A week or so ago, Marc Goldberg at Harry's Place cited a post in favour of banning golf by some obscure member of a Labour Facebook group as yet more proof of the creeping Stalinism of the left.
The idea that this was sinister, or any more than somebody letting off steam sounded a bit silly to me (the obvious possibility, that this suggestion was tongue-in-cheek, rather than sinister, didn't seem to have occurred to Marc). At this point, I thought it'd be interesting to quote the de facto patron saint of Harry's Place, George Orwell, on golf:
That old quote about the Battle of Waterloo being won on the playing fields of Eton may be apocryphal, but the idea that the ruling class fights its class war from the clubhouse and fairway is as plausible now as it was in 1944.
The idea that this was sinister, or any more than somebody letting off steam sounded a bit silly to me (the obvious possibility, that this suggestion was tongue-in-cheek, rather than sinister, didn't seem to have occurred to Marc). At this point, I thought it'd be interesting to quote the de facto patron saint of Harry's Place, George Orwell, on golf:
Since it [cricket] needs about 25 people to make up a game it necessarily leads to a lot of social mixing. The inherently snobbish game is golf, which causes whole stretches of country-side to be turned into carefully-guarded class preserves.From a review of Cricket Country by Edmund Blunden in the Manchester Evening News, 20th April 1944.
That old quote about the Battle of Waterloo being won on the playing fields of Eton may be apocryphal, but the idea that the ruling class fights its class war from the clubhouse and fairway is as plausible now as it was in 1944.
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