AS Sir Keir Starmer continues his curious policy of propping up the Tory Government, it’s been left to Manchester to provide the stiffest opposition to Boris Johnson’s broken administration.

Andy Burnham, the city’s mayor, has been an eloquent advocate for his city as the great “we’re all in it together” lie has been exposed again. England’s great northern communities were easy prey for Brexiteers promising investment in these regions after years of EU employment laws undermining local workers and driving down wages.

These northern communities are experiencing what many who voted No in the 2014 independence referendum discovered: that once their vote is safely secured they will revert to being surplus to the requirements of a hard-right Tory administration.

Burnham has been joined by Marcus Rashford, a young English professional footballer who has emerged to show us that natural intelligence, wisdom and vision aren’t the exclusive preserve of those who attend the UK’s top universities.

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When the pandemic’s sting has been drawn, school pupils all over the UK will have gained a valuable working knowledge of their nation’s geography. In particular, they will now instinctively be able to picture where Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle and Wigan are located on the map. These are the places which have that familiar big loop drawn around them that tells us that they have been suffering chronic levels of Covid-19 infection.

In 2014, I met some Mancunians in an unfussy pub in the city’s edgy Moss Side area. I was travelling down through the spine of England to solicit the views of real English people about Scottish independence. Prior to this, only the Oxford friends of the BBC executive and some ridiculously self-important political commentators were deemed to be the authentic representatives of English opinion on the constitutional issue.

I spoke with more than 20 men and women in Moss Side during a memorable evening of political discussion and the morality of Manchester City becoming a boutique plaything of a corrupt, gangster state. They were all eager to convey to me their great love and affection for Scotland and that they hoped we would take our chance to forge our own destiny. “I just wish we could join you,” one of them reflected. “London and Westminster are much more foreign to us than Scotland.”

In these places, they have been shouting about high mortality rates; child poverty, health inequality and the way in which the poorest people are being pushed to the margins of their great. Coronavirus is simply the latest lethal pathogen menacing this part of England.

Rashford, the young footballer who plays as a striker for Manchester United, is encountering an early lesson in how the Tories quickly deploy attack dogs to menace you if you threaten to make life uncomfortable for them.

His advocacy of free school meals for all children during lockdown has exposed the essential wickedness that lies at the heart of Tory philosophy: that there are just too many poor children lurking in poor families for them to reach. Thus they are considered as acceptable collateral and no great mischief if they fall.

Tory Central Office pressed an assortment of MPs to begin attacking Rashford. “We’ll take no lessons on poverty from a millionaire footballer,” was the predictable refrain. Rashford responded with poise and dignity, essentially forgiving these enemies and urging others to show kindness to them in their responses. As Sir Keir Starmer indulges a Government he is employed to oppose, meanwhile a 22-year-old working-class man from Manchester who left school with no formal qualifications is running rings around the Cummings/Johnson/Gove cartel.

THE claim that Rashford’s campaign lacks legitimacy owing to the size of his bank balance is an empty one. Rashford is using his fame and natural talent for the most popular professional sport on the planet to good use. If he had been the striker for Exeter City, who would have paid any attention? And any time a pop icon or film star speaks about these things you find yourself checking for the inevitable record or film that’s being touted.

Governments are a bit fearful of football and are wary of the passions that swirl around this game. Any event which routinely attracts many thousands of working-class people to the one place and united in a common cause will always cause consternation among political elites.

Best keep an eye on them in case they start revolting. It was why the British state cracked down on Gaelic Games as being an expression of Irish culture and sent a detachment of the British Army to drive an armoured car into Croke Park, Dublin in 1920 with orders to machine-gun the crowd. Fourteen people were murdered and more than 80 were injured.

Paul Breitner, the great German footballer, was disdained when he embraced left-wing politics. Robbie Fowler, the gifted Liverpool striker, was fined and reviled in some quarters after he removed his football top to display a T-shirt signalling support for striking Liverpool dockers.

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Celtic’s Green Brigade ultras have raised hundreds of thousands of pounds for food banks yet are routinely targeted and intimidated by police. In 2016 they raised almost half-a-million pounds for charities operating in the West Bank’s refugee camps. This was in response to Uefa, the capitalist, sporting wing of the EU, fining Celtic because their fans displayed pro-Palestine flags during a game against an Israeli club.

The rest of us fall prey to the false narrative of footballers being a bit thick and the media encourages it. In truth though, footballers quickly learn that the best way of evading the inane and semi-literate entreaties of thick football writers is to appear thick themselves. It’s a defence mechanism.

The few who earn life-changing amounts of cash often use it to support several households in their wider family. Their careers are brutally short and they are constantly subject to the predations of agents, financial advisers whose primary job is to part them from as big a percentage of their rewards as may be possible in the shortest time possible.

So when someone like Marcus Rashford begins to get ideas above his station, the political elites indulge him with barely concealed disdain before turning on him if there’s a risk he might make a difference.

I watched some Labour figure last weekend express her wish that Rashford enter politics when his football career is over. Of course, he’d be considered too radical for the Labour Party and the red tops would treat him as an enemy of the people.