Wearing your politics on your chest

Philosophy Football’s splendid t-shirts have been getting the sort of free publicity that the big corporations would pay serious fortunes for on Celebrity Big Brother. The former Scottish Socialist Party MSP Tommy Sheridan, who is still awaiting trial on perjury charges arising from his £200,000 libel victory over the News of the World in 2006, must have packed a whole suitcase of them to take into the Big Brother house and has been wearing them virtually every day. He’s even got some of the other housemates to model the shirts, including La Toya ‘My contract says you can’t film me without make-up’ Jackson, who was sporting one featuring Nelson Mandela.

Philosophy Football’s Mark Perryman says Sheridan must have bought some of the shirts ten years or more ago as they’re no longer available. You can still buy one of my personal favourites, though: the Bill Shankly shirt, which Sheridan modelled the other day. (‘The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It’s the way I see football, the way I see life.)

And the ‘sporting outfitters of intellectual distinction’ have just produced one that Mark says ‘is partly inspired by one of the hundreds of hand-written anonymous placards carried at the 3 January demonstration in London. The Palestine 09 design expresses vividly the cycle of despair that has turned the tiny Gaza strip into a war zone of Israeli reprisals using its overwhelming military might.’ Priced at £16.99 and helping to raise funds for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, it’s available from http://www.philosophyfootball.com/

Politician charged with lying

If a rookie journalist came up with the above headline, he'd be laughed out of the news room (where such things still exist). So what's the big deal about former Scottish Socialist MSP Tommy Sheridan being charged with perjury?

The big deal, of course, is that a year before George Galloway's spat with the SWP tore apart one of the most successful electoral initiatives to the left of Labour in England for many a long year, Tommy Sheridan's libel case against the News of the World in Scotland did the same thing to the far more successful Scottish Socialist Party. Sheridan had been accused, among other things, of visiting a swingers' club. He sued, and won £200,000, despite a succession of his former party colleagues standing up in court and saying that they'd been at a meeting at which Sheridan had admitted going to the club twice but said he would sue anyway because there was no proof.

The News of the World, unaccustomed to such reverses, described the jury's verdict as 'perverse' and launched a dual strategy of character assassination in its columns and legal appeal in the courts. Iain McWhirter, writing in the Sunday Herald, understood the outcome of the case better as 'a rebuke to an industry that preys on human misery and disclosure; that uses chequebook journalism, spin, sensation, distortion. This has been a long time coming.'

The left is broadly divided between those who see the whole thing as a vendetta against a leading socialist by Rupert Murdoch and the state, and in many cases don't much care whether Sheridan is telling the truth or not, and those who are convinced he is lying and refuse to back him as a matter of principle. The latter include former SSP MSPs Rosie Kane and Carolyn Leckie, who said after the libel case that it had not been 'about judging behaviour but about the most popular, most famous convener with a huge reputation for principle, honesty and integrity being shown to be a hypocrite and a liar'. That distinction between different kinds of moral judgements begins to a look a little less clear cut unfortunately in the light of the SSP's own website's reference to what it calls Sheridan's 'squalid secret life' and the involvement of SSP members in organising the sale of a secretly recorded tape of Sheridan to the News of the World for a reputed £20,000.

Meanwhile, Sheridan has won the unequivocal moral backing of George Galloway. himself no stranger to the libel courts. For Galloway, 'Tommy's real crime in the eyes of News International is that he has spent his entire political life speaking truth to power.' Soon, for a second time, a Scottish jury will be asked to decide just how truthful he has been.