WHAT’S gone wrong with England? The English cannot be happy. How could they? How can a country be happy when its own government trammels up hate against its national football team and stokes racism against players?

What other country would come second in a global sporting event and see violence on the streets? Instead of celebrating great sporting success, England today studies its own soul, looking for the source of the poison.

The only answer England finds is that its own government is to blame – its Prime Minister, a man who talks blithely of “piccaninnies”. But the horrible logical extension of that answer is that England elected this government, this Prime Minister.

It all speaks of deep self-loathing, of a nation utterly lost in the world, with no real sense of its identity or place. Clearly, none of this means Scotland, or Ireland or Wales or any other democratic country, is without their own glaring faults. But something unique is happening in England and perhaps we’ve only ever seen it before, in recent times, unfold in America.

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It’s as if Boris Johnson – like Donald Trump – has given permission for the previously impermissible. Now, the toxic nationalism that’s always been part of English football has come together with the toxic nationalism of Johnson’s government in one nitro-glycerin moment. As the smoke is clearing, we can see the damage that’s been wrought on England’s soul.

Johnson and his government, specifically Priti Patel, ‘stoked’ – as the footballer Tyrone Mings made clear – hate against England players. One Tory MP even ‘boycotted’ England games because players took the knee against racism. This is a government which hates ‘the other’, which weaponises ‘the other’. The hate that Johnson’s government has fed for years inevitably exploded on the street and online.

Instead of confronting their wrongs, Johnson’s government deflects blame onto social media companies. Yes, Big Tech carries responsibility, but who’s more to blame: the gun company or the gunman?

The ideology of Johnson’s government now dominates everything in England – sport, art, science, education. The same problems beset many Western nations, Scotland included – with politicians dripping poison across life – but in England the effect is now getting onto a par with America in the early days of Trump. Ideology is out of control.

A report by the Runnymede Trust – Britain’s leading think tank on race equality – that’s bound for the United Nations, states baldly that racism is now systemic in England.

If politics is the art of working out what your base wants and needs, and then offering it back to them, then Boris Johnson has simply tapped into the hate, stupidity, cruelty and bigotry which was on show from England fans the other night and repackaged their hooliganism as the modern Conservative Party.

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Under our first past the post system, a majority of English citizens didn’t vote for Johnson’s vision of England. God help them. It feels as if England is living through the 1980s again, divided so bitterly – a vast swathe of the population trapped under an ideology it loathes.

Again, the echoes of Trump’s America are strong – the enabling, the division. England has always been the mother of the Anglo Saxon world and America the swaggering elder child. The two have convulsed almost simultaneously – Trump and Brexit had near alignment; now England is catching the fever of social uproar that ripped through America under Trump.

Something very ugly is happening – it’s a rupture, a change, an end of something perhaps, a beginning of something else. Even some Tory MPs are horrified by what’s happening under their government – urging Johnson’s administration to step back from its relentlessly divisive concocted culture war.

Look at what’s happened to England in such a short space a time. It’s a now a country which celebrates slashing aid to the poorest nations, it gloats over the fact that soldiers who shot civilians dead in Northern Ireland will never be prosecuted. Johnson plans to gerrymander democracy – he intends to end fixed term parliaments so he can call elections at the time which suits him; new laws will impose voting restrictions.

There’s cronyism and corruption on an industrial scale, relentless rule breaking and destruction of democratic norms, bullying, lying, hypocrisy. Is this not Trumpian? Did we not see what Trump did to America? Are we not seeing an English iteration of that right now?

It’s a government of careless, privileged cruelty. ‘Learn to live with Covid’, we’re told – while other nations fret endlessly over the safety of citizens. Everything comes with a thuggish scream of ‘freedom’ – but freedom for what? To be selfish? Cruel? Stupid? Freedom to trash England – and the rest of Britain? Perhaps, freedom to behave like the yobs who terrorised Wembley?

Britain is a country of boarded up towns and empty high streets, while Russian oligarchs own London. But everything is fine because there’s a flag and a Queen. Always the flag, always the Queen.

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What functioning nation behaves like this? What functioning nation does so well in a game and then watches chaos and hate unfold, and has to endure a self-imposed mass psychological therapy session afterwards?

The hooligans in London felt like a pustule breaking on the skin of a poisoned body politic. Johnson’s ruthless and hate-laced Brexit and all that flowed from it has fed thuggery into the English blood stream. Many in England – most – have resisted it, but there feels a strange synergy between the ugliness of Wembley and the ugliness of Johnson’s government. Perhaps, the freedom of Brexit is just the freedom to rampage.

Again, none of this excuses the failures of Scotland or any other country. What country isn’t cursed with disgraceful football fans, or hardline hateful nationalists? But what’s happening in England is out of the ordinary. The politics of England now seem to reflect the worst of the terraces in a way that’s never been seen before.

One can only feel sorrow and pity for the millions of decent English people who reject what’s happening in their country. However, beyond England, especially in the other nations of the UK there’s a whisper of fear too – because only a fool wouldn’t ask: where does this all go next?

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