Matt Le Tissier: Man of the People

When many looked for a rock to hide under, some people took a stand.

Going to work, paying your taxes, being a nice enough person are decent qualities to have but are not quite the incredible achievements that politicians and professional flatterers, usually trying to sell us something or manipulate us, would have us believe. There is a degree of compulsion or conditioning about each of these traits.

If you do not earn, then you’re unlikely to have a nice lifestyle. Not paying taxes could see you receive a large bill or going to prison. You’re a wonderful, creative, individual, worthy, should-be-listened-to, valued, respected, good person when a politician wants your vote, a company wants your money or your manager wants you to do something. (Or, also, when the vaccine-NHS-media coalition want you to take a vaccine - do that, you’re a hero!)

Compliments for this are fine but not greatly valuable or meaningful. It can be difficult to know who has what used to be called ‘character’. Two areas where we can glimpse the true worth of any person is during key situations at work and what they do outside of work.

At work, if any man or woman is prepared to step outside the tramlines of obedience and groupthink - line managers, chain of command, agreeing with everyone else at the meeting - to stick to their principles or assert their rights, then that person is highly commendable.

When not at work, what a person stands for, what they spend at least some of their time doing, shows their quality. Night after night on Netflix with delivered pizzas is fine, but litter-picking, volunteering, getting involved in matters that are bigger than just your ‘bubble’ is extremely laudable. It is what people do outwith the boundaries of eat-sleep-obediently-work-vote-pay-taxes/charity subs that we can see the true measure of any individual.

The reason why these actions are so estimable is because they show more of the true Self behind the mask of everyday routine. They illustrate a commitment to values. Nearly without exception, a person has to love fairness and the underprivileged to volunteer at the Citizen’s Advice Bureau; a person has to care for their community if they help run the local football team; a man or woman has to be passionate about democracy and the body politic if they are prepared to be a local activist (as long as they’re not just angling for a job).

Sometimes it does not have to be as obvious: an individual could be said to love Truth, if they’re prepared to think and, better yet, speak it. That too is very admirable, very important for society, in my opinion.

Part of the reason why being a primarily values-driven person - not a money-driven person or a status-driven person or a lifestyle-driven person - has been so commendable in all societies everywhere is the meaningful sacrifice involved. At some point these individuals have to make a choice that will be uncomfortable. It is pouring rain, yet the coach still turns up to take training; the political meeting has two people in attendance, waste of time, but the activist still campaigns; the stand you make about a bullying manager is met with no appreciation. There can be loss and hurt, mild to extreme, in the name of a greater good, a greater value.

Therefore, these are the people we admire most. People whose ethics do not let them stand idly by and watch their values be debased or the world become a flatter, duller, colder, crueller, less human place. They think. They resolve. They stand-up. Something still uncommon, despite billions of pounds worth of sports advertising using these qualities of courage and individuality and empathy to sell trainers and clothing in the belief that this is what consumers identify with.

Sports. Is there any area of public life that attracts more adulation, aspiration, fanfare and hero-worship than sports? Sports stars are packaged as minor divinities, demi-gods, who surpass the run-of-the-mill mortals that populate the rest of the world. Millions of people fill arenas to watch them. We are treated to their triumphs, their moments of skill in slow-motion, high-definition, deifying replays which emphasise just how separate they are from us and the reality around them. They…touch the Eternal.

But what about the person behind them? We expect them to incarnate the admirable values that media, advertisers and sportswear manufacturers are so keen to push in order to build connection between us and them. We expect them to be braver, more determined, more honest and, ultimately, nobler than the rest of us. After all, they’re heroes.

Recent history has shown that to be just an illusory image.

The past three years have witnessed the emergence of the greatest existential threat to the British People ever, to say nothing of humanity. Under emergency measures, all human rights had been scrapped. Few returned. The ability to speak openly in the media has been lost. There is gargantuan censorship by omission - the BBC’s favourite trick. Democratically elected politicians have abandoned their voters. The voters in their hundreds of millions have abandoned Reason, Experience and Common Sense.

This led to a pitiful situation of bewilderment interlaced with cruelty. People self-imprisoned under the turn-key of Fear with the police exceeding even the non-legal powers that were extended to them. The elderly inhumanely treated in care homes under the guise of ‘protection’. Years of basic understanding of medicine and science, thrown out the window.

A childish narrative ‘sold’ to a gullible, panicked public of scientists working night and day to find a ‘cure’ for a ‘lethal virus’ and, incredibly, just in time, one is found! A new type of gene-editing vaccine that will save us - coincidentally, making billions Pharma and Foundations, the same institutions that buy-off the media who hyped a virus that never exceeded the mortality of a seasonal influenza.

The vaccine. This is not the place to explore the ins and outs of the vaccine, but to acknowledge one blindingly obvious ethical rule - you do not inject a population with an experimental medication. You just don’t do it. Why They did so is not explicable by any medical or health necessity. What happened to the Precautionary Principle? There could be anything in those vials to achieve what intention? (The ingredients of the vaccines, as far as I am aware, have still not been released publicly).

These will be remembered as the darkest days in the history of these islands. Not for the cruelty, but the compliance. The silent, small, ‘inconsequential’ decisions that highlighted the decimation, the blithe obliteration of the better side of human nature and of our national character. To be so universally frightened and irrational…

Where were our heroes to inspire us? Who was prepared to critically think about what we were being told and then use their influence to question it? Where were they? Politics was a desert. Journalists? Ha! Ha! Ha! Actors? Dancers? Singers? No. Comedians? A handful - most of the ‘edgy’ ones made a run for it. What about our sports stars? Almost none. Yet, here, a few names do stand out. The greatest human being to play tennis is now not debatable: it’s Novak Djokovic whose solitary stance against the entire bio-tech-government system lit the world.

Football? The People’s Sport. Trevor Sinclair made a brave and continued attempt to challenge the vaccine consensus. Dejan Lovren spoke out. Gary Neville made a very subtle signal that he did not support mandatory vaccination. Nonetheless, the richest, most watched league of the greatest, most popular sport in the world appeared to be bereft of those value-driven individuals who are so valuable to a society.

Except Matt Le Tissier. One of the three greatest English football players to grace a football pitch in the past thirty years - Paul Gascoigne and Wayne Rooney being the other two - he raised his voice in protest.

Watching the videos, Matt Le Tissier played football with flair, daring and integrity. He was himself on the football pitch - a thing much harder than it looks given the pressures of team-mates, coaches and forty thousand people who think they know best and let you know they do. He has demonstrated the same values again.

He was in a tiny minority of celebrity voices resisting the corporate juggernaut, still, it was incredibly heartening to a bullied, defamed minority of the population to see the public persona of well-known personality transcended by the actual man himself.

People like Alan Shearer were signed-up to vax promotion. Media companies, like Sky, were involved financially in promoting Covid and the vaccines. Those that were not convinced were keeping their heads so far down, they looked like aristocrats during the first wave of the French Revolution. Matt Le Tissier had a lot to lose. And he did lose a lot: his pundit position with Sky was taken; from being a universally revered sporting idol, he became a ‘conspiracy theorist’, ‘an anti-vaxxer’ and, as usual in the UK, ‘mad’ to millions.

Let’s take a moment to consider this. Few others were prepared to do this for freedom, fairness, common sense, call it what you like. Decades of reputation staked for a cause that tens of millions in this country thought was not only wrong but were utterly terrified of the threat it posed to their lives. And we know things can get very ugly when people are scared. Overnight, Matt Le Tissier became a risk to millions of frightened individuals, to the lying media, the dishonest journalists and the plans of the entire bio-tech establishment with their allies in finance and government, technocrats, basically. A dangerous place to be.

If you cast your mind back, it was less than a couple of years ago that commentators who we had known all our lives, some of whom we had even quite liked, were asking whether it was time to start ‘getting tough’ with the unvaccinated i.e. holding us down, injecting us, putting us in camps, that sort of thing - everyday Nazi stuff. Matt Le Tissier was prepared to publicly defy these threats. He continued to speak out. He still called for people’s rights to be respected. He asked for caution. He asked for common sense. He warned people. That’s brave, he could have kept quiet.

But he didn’t. He decided that the world which allowed him to become a professional footballer, that had given him fans that adored him and which let children dream of following in his footsteps was a world worth preserving.

(If you’re reading this and the penny has not dropped yet, then this is what the signs of an emerging future are signalling: we are being slow-marched towards a bio-tech, neo-feudalist state where the value of the everyday person, working class, middle class and even upper class, Global-Cult-Elite aside, is nil. All of us will be tagged, IDed, surveilled, kept in our place and ruled as the technocrats see fit.)

Matt Le Tissier wanted to preserve fairness; he wanted to go to sleep with a clear conscience because, unlike so many grasping, attention-seeking celebrities or self-absorbed sportspeople, the ordinary person has a value to him. And in that cause, he was prepared to step forward and risk it all. He is still doing it.

What does it mean when someone speaks out against oppression? It means they have courage, certainly. It means they are value-driven, definitely. Yet it means more than that. It means they think YOU have value. It means they think that YOU are worth protecting. It means that YOUR life, YOUR family, YOUR children are important. At the very least, they have figured out that their interests are the same as YOURS and that we should cooperate to find a solution together. There is no reason to speak out otherwise.

In Matt Le Tissier’s case, he could have remained in his Sky job, then retired with his family to a Caribbean island where wealthy people are vaccine exempt, they travel freely with ‘Blue Passes’ - special passports for the rich - and he no doubt could have lived off his legendary status, welcomed as someone who has made their peace with the New World Order.

The darker the night, the brighter the stars: fortunately, Matt Le Tissier was not alone. His courage called to the other elements of society that still want freedom over control, responsibility over obedience, who still believe in HONOUR. His stand emboldened others and now, on top of the nine million unvaccinated in the UK alone, there are tens of millions more who have lost faith in the booster programme, leading to its cessation a couple of weeks ago, and who, at last, are beginning to realise the situation and the betrayals. Would we be here now without Matt Le Tissier, Djokovic, a few brave scientists like Professor Richard Ennos, Joe Smalley, Dr Carol Craig and a relatively few others?

This is why Matt Le Tissier is a true Man of the People. He stood-up for us. He values us; he values YOU, and the braver, more sensible parts of The People value him greatly in return.

Matt Le Tissier will be coming to Edinburgh to speak about his career in football, the media and the issue of censorship, followed by a live Question and Answer session. Click here to purchase.