Mr. Cartwright, is it still possible to consider today’s football,
submerged with money and scandals, as a social passion, something one can
identify himself with, something that is able to express the needs and the
positive drives of society?
«Football is still the people's game. Top-level
professional football is a house built on sand, that much seems
clear, financially, morally... What's strange, though, is that people still
identify a great deal with the players. It's not the players' fault that they
end up in the bubble they are in. And the players, after all, are still
overwhelmingly from working-class backgrounds. Rooney, Bale, Gerrard - they
would be playing if there was no money in football at all. Of course, the
top-level is only the tip of an iceberg. Football at all levels is full of
people driven by love and loyalty, passion and camaraderie. That is also what
makes it such an interesting topic to write about. I should add that football
is not the cause of social division in Heartland, it is a manifestation of it. Football specifically offers much more to unite us than divide
us. All of life is in it: greed, genorosity, love, hate, wealth, poverty,
friendship, rivalry, and so on...».
How English people live their relationsip with
football in the present time? Is it a simple relief from everydays problems or
there’s something more?
«"The game is about glory," Danny
Blanchflower (Villa, Spurs, Northern Ireland) famously said. It's about
adventure and magic and, yes, an escape from everyday problems. But in anything
that creates such passion and brings people together in such numbers there is a
political dimension. I think the advent of "fan-power" - I'm thinking
of events such as the formation of FC United of Manchester (a club
created in response to the commercialisation of Manchester United) and AFC
Wimbledon (formed by fans when Wimbledon FC left for Milton Keynes and became
the MK Dons), plus supporters resurrecting clubs that went into liquidation,
such as Newport County - is a real phenomenon of recent years and an antidote
to all the commercial shenanigans of the big clubs. What's great is that all
the money in the world can't tarnish the beauty of the game. If the money
disappeared tomorrow, football would still be here».
How is the relationship between football and
politics, so present in your book, evolving in England?
«A very positive aspect, I think, is the
growth in fan-ownership, community-centred clubs. I mentioned FC United, AFC
Wimbledon, Newport County. We could add to that list Merthyr Town FC and
Chester FC among others, who are clubs that were resurrected by fans following
financial mismanagement by previous owners. Or AFC Liverpool, a club formed by
people who could no longer afford the ticket prices in the Premier League.
(Newport and Merthyr are Welsh clubs that play in the English league system, by
the way). Issues about race continue in different forms - the lack of
black managers and coaches being given a chance at a high level, the
absence of professional players from Asian backgrounds, rows about racist
chanting and high-profile racist comments made on the pitch (John Terry, Luis
Suarez). One thing to say in English football's favour is that
these issues are at least out in the open. With much of the injustice in
our society - racism included - there are attempts by the powerful to hide
it away, to simply pretend there is no problem. On that note, I feel
I must mention the heroism of the Hillsborough Justice Campaign, who have
fought all these years to expose the truth about what happened on the day
of the disaster (when 96 Liverpool fans were crushed to death at the
1989 FA Cup Semi-Final) and to expose the subsequent political
cover-up».
Jim’s character is representative of the
Labour crisis, of its inability in governing social changes and speak to the
traditional socialist electorate, as a consequence of the process of
deindustrialization and the end of the traditional concept of work. Is “The
Spirit of 45” unrecoverable?
«I think "The Spirit of '45" is still
alive, although maybe it's a small flame, and you are right that Jim feels
exhausted by the pace of change (for the worse) his community has been put
through. Right-wing criticism of "the spirit of 45", and of Ken
Loach's recent film of the same name, incidentally, is that those years have
gone and any sense of collectivism, universalism, the welfare state,
socialism...is merely nostalgia for a world that has disappeared. Of course,
the world has changed. And the impact of deindustrialization means British
society has changed utterly, as Jim feels so acutely in Heartland. But a belief
in social justice, in equality, in simple human dignity, a society where people
look after each other "from cradle to grave" will always be relevant
and I think will return to the political mainstream in the coming years».
Do you think that suburbian areas are just an
agglomerate of individual and social defeats, that can generate only social
tensions, or is it possibile to think about them as a social lab for new ideas
of life in the community?
«There are very clear problems when the
economic divisions in society are replicated geographically. In Heartland,
Cinderheath is isolated because of the closure of its industry, and then the
communities who live there are further isolated by a retrenchment into a
"white" area and an "asian" area due to all kinds of issues
- housing, culture, transport, (un)employment, etc. What is interesting is when
people refuse to conform to the role that the powerful in society
seem to want from them - a kind of reaction that my characters Zubair
and Rob are searching for, and Jim yearns for, in Heartland. A
happy sequel to the novel would be the merging of the two rival
teams and for them to form a new club, kind of in the spirit of Atletico San
Lorenzo, to represent a new idea of Cinderheath».
European newspapers narrate the unsetting rise
of fascist deviations like greek “Golden sunrise”. What can you tell us
about the racists movements in Great Britain?
«The British National Party has collapsed as an
electoral force. In the 2012 local elections it lost most of its council seats.
This is the good news. However, the threat from the far right remains
a problem in different forms. The English Defence League seeks to create
confrontation by marching through predominantly Asian areas, in the style
of Oswald Mosely's 1930s Blackshirts. More
subtle, and politically more dangerous, is the influence of the
far-right on the present government and on the Conservative Party
in particular. The United Kingdom Independence Party, an
anti-immigration, anti-European party with a more middle-class
profile than previous far-right parties has gained
popularity - including inside the Conservative Party - and a kind of
media-driven political credibility that the BNP could only dream of. Their
influence is sinister and very British - maybe just English - in
the sense that they represent terrible bigotry, political extremism,
feudalism, as a kind of "common sense", in the manner of eccentric
suburban bank managers. I think the influence of the far-right is a kind
of dirty secret of British society - it's what I was trying
to symbolise by the rally at the country house in Heartland
(organised by British Party backers - the inference being that they have
'upper-class' connections)».
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