For obvious reasons, the small hours of last Wednesday turned out to be an excellent time to bury bad news. Even so, I was pleased to be awake for a tweet emanating from the trade minister Greg Hands, in which he announced: “In Qatar to open our #SportIsGreat conference, supporting Qatar’s 2022 World Cup & offering UK to be the partner of choice for delivery.”
Ah, so that’s what we’re doing now. Closer inspection reveals that Greg wrote an obsequious comment piece for the Peninsula, the Qatari English-language daily, in which he widened his focus to include all the 437 major athletic events to which the … sport-mad, is it? … autocracy has now acquired hosting rights. “This is an exciting time for Qatar’s [sporting] vision,” he euphemised bravely, “and the UK has the opportunity to be a strategic partner to ensure all these events are as successful as possible for spectators, competitors and organisers alike. As the UK’s international trade secretary, Dr Liam Fox, said on his recent visit to Doha – the UK is open for business like never before and nowhere is that more true than with Qatar.”
Nowhere? Well, you can see why the Trump team feel mugged off. Maybe democratically elected governments are, to quote a phrase, at the “back of the queue”. There is, of course, a rich precedent for this. In the arms sector, Britain has long operated an autocracies-first policy, with almost half our exports last year going to 21 of the Foreign Office’s 30 “human rights priority countries” – places where “the worst, or greatest number of, human rights violations take place”. So if we can live with that, I think we can make our peace with being the ethically challenged butler for the globally popular idea that is the Qatar World Cup.
Even so, good to have it made crystal clear. Whatever the exact position of Qatar in the queue of countries with whom the charmless, overpromoted GP Dr Fox is attempting to ingratiate himself, the sport angle feels like it is evolving. Thus far, our chief contribution to the sporting revolution in Qatar has been to gift the nation Richard Keys, who now functions as a sort of Lord Haw-Haw for the country, in between presenting Premier League coverage for a local sports channel with his fellow feminazi Andy Gray.
But now, in a clear escalation, the UK has marked itself out as keen to assist in Qatar’s creepy project to launder its reputation via the medium of sport. Because as almost everyone can see, that’s what’s going on here. There are seven-year-old London‑based Manchester City fans who have been sport-mad longer than Qatar. This is a country that is having to build a whole new $45bn city around one 2022 stadium just to stop it looking like turbo-capitalist mirage shimmering out of the desert. Lusail will eventually be a metropolis big enough for 450,000 people – which is nearly 200,000 more than the number of citizens of Qatar. Think of it as Field of Screams: if indentured labourers build it, they will come.
Maybe this was what Greg was on about in his big speech to open the Sport is Great event. (Incidentally, has there ever been a more phoned-in name for something than Sport is Great? It makes Ross Kemp: Middle East look long on detail.) “Relations between Qatar and the UK have grown ever stronger over our two countries’ rich histories,” Greg declared. “In the field of sports in particular, which is integral to both nations’ societies, our cooperation is creating a lasting, positive impact.”
Dude, you probably need to tell everyone from the FA to all British football fans that. I don’t know if the trade department is watching the sporting news of the past six years on a box set, but I have a spoiler for them: the idea of the Qatar World Cup has not been generally greeted positively, either by fans or corruption investigators.
As for other forms of “lasting, positive impact”, it seems others failed to get the memo too. In the wake of Greg’s visit, both Amnesty and Human Rights Watch issued slightly incredulous statements condemning the minister for apparently failing even to raise the abuses suffered by indentured migrant labourers building the infrastructure for Qatar 2022. As Human Rights Watch put it: “It’s understandable that the UK government wants to ensure British companies get as many construction and engineering contracts as possible, but Greg Hands should be mindful of the fact that Qatar’s construction market poses serious legal and reputational risks to UK firms on account of the Qatari government’s stubborn refusal to meaningfully reform its labour system or investigate an alarming pattern of unexplained migrant worker deaths.”
Mmm. On the plus side, Greg did take the Premier League trophy with him, the mere sight of which is proven to make bad stuff stop happening. Let’s just chalk this up as another episode in which sport is just an instrument of realpolitik, and humanity ends up the winner.
