Russia assassins are operating in Britain, England could pull out of the 2018 cup. I doubt more than a handful of football fans would support a boycott, and in any case Mr Johnson says many things.
Attitudes to cheating in sport give us a useful comparison. Football fans don’t care if one of their players fouls an opponent. On the contrary, if the referee gives him a card for stopping the other side’s strikers we say with undisguised admiration that he’s ‘taken one for the team’ –  as if he were a soldier who had laid down his life for his comrades. Even athletics, cycling and weight-lifting, sports that are so riddled with doping scandals you only have to see a record broken to suspect that drugs have been ingested, still draw large audiences.
At the end of a study of cheating, the economists Ian Preston and Stefan Sztmanski concluded:

Cheating is unlikely to disappear from sport. Indeed, for committed fans, belief in one’s own team is more easily preserved if it is possible to think that the opponents are cheats. It is not clear how much cheating has to occur before interest in the sport starts to suffer, but there certainly does not seem to be any clear evidence that scandals related to cheating have reduced interest.

On this calculation, a sport will suffer only if corruption directly hurts fans themselves. If Russian police officers or football hooligans – the differences between the two are small – turn on visiting supporters or a Qatari stadium collapses in the middle of the tournament, there will be outrage. If not, the show will go on, and few will care about the dead stagehands lying in the wings.

If you want to check out this tool:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Cohen

And also, if he so fucking concerned about workers safety, did he read this after he backed the removal of Gaddafi in Libya?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-08/worker-s-death-leads-libya-s-oil-production-to-drop-by-a-quarter

A Stockport born rag, who clearly has a gripe. Didn't see any of his blogs last year, the year before that, or the year before that...fucking cock-tard! 

Who pays for Manchester City’s beautiful game?

Nick Cohen

It is considered ‘inappropriate’ to ask about the money behind Pep Guardiola’s team, and other leading clubs, but we should be asking the hard questions

Sun 24 Dec 2017 00.05 GMT

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[size=89]E[/size]ven though I come from the red side of Manchester, I want Manchester City to win every game they play now. Hoping City fail is like hoping a great singer’s voice cracks or prima ballerina’s tendons tear. Journalists have written and broadcast millions of words about the intensity of Manchester City’s game and the beauty of its movement. You watch and gasp as each perfect pass finds its man and each impossible move becomes possible after all.
Everything that can be said should have been said. But here are words you never hear on the BBC or Sky and hear only rarely from the best sports writers. Manchester City’s success is built on the labour extracted by the rulers of a modern feudal state. Sheikh Mansour, its owner, is the half-brother of Sheikh Khalifa, the absolute monarch of the United Arab Emirates: an accident of birth that has given him a mountain of cash and Manchester City the Premier League’s best players.
An absolute monarchy is merely a dictatorship decked in fine robes. The usual restrictions of free speech, a free press, the rule of law, an independent judiciary and democratic elections still apply in the Emirates federation of seven sultanates. Critics are as likely to disappear or be held without due process as they are in less glamorous destinations. The riches that supply Pep Guardiola’s £15m salaryand ensure the £264m wage bill for the players is met on time do not just come from oil. The Emirate monarchies, Qatar and Saudi Arabia rely on a system of economic exploitation you struggle to find a precedent for.


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In the UAE as a whole, only 13% of the population are full nationals. In the glittering tourist resort of Dubai, citizenship rises slightly to 15% and in the Abu Dhabi emirate to 20%, but everywhere a subclass of immigrants does the bulk of the work. The obvious comparison is with apartheid: Arab nationals sit at the top, white expats have some privileges, as the coloureds and Asians had in the last days of the South African regime, while the dirty work – from construction to cleaning – is done by despised immigrants from south Asia.
But comparisons with apartheid or the Israeli occupation of the West Bank or America’s old deep south miscarry because the Arab princelings import their working class rather than rule over subdued inhabitants. It’s like Spartans bringing in Helots. Or if images of stern Spartan militarists feel incongruous when imposed on the flabby bodies of Gulf aristocrats, Eloi importing Morlocks. Timid labour reforms are meant to have improved the lot of the serfs. In law, employers can no longer keep them in line with the threat of deportation to India or the Philippines if they do not please a capricious boss. In practice, absolute monarchies repress the lawyers and campaigners who might take up their cases. Now, as always, activists are silenced and workers fear the cost of speaking out.
You should be able to praise Manchester City’s football and condemn it owners. Or, if that is asking too much, you should at least be able to talk about its owners or mention the source of their wealth. If only in passing. If only the once. Instead, there is silence. With Mansour building a global consortium of clubs, Qataris owning Paris Saint-Germain and Emirate money poised to buy Newcastle United, rich dictatorial states are engaging in competitive conspicuous consumption. They are creating the world’s best clubs and may one day take them off into an oligarchs’ league. You are not “bringing politics into football” when you worry about Sheikh Mansour. You are recognising that the future of football is political.
The silence about the fate of the national game covers much of national life. Everywhere you look, you are struck by the arguments that are not being made.
Mainstream Conservatives refuse to join Tory rebels in speaking out against the dangers of Brexit. They like to boast that they are stable and commonsensical types, with no time for dangerous experiments. When confronted with the reckless nationalism of the Tory right, however, they prefer the safe option of keeping quiet until public opinion shifts. Many Labour MPs and leftwing journalists deplore Corbyn and the far left. I speak from experience when I say they talk with great eloquence in private, but will not utter a squeak of dissent in public until Corbyn’s popularity among party members falls. They, too, will speak out when, and only when, they can be certain that it is too late for speaking out to make a difference.
We think of ourselves as more liberated than our ancestors, but the same repressive mechanisms silence us. In the 18th and 19th centuries, few wanted to say that gorgeous stately homes and fine public buildings had been built because the British looted Indians and enslaved Africans. Today, it feels equally “inappropriate” – to use a modern word that stinks of Victorian prudery – to say that a beautiful football club has been built on the proceeds of exploitation.
Football supporters reserve their hatred for owners such as the Glazers, who bought Manchester United with borrowed money and siphoned off the club’s profits to pay down the debt. If billions are available to turn Manchester City or Paris Saint-Germain into world-class clubs, the fans do not care where the money came from. Nor do neutrals who love football for its own sake. For them, it is as miserablist to talk about Manchester City’s owners on Match of the Day as to talk about the factory farming of turkeys at the Christmas lunch table.
Honest sports writers fear the accusation that they are joyless puritan nags whose sole pleasure is ruining the pleasure of others. In Britain’s vacuous politics, Conservatives fear accusations of ignoring the will of the people on Brexit. Labour MPs fear their activists rather than their voters. In both the Tory and Labour cases, the worst that can happen to MPs is deselection. Mail or Express journalists who came out against Brexit would, I imagine, risk their jobs or being moved on to a different story. But no leftwing paper would sack a columnist who criticised Corbyn. The worst they would endure is frosty words from line managers and twaddle on Twitter.
We do not live in Abu Dhabi. The police do not pick up dissidents. Jailers don’t torture them. Yet peer pressure and trivial fears are enough to suppress necessary arguments. If you do not yet have a New Year resolution, it’s worth resolving to treat both with the contempt they deserve.

I wrote something on this subject a while ago. Every man and his dog was quoting some organisation that extrapolated (or simply made up) accident/death figures for workers in Qatar. It was all bullshit.

I'm no apologist for Qatar or other middle eastern states but who are we to preach when we've got shitty employment rules in this country (remember the cockle pickers?) and some disastrous human rights betrayals of our own. 

And don't get me started on the 'civilised' countries that we do business with. I await Mickey Mouse Cohen's outrage over the USA or Israel with baited breath.....

Has previous the rag bastard

'rag' and 'bastard' are two words that should always be said together

And include the adjective filthy

Asked similar things if him on Twitter.

Saudi Arabia's affiliation with United?
Ed Glazer openly supporting Trump and the NRA? 11,000 deaths in 2016 through gun crime...and his prick quotes one death in Qatar, not even a UAE state?

Wankstain.

Paulpowersleftfoot wrote:Who pays for Manchester City’s beautiful game?

Nick Cohen

It is considered ‘inappropriate’ to ask about the money behind Pep Guardiola’s team, and other leading clubs, but we should be asking the hard questions

Sun 24 Dec 2017 00.05 GMT

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• [url=https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=Who pays for Manchester City%E2%80%99s beautiful game%3F | Nick][/url]
  
  
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[size=89]E[/size]ven though I come from the red side of Manchester, I want Manchester City to win every game they play now. Hoping City fail is like hoping a great singer’s voice cracks or prima ballerina’s tendons tear. Journalists have written and broadcast millions of words about the intensity of Manchester City’s game and the beauty of its movement. You watch and gasp as each perfect pass finds its man and each impossible move becomes possible after all.
Everything that can be said should have been said. But here are words you never hear on the BBC or Sky and hear only rarely from the best sports writers. Manchester City’s success is built on the labour extracted by the rulers of a modern feudal state. Sheikh Mansour, its owner, is the half-brother of Sheikh Khalifa, the absolute monarch of the United Arab Emirates: an accident of birth that has given him a mountain of cash and Manchester City the Premier League’s best players.
An absolute monarchy is merely a dictatorship decked in fine robes. The usual restrictions of free speech, a free press, the rule of law, an independent judiciary and democratic elections still apply in the Emirates federation of seven sultanates. Critics are as likely to disappear or be held without due process as they are in less glamorous destinations. The riches that supply Pep Guardiola’s £15m salaryand ensure the £264m wage bill for the players is met on time do not just come from oil. The Emirate monarchies, Qatar and Saudi Arabia rely on a system of economic exploitation you struggle to find a precedent for.


Guardian Today: the headlines, the analysis, the debate - sent direct to you

 
Read more


In the UAE as a whole, only 13% of the population are full nationals. In the glittering tourist resort of Dubai, citizenship rises slightly to 15% and in the Abu Dhabi emirate to 20%, but everywhere a subclass of immigrants does the bulk of the work. The obvious comparison is with apartheid: Arab nationals sit at the top, white expats have some privileges, as the coloureds and Asians had in the last days of the South African regime, while the dirty work – from construction to cleaning – is done by despised immigrants from south Asia.

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But comparisons with apartheid or the Israeli occupation of the West Bank or America’s old deep south miscarry because the Arab princelings import their working class rather than rule over subdued inhabitants. It’s like Spartans bringing in Helots. Or if images of stern Spartan militarists feel incongruous when imposed on the flabby bodies of Gulf aristocrats, Eloi importing Morlocks. Timid labour reforms are meant to have improved the lot of the serfs. In law, employers can no longer keep them in line with the threat of deportation to India or the Philippines if they do not please a capricious boss. In practice, absolute monarchies repress the lawyers and campaigners who might take up their cases. Now, as always, activists are silenced and workers fear the cost of speaking out.
You should be able to praise Manchester City’s football and condemn it owners. Or, if that is asking too much, you should at least be able to talk about its owners or mention the source of their wealth. If only in passing. If only the once. Instead, there is silence. With Mansour building a global consortium of clubs, Qataris owning Paris Saint-Germain and Emirate money poised to buy Newcastle United, rich dictatorial states are engaging in competitive conspicuous consumption. They are creating the world’s best clubs and may one day take them off into an oligarchs’ league. You are not “bringing politics into football” when you worry about Sheikh Mansour. You are recognising that the future of football is political.

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The silence about the fate of the national game covers much of national life. Everywhere you look, you are struck by the arguments that are not being made.
Mainstream Conservatives refuse to join Tory rebels in speaking out against the dangers of Brexit. They like to boast that they are stable and commonsensical types, with no time for dangerous experiments. When confronted with the reckless nationalism of the Tory right, however, they prefer the safe option of keeping quiet until public opinion shifts. Many Labour MPs and leftwing journalists deplore Corbyn and the far left. I speak from experience when I say they talk with great eloquence in private, but will not utter a squeak of dissent in public until Corbyn’s popularity among party members falls. They, too, will speak out when, and only when, they can be certain that it is too late for speaking out to make a difference.
We think of ourselves as more liberated than our ancestors, but the same repressive mechanisms silence us. In the 18th and 19th centuries, few wanted to say that gorgeous stately homes and fine public buildings had been built because the British looted Indians and enslaved Africans. Today, it feels equally “inappropriate” – to use a modern word that stinks of Victorian prudery – to say that a beautiful football club has been built on the proceeds of exploitation.
Football supporters reserve their hatred for owners such as the Glazers, who bought Manchester United with borrowed money and siphoned off the club’s profits to pay down the debt. If billions are available to turn Manchester City or Paris Saint-Germain into world-class clubs, the fans do not care where the money came from. Nor do neutrals who love football for its own sake. For them, it is as miserablist to talk about Manchester City’s owners on Match of the Day as to talk about the factory farming of turkeys at the Christmas lunch table.

Advertisement

Honest sports writers fear the accusation that they are joyless puritan nags whose sole pleasure is ruining the pleasure of others. In Britain’s vacuous politics, Conservatives fear accusations of ignoring the will of the people on Brexit. Labour MPs fear their activists rather than their voters. In both the Tory and Labour cases, the worst that can happen to MPs is deselection. Mail or Express journalists who came out against Brexit would, I imagine, risk their jobs or being moved on to a different story. But no leftwing paper would sack a columnist who criticised Corbyn. The worst they would endure is frosty words from line managers and twaddle on Twitter.
We do not live in Abu Dhabi. The police do not pick up dissidents. Jailers don’t torture them. Yet peer pressure and trivial fears are enough to suppress necessary arguments. If you do not yet have a New Year resolution, it’s worth resolving to treat both with the contempt they deserve.

Can you send that proper link again Rich?

Don't worry, found the article. He's a horrible cnut!

Topdawg wrote:I wrote something on this subject a while ago. Every man and his dog was quoting some organisation that extrapolated (or simply made up) accident/death figures for workers in Qatar. It was all bullshit.

I'm no apologist for Qatar or other middle eastern states but who are we to preach when we've got shitty employment rules in this country (remember the cockle pickers?) and some disastrous human rights betrayals of our own. 

And don't get me started on the 'civilised' countries that we do business with. I await Mickey Mouse Cohen's outrage over the USA or Israel with baited breath.....

He's an atheist...which is surprising, considering his beloved Glazer's, are evangelical Trump/NRA supporting fucktards. 

11,000 deaths through gun crime in 2016 in the USA.....and this prick writes about one death of a westerner in a country that isn't even part of the UAE for fucks sake....but clearly associates everyone in that region being the same. Racist cnut!

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/24/who-pays-for-manchester-city-beautiful-game

He is a vile rag sycophant

He can’t be on twitter otherwise you’d have blasted him already bluey!

He is...and I have.

@NickCohen4

Oh, his name is Nick. I've been calling him Dick.....

apt...

And I suppose this country we live in is unimpeachable?  Maybe he's not aware of all the people who were drafted in from Africa and Asia to help rebuild the country after the wars, who were shunted into appalling housing and paid peanuts while the lords and masters sat back in their posh houses, ignoring their plight.  Maybe he's conveniently ignoring the fact that we still have zero hour contracts, denying people the right to sick pay, holiday pay, guaranteed work and the denial of benefits on the basis they are "employed", even though two weeks without work would mean no money and no way to pay the bills.  Perhaps he's blind to the fact that many employers in this country still employ immigrants on less than minimum wage, whilst dodging their own tax liablility. And perhas he was sleeping on the day Grenfell Tower turned into an inferno, jeapordising the lives of the poor Black, Asian and Eastern European community within, which was caused by using cheap, substandard materials designed solely for the purpose of making the building less of an eyesore for the wealthier residents in the area.

And he also seems to be blissfully unaware that we sell firearms to these apparently dodgy Arab states, helping them to maintain the status quo that he seems so desperate to undermine. And why do we do that? To secure the oil supply, that's why.  And what about the illegal war on Iraq, where we supported the US in a mission to overthrow a despot who may have had WMDs?  Given there's a similarly arrogant dictator in North Korea who actually has a nuclear capability (of sorts), why are we not ensuring world safety by hoofing him out of power? Could it be because Iraq has oil and North Korea doesn't?

See, it's very easy to point the finger at others, but we're not exactly a paragon of virtue as a country either.

As for bringing all of this crap into football, it just reeks of desperation and bitterness. Yes, the Emirates, by our standards, is fucked up, but our country still supports the regime because it suits us to do so, which is just as messed up. We proved we can make a stand against countries that are a mess with the embargo on South Africa over apartheid, but then again, they weren't buying our weapons or selling us oil.

But let's turn it on it's head a moment.  East Manchester used to be a wasteland of derelict chemical sites, poisoned land, poor air quality, no jobs and a depressed housing market. What the Sheikh has done, at his own considerable expense, is remove the mess, improve the quality of the area, provide jobs and generally turn the most run down area of the country into somewhere that is borderline desirable. To paraphrase Life Of Brian, what this idiot is saying is, "So, apart from clean air, proper jobs, decent housing, a cheap oil supply, income from arms sales and a football team worth watching, what have the Arabs ever done for us?"

Wow Leo, you need to get on your crate and either deliver a sermon or go into politics!

Well said Leo. Had another argument with one of his so-called journos who supported his rhetoric. Wankers, the lot of them.

Topdawg wrote:Wow Leo, you need to get on your crate and either deliver a sermon or go into politics!

Can you do politics from on a crate?  That might be interesting. I'm probably taller than most (if not all) of the current mob, so the extra height would make me look even more impressive. As opposed to Tom Cruise, who it only made look as tall as Kelly McGillis...

blueboy wrote:Well said Leo. Had another argument with one of his so-called journos who supported his rhetoric. Wankers, the lot of them.

Yes, they are.

"Ooh, how can you support a regime that cuts the hands off thieves?"  What, as opposed to giving them sheltered accommodation for a couple of years, three square meals a day, access to entertainment and education and all at the expense of Johnny Taxpayer? Especially seeing as the trade-off for this is to fail to support honest, hard working people who find themselves suddenly unemployed because the rich bastard who ran the company got caught with his hand in the pension fund...

Anyway, it's not us that supports the Arabs, it's them that support us. And it's cockwombles like this pen monkey who seem to think we can do something about it, even though we had absolutely no say in it whatsoever.

Agree...

Every country has something wrong with it for whatever reason. We've done some terrible things over the years, as have probably most countries in 'defending' themselves. 

Isn't it funny that N. Korea have escaped invasion or direct attack but Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria etc. have been invaded. Could it be because N. Korea have nukes and it is a generally held view that their leader would use them if he wanted/needed to?