In about 1987 I was playing basketball at a training session in my school hall and Graham Murrey turned up wearing a brand-new pair of Converse Mavericks.
In 1987 Converse Mavericks were right outside the mainstream. They looked pretty horrible, but they were like, futuristic and brilliant.
I coveted those so badly, but they were about £120 a pair in 1987 which was something like £400 now.
No chance I was ever going to get them.
Converse did this, they were just rebellious and for people who didn’t buy Nike or Adidas or Puma or any of those brands.
They were not tennis shoes; they were out and out ridiculously expensive and nobody else had them basketball shoes.
Then later I found out that Converse had sold out to Nike.
People still buy Converse, particularly All Stars because they think they’re different and a little bit edgy and a little bit anti-establishment because that’s what the brand says.
They’re not or even if they are the money still goes to the big boys.
And then the war broke out in Ukraine and stuff that had been happening in a totally insipid way, but everybody just signed up for because they thought it didn’t cause any harm to a anybody, came under scrutiny.
Everybody thought they were outside the mainstream, everybody thought they weren’t just working for the man.
The news stories hit that Coca-Cola and McDonalds were not pulling out of Russia and suddenly they changed their mind but really that only happened because of #boycottMcDonalds and #boycottcocacola.
While we can look at this as a real evidence of power to the people and humanity wanting to do better, it’s only commercial protectionism from some absolute behemoths that will never be able to die because they’re now outside the establishment at the other end and really just sit there making as much money as possible, wrecking as much environment as possible and buying their competitors up.
And so, pretty well outraged by this we started to look at the possibility of taking Coca-Cola out of the Academy and out of the Clinic because that would be the right thing to do in our mind.
And then we realised that Coca-Cola owns everything, if they don’t own it Pepsi do and if they don’t Nestle do and then you can’t live without buying your trainers from Nike.
The biggest shock to people was Coca-Cola owning Costa so if you want to boycott Coca-Cola, you have to boycott Costa but you’ll also have to boycott Pepsi because they’re no better than Coca-Cola but then you have to boycott Walkers crisps so you could boycott all of this and go to San Pellegrino but they’re owned by Nestle and so you could buy Fentimans but that doesn’t taste as good.
And then came Chelsea.
And that made football look.
And then the Chelsea fans complained that it was nothing to do with them and they sung Abramovich’s name during the minutes respect at the game at Burnley and again at Norwich because no one was going to tell them what to do.
And they demanded evidence and wanted to know why other football clubs weren’t going to be put under the same amount of scrutiny and sanction and potential road to destruction that they’re now on.
And Nicky Campbell asked a Chelsea fan on the radio “didn’t you sell your soul to the devil?”.
The Chelsea ownership structure and the money that came in is no worse than that which is coming to Newcastle and perhaps no worse than that which is coming to Manchester City and perhaps no worse than that which is coming to PSG etc etc etc. vomit.
At my boy’s football game two weeks ago, I asked a parent who was shouting repeatedly at the referee ‘please don’t shout at the referee as it shows a bad example to the boys’. That ended with him threatening to punch me, I wonder if he was one of the Chelsea fans who sung Abramovich's name at Burnley.
Amazon don’t pay taxes and the conditions for their workers is appalling at times, this has been seen time and time again but still we click, click, click.
We filled our cars with petrol from Russia and our central heating was powered by their gas and we wanted it from there because it was cheaper.
Last week the president of Lithuania said, “we can no longer buy cheap oil and gas using the blood of Ukrainians”.
I’m a strong believer in the fact that it’s not that people don’t care, it’s that they don’t know.
So, now we know.
Blog Post Number - 3024
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