Delingpole: England’s Cricket Triumph Is a Vindication for Brexit

Cricket
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James Delingpole

England has just won the most important fixture in the history of sport after the most exciting match in the history of sport.

So, naturally, the liberal-left is busily trying to claim this glorious victory – a triumph for patriotism, for elitism and social cohesion – for its own nefarious ends.

Here’s some grim, adolescent Corbynista from the North having a go:

But the liberal-left, as we know, hunt in packs and respond as one to the hive mind. Here are a few more of your favourite loons, race-baiters, bitter Remoaners and globalists seizing the moment.

I don’t think Jacob Rees-Mogg, or indeed anyone else on the Brexit/non-George-Soros side of the argument, is unaware that the England team that beat New Zealand in the cricket was ethnically varied and that it included several players who were either immigrants or of immigrant stock.

Some of us do feel a bit guilty, for example, that England player – and man of the match – Ben Stokes was actually born in Christchurch, New Zealand, and thus would have been perfectly eligible to play for the losing side, quite possibly leading to a very different result.

But I’m really not sure how, as woke Twitter is pretending, this constitutes an argument for uncontrolled mass-immigration and the relentless pursuit of ‘diversity’ as a noble end in itself.

On the contrary, England’s victory is actually a victory for all the things that the liberal-left loathes: elitism, nationalism, patriotism, social cohesion and an intelligent approach to controlled immigration.

It’s noticeable, for example, that the England team did not contain a single player chosen for any reason other than their raw talent and/or experience. You could argue – as the liberal-left does under most circumstances – that this is discriminatory. Where were the female players? (lol) Where were the disabled players? Why could they not have included any players who were openly gay or transgender?

As for the players who weren’t obviously Anglo-Saxon or white English born and bred, I have to say that – in common with every other person rooting for England yesterday – I frankly couldn’t give a stuff where they came from, what their racial heritage is, or whether the rules were bent slightly in order to render them eligible for play. We all just wanted a team that would win.

For example, the young, hitherto untested (internationally) fast bowler Jofra Archer who helped carry that final Super Over: he should, technically, have been playing for the West Indies, not England.

At least he should have been till November 2018, when the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) changed its rules on eligibility.

Before then, Archer – who was born in Barbados – was ineligible to play for England till the winter of 2022, after he’d completed his seven-year presidency period. But then, happily for yesterday’s result, the ECB reduced the eligibility to three years.

So the presence of characters like Archer in the England team isn’t really – as the liberal-left would love us to believe – an argument for the joys of multiculturalism and ‘let them all in’. It’s an argument for the kind of ruthless discrimination and hard-headed talent-spotting approach to immigration Britain is unable to apply while a member of the EU but which it would certainly be able to use post-Brexit were it to adopt, say, an Australian-style points-based immigration system.

Britain needs lots more Jofra Archers, Moeen Alis and Ben Stokes. It really doesn’t need any more gangs of pimps, pickpockets and people traffickers from former Eastern Europe, nor does it need any more people like Salman Abedi, the suicide bomber who murdered 21 people at the Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena in 2017.

Brexiteers totally get this obvious truth in a way that Remoaners, perhaps because they’ve been overeducated into stupidity while studying Poi, My Little Pony and Environmental Studies at ‘uni’, generally don’t.

Yesterday, I tweeted trollingly, that England’s cricket victory was a victory for Brexit.

I meant as a joke. But I was right, wasn’t I?

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