When History Becomes a Weapon: How the World Cup and Brexit Expose Britain’s Cultural Battles
From Mussolini’s Italy to Farage’s Britain, how sport and politics collide in a decade of erasure, anger, and forgotten victims. The stories that shape—and haunt—us.
The World Cup’s Dark Mirror: When Sport Becomes a Stage for Power
The 2026 World Cup is already drowning in hype, but the real story isn’t on the pitch—it’s in the shadows of history. A new podcast, The Political Football, drags listeners through the tournament’s most toxic moments: Mussolini’s 1934 spectacle, where fascist Italy weaponised the game to legitimise its regime, and Uruguay’s boycott in protest. The message is clear: football has always been political. The question is, who gets to control the narrative?
Today, that battle rages on. The podcast’s hosts—former US player Merritt Mathias and journalists Musa Okwonga and Julio Ricardo Varela—frame the World Cup as a microcosm of global power struggles. But in Britain, the conversation is narrower. The game’s commercialisation has turned stadiums into corporate playgrounds, while grassroots clubs drown in debt. The underdog stories of 2026—Scotland’s resurgence, Iraq’s defiance—are celebrated, but the systemic rot beneath the spectacle? Conveniently ignored.
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s selective memory. And it’s not just football.
Brexit’s Civil War: The Winners Rewrite History
A decade after the Brexit vote, BBC Two’s Brexit: A Very British Civil War offers a masterclass in revisionism. The documentary, framed as a "celebration" of the Leave victory, rolls out the usual suspects—Farage, Gove, Johnson—while the Remain camp is reduced to a footnote: Cameron, Osborne, and a lone "sadly muttering" Nick Clegg. The erasure is deliberate. The chaos that followed—economic stagnation, NHS collapse, the slow unravelling of Britain’s global standing—is airbrushed into a triumphant fable.
What’s striking isn’t the bias. It’s the timing. As the UK grapples with AI scams, Brexit tariffs, and a cost-of-living crisis, the documentary arrives like a propaganda reel, urging Britons to "link hands and joyfully celebrate." But who, exactly, is celebrating? The working-class communities promised £350m a week for the NHS? The farmers bankrupted by trade barriers? The young voters who’ve inherited a broken economy?
The answer, of course, is the same men who sold the lie in the first place. History, as the saying goes, is written by the winners. And in Britain, the winners are still writing.
The Forgotten Victims: When Art Becomes a Weapon of Justice
While the BBC rewrites Brexit, a different kind of cultural reckoning is unfolding off-screen. All the Rage, a "guerrilla play" born from a WhatsApp group of 80 female and non-binary writers, flips the script on the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Tired of media obsessing over "men and money," the creators—led by playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz—centre the victims. The result isn’t just art; it’s activism. A collective roar against a system that still protects predators.
The play’s timing is no accident. Epstein’s death in 2019 was supposed to bury the story, but the files released this year proved otherwise. The powerful men named in them—politicians, CEOs, royalty—have faced little consequence. All the Rage refuses to let them off the hook. It’s a rare example of culture not just reflecting society, but fighting back.
But will it change anything? In Britain, where the arts are increasingly commodified and underfunded, the question lingers. When museums sell out to corporate sponsors and public broadcasters sanitise history, can art still be a force for justice? Or is it just another product, packaged for consumption?
Hong Kong’s Erased Faces: The Cost of Cultural Amnesia
Thadde Comar’s photography exhibition, How Was Your Dream?, captures the raw, unfiltered reality of Hong Kong’s 2019 protests. His images—on display at the Belfast Photo Festival—don’t just document the unrest; they zoom in on the individuals caught in the crossfire. Faces obscured by masks, hands raised in defiance, bodies pressed against police lines. The message is stark: in the rush to geopolitical grandstanding, the human cost is too often forgotten.
The parallels with Britain are unsettling. As the UK government cracks down on protests—from climate activists to Palestine solidarity marches—the line between dissent and disorder blurs. The state’s response? Erasure. Criminalisation. A quiet war on memory.
Comar’s work is a reminder: culture isn’t just about what we choose to remember. It’s about what we’re forced to forget.
What’s at Stake: The Battle for Britain’s Soul
These stories—football’s political past, Brexit’s revisionist history, Epstein’s victims reclaiming their narrative, Hong Kong’s erased protesters—are connected by a single thread: the fight over who gets to tell the story.
In Britain, that fight is increasingly one-sided. The winners of Brexit control the narrative. The powerful men named in the Epstein files evade accountability. The voices of dissent—whether in Hong Kong or on British streets—are drowned out by state crackdowns and corporate media.
But culture isn’t just a mirror. It’s a weapon. And right now, it’s one of the few tools left for those who refuse to be silenced.
The question is: will anyone listen?
