The postwar proletarian future football promised never arrived.

Evidence

There’s a poignant moment in Duncan Hamilton’s biography of Brian Clough — also recounted in David Peace’s The Damned United — when Clough and Peter Taylor (who “wanted the ship-builders to earn as much as the ship-owners”) go to see Harold Wilson speak and come away glowing with the white heat of Old Labour optimism, fired up by the prospect of a new era for the proletariat. “You could hear the passion for change in what he said”, Clough told Hamilton. “We went back to Taylor’s house burning with it ourselves.” It’s like a scene from Our Friends In The North: Our Friends In The Midlands, perhaps. The future that Clough and Taylor anticipated would of course never arrive. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1552

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with chapter 13’s account of the 1984-85 miners’ defeat only being registered as inevitable in hindsight — the same retrospective structure of a promised future that never arrived.