Generally, the public mood on armbands and bent knees seems to be split. There are those who assume every organised public gesture in the name of human rights must be altruistically intentioned and beneficial. And then there are those who dismiss all such gestures as self-interested attempts to gain social capital. The relation between the two looks symbiotic: the more enthusiastically the first group don flags, lanyards, and armbands, the more obstinately the second group insists there is nothing but self-promotion at the end of this particular rainbow.

Prospects of a more nuanced take aren’t helped by Left-wing lip service to universal human rights, combined in practice with squeamishness about saying anything robust in their favour which might exacerbate racial or non-Christian religious sensitivities. One only has to compare the relatively muted and qualified response of Stonewall to the stabbing-to-death of three gay men in Reading in 2021 (perpetrator: a militant Libyan asylum seeker with a history of violence) to last week’s impassioned response to a US shooting in a gay nightclub  (perpetrator: a white American with a history of threatening to blow up his mum’s house — although, in an inconvenient plot twist, he has since come out as non-binary).

Apart from leaving the stage clear for Right-wing commentators to claim the divisive spoils, the Left’s squeamishness about cultural insensitivity also entails that activist gestures are most plentiful in the contexts where they are least needed. The safest space for full-throated political activism is apparently one where you can rely on the audience’s proximity to your own values, not to mention their repressed politeness and fear of being judged as the bad people. Many tolerant people in the UK are by now very fed up with all the needless hectoring and guilt-tripping.

This hectoring reaches its apotheosis during the annual farce of Transgender Day of Remembrance in the UK. Nagged into it by Stonewall and other transactivist organisations, last week various institutions fell over themselves to mark the murders of precisely zero UK trans people during the previous year with various fulsome tributes. Perhaps imaginatively accompanied by visions of the Last Post bleakly ringing out over the Somme, the Welsh Parliament even dramatically tweeted out: “Today, we remember the trans individuals who have lived, loved, fought and fallen.”

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Yet for UK political institutions to address a major factor in the majority of trans murders worldwide — working in the sex trade — not only would they have to address male violence and sex-buying, they would also have to take a public stand in some extremely macho and homophobic cultures overseas. Much easier, then, to put all such deaths down to amorphous “transphobia” and then return to the main task of leveraging irrational guilt out of soft-touch Lefties for the purposes of cash extraction and power consolidation.

But those on the Right should not think themselves off the hook either. On the side of those fulminating on Twitter about Kane’s supposed virtue-signalling were various socially conservative and post-liberal types, disapproving of the arrogance involved in imposing Western values on the Qatari nation. This position was, perhaps inadvertently, well-summed up by French captain Hugo Lloris. “When we are in France, when we welcome foreigners, we often want them to follow our rules, to respect our culture, and I will do the same when I go to Qatar, quite simply,” he said last week. “I can agree or disagree with their ideas, but I have to show respect.”

It’s likely Lloris said this for the sake of an easy life. But a growing number these days seem relatively uncritical — even occasionally offering qualified approval — of authoritarian regimes, partly because they are distinctly disillusioned with Western liberalism. Specifically, they are tired with the way that the internal logic of liberalism apparently results in endless quests for new forms of “freedom” — religious, sexual, bodily, and so on — with the result that traditional social structures such as marriage, the family, and local community have been undermined. Whereas many liberals on both the Left and Right would present things such as the advent of the Pill, no-fault divorce, commercial surrogacy, and rampant bodily modification as having no downsides whatsoever, post-liberals tend to be much more focused on what has been lost in terms of social cohesion and stability, and also upon the apparent moral and spiritual emptiness of what replaces it.

I’m not saying that these critics of liberalism would admire a country partly run under Sharia law. I’m suggesting, rather, that keen awareness of the limits of the dominant Western political model tends to make one less likely to criticise more authoritarian alternatives. And yet, no one should kid himself that failing to object vociferously to the imprisonment of gay men, or to the forcing of women to be dependent on male guardians for all their major life decisions, is a simple mark of respect for a less fractured and narcissistic culture than our own. Unless an unabashed cultural relativist, even the most post of the post-libs should acknowledge that personal autonomy — in the basic sense of being able to choose what you do — is a universally important moral and political value, whatever else is also valuable.

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This seems to be well-recognised with respect to the past, with leading post-liberal writers such as Patrick Deneen rightly decrying slavery. Qatari women and sexual minorities, living in the here and now, deserve no less a defence. Radical feminists have long complained of the tendency of liberal feminists to go suspiciously quiet when it comes to the authoritarian repression of women in non-Western cultures or minority communities. Post-liberals must not make the same mistake. And nor should they tell themselves that Qatari women don’t know what they are missing. It might be true that women in medieval England couldn’t miss what they didn’t know they didn’t have — but unlike them, Qatari women have at least some access to the internet.

Another source of reluctance to intervene here might be a general scepticism about the notion of human rights. Certainly, there’s no need to be credulous about every audaciously solipsistic claim made in the name of the “rights” of an identity group. It’s also reasonable, in my view, to have a relatively pared down account of what human rights actually are: not quasi-religious edicts coming down to us from some mysterious ethical realm on high, but rather requirements derived from basic and universal human needs, articulated in terms of the minimum standard required for well-being and not the maximum. We can argue about whether free movement across the globe is a human right in this sense, but it would be difficult to argue that free movement around your own village is not.

So, though it’s a shame that Kane eventually bottled it, I think it’s great that he initially wanted to take a public stand in Qatar. Despite what Piers Morgan thinks, whether a gesture like armband-wearing counts as “virtue-signalling” surely depends on the context. Within relatively progressive enclaves in the UK, public gestures in favour of values most people already hold there are superfluous — and the primary motive for them does indeed start to look like a desire to show off your moral superiority rather than to tackle the political non-issue in question.

But in profoundly illiberal Qatar, things are very different. I see no reason not to take any armband-wearing over there as a sincere and admirable attempt to speak up for the rights of oppressed others, and it seems to me highly uncharitable to take it any other way. Hell, never mind Qatar — in UK football, things are also very different. As is well-known, there are almost certainly gay players in the Premier League but none who will dare come out publicly, so great is the stigma. In either of these contexts, then — despite the critics — a rainbow armband or two is surely a wonderful thing.

The team turned away from glory. They retreated from a dazed Italian team. They could not tap into the wave of demonic national energy and were thus consumed by it. Sending out two players who had not kicked the ball in open play and a 19-year-old to take penalties was a cruelty that none of them deserved. Gareth Southgate builds his philosophy around bravery, kindness and ambition and none of those virtues was present in the last 75 minutes of the game. The final was not a new beginning but another chapter in a long story which might also be called a chronicle of a death foretold. That foreboding of heartbreak to come and an unrealised beauty.

My first memories of a confused sense of weirdness and impending heartbreak are tied up with football, and particularly England playing Germany. I can still see through my five-year-old eyes the fuzzy screen of our big fat black and white telly in the lounge with its dodgy aerial. The only clarity was an intense white dot when you turned it off. My brother insisted that I lay completely still on the floor while we played so that I wouldn’t disturb the picture. I remember the blurred insanity of the ball bouncing down off the crossbar and my overexcited confusion as the players ran in dreamtime. I lay on the floor crying, lying completely still. It was all too much. Apparently my Mum took me to bed with a fever. It’s coming home.

It was also my first experience of heresy. There was the shock of hearing German Jewish relatives say it wasn’t a goal, that the ball did not cross the line. That sent me into a spin from which I’ve never really recovered. What did they mean, Russian linesman? And then there was the lingering heartbreak of Jimmy Greaves. I was as sure as you could be sure of anything that he was the greatest striker in England and he was dropped from the team in favour of a West Ham player. He said that when the final whistle blew he felt like the loneliest man in the world and that he was never the same again. Well, that made two of us. It was the beginning of a lifelong argument with the FA management that defined the outcome of this tournament. A reluctance to trust the wild brilliance of English football. Brian Clough. The demons that have beset the soul of the England team were fully present in 1966.

I was a far more mature nine in 1970, and armed with a full Esso collection of world cup player coins in my album. It took me ages to get Paul Reaney, and he broke his leg and couldn’t even go to Mexico. I would stare for hours at the profile of Frances Lee and Colin Bell, Terry Cooper and Peter Bonetti. And all the feelings of heartbreak and weirdness that found first expression in 1966 returned. Bobby Moore getting arrested and jailed for four days for stealing a bracelet in a Bogota hotel. What was that all about? Fifty years later I still can’t get to the bottom of it. Bobby Moore remains an elusive character in a way that Bobby Charlton does not. And then there was the shock of the eternal figure of Gordon Banks going down with “Montezuma’s revenge”, whatever that was, just before the Germany game. And then the ecstasy of going two goals up. Back Home, we were really behind them when they were far away. And then it all fell apart. The numb awfulness of Germany equalising and then scoring the winner in extra time. I felt like I’d jumped off a mountain and was falling through space. Something inside of me died and I couldn’t really engage for two decades after that. That feeling that something was going wrong and no one was doing anything about it.

I began to believe that winning the World Cup with Geoff Hurst had put our football back 20 years. We couldn’t even qualify for the World Cup in the Seventies and our cameo appearances in the European Championship were fleeting. It seemed we were playing football in a parallel universe. The big number nine, the concrete feet. We were simultaneously brutal and naïve. It was something unique and completely dissatisfying. Don Revie disappearing in a puff of Saudi smoke. Tony Curry. And even when we finally qualified in 1982 we wouldn’t play Glen Hoddle. It seemed to me that English Football did not trust English footballers who were touched with the gift of passing. Nor the dribblers. Blame the management not the workers. In the Eighties it felt like there was a systematic loathing of working-class culture in our politics, economy and football. I clocked on for ‘86 and witnessed the two faces of Maradona but never felt that we were any more than a walk on part in his apotheosis.

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And then came Italia 90 and Paul Gascoigne. I was living in Italy and watched the semi-final in a bar full of Germans and all the old childhood feelings were back. That sickening sense of loss, the rage in the night. I stared at the figure of Peter Shilton and I could have sworn he was in my 1970 coin collection. How was he going to save German penalties. It looked to me that he was out of breath changing ends. In Paul Gascoigne however there was finally an expression of the wild brilliance of English football, of the intuitive stillness in the wind and rain.

I think it means so much to me because football is one of those rare parts of our society where the working class is its public face. Our politics is still public school, as is rugby, cricket and tennis. Our music has bursts of working-class mayhem but the spirit of Genesis and Pink Floyd is always lurking. It was not only football, we also gave progressive rock to the world and I am not sure what we can do to erase that shame. And yet football remains, for all the corporate commodification, a working-class sport and our football expresses that. The Wimbledon gasp is not something you hear at a football ground. The almost inaudible hum of the Wimbledon final on the Sunday afternoon before the game indicates where it stands in the national affections.

There is a demented kind of glory that is everywhere to be seen in English football and never expressed in the national team. Glen Hoddle turned against himself as a manager and David Batty represented his failure of courage. There was no real difference between Graham Taylor and his team. I remember Ossie Ardiles commenting that Carlton Palmer’s first touch was longer than he could kick the ball and the hype of the golden generation left me cold.

Neither Sven Goran Eriksson nor Fabio Capello had any feeling for English football and all the fizz was expressed in a unsatisfying burp. Roy Hodgson was more reminiscent of Montezuma’s revenge.

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Which brings us to now. To this team, to Gareth Southgate and the first ever England appearance in the final of a European Championship, the second final in our history. Back at Wembley.

We have beaten Germany, and with very little anxiety. Whatever the American origins of taking the knee it has been assimilated into English football as part of a long-standing campaign against racism that has nobility. I was at Wembley when Viv Anderson made his debut for England, the first ever black player, and I remember the boos as well as the applause. As a game played by working-class people there is an intense relationship between footballers of different backgrounds. Football is a rare case of something that brings races, and places together. A patchwork of England flags with the names of small towns on them, Kiddeminster, Grimsby and Yeovil were draped all around me when I watched the qualifying game against Scotland.

But the old anxieties still linger. Why didn’t we play Grealish from the start? Why do we still mistrust the players who play? There is great potential in this England team but it will not be realised until their soul is set free. It’s the same old story. This was not a perfect Italian team. They lacked two essential features, a sublime 10 — like Pirlo, Antognoni or a Baggio — and a merciless 9 — like Rossi, Inzaghi or Mancini. What they had was great passers in Jorginho and Veratti, a magnificent defence and wingers who were prepared to run. If the game was contained, then they would win. It would have taken a wild kind of courage to defeat them and we had it, then we lost it.

Don’t blame the players, blame the management.

It has — as usual — taken a football tournament to achieve this momentary tolerance, and there is no guarantee that it will hold. It hasn’t previously. But, while we may, let us enjoy it. Let us, against the background of not only this gruesome past 15 months but the bitter polarisation that has gripped our country over the past few years, appreciate the uplifting sense of solidarity and belonging that have emerged with the successful march of the England football team to the final of Euro 2020. Such sentiments, as most of us have always known, may be harnessed as positive forces if only the liberal establishment and assorted high-minded progressives were to abandon their own longstanding prejudices against them.

That we lost the final in the most cruel manner will not dampen the fervour. Not yet, at any rate. The feelgood factor generated by England’s advance through the tournament, as well as the admiration the players and manager have drawn for the impeccable manner in which they have conducted themselves, have given rise to unabashed displays of English national pride — the kind which, outside of a sporting context, are usually resisted and discouraged by those who know better.

St George’s flags affixed to cars and adorning houses; outpourings of support for “our boys”; the massed ranks of fans belting out “Football’s Coming Home”; the invocation of a history and culture that, by and large, has been a force for good; the spirit of openness that says that, irrespective of whence and when you came, you may be part of all this if you wish to be: these are not the divisive manifestations of a hostile or exclusionary nationalism or sense of superiority, but instead the benign and unifying expressions of national consciousness, born of a recognition that we are part of something greater than ourselves.

Everything we have seen in recent weeks has been the best of what it means to be patriotic: a spirit of reciprocity, common values and identity, the nurturing of associative bonds that give meaning to life and transcend cold economic calculus. When communities which would normally live parallel existences unite in pursuit of the same desire – on this occasion to see a team of eleven young men win some silverware on behalf of the nation – we all have cause for celebration. That’s what football has the capacity to achieve, and no politician dare mock it.

Only the truly cynical would have sneered at the unbridled joy displayed by students at an Islamic school in Blackburn when Harry Kane scored the winner against Denmark in the semi-final, or the Bhangra flash mob dancing through the streets of Wolverhampton to their own version of the Three Lions anthem. Who could have failed to identify with exactly how these groups felt at those moments? What separated them from the residents of the Bermondsey housing estate which was festooned in St George’s flags for the entirety of the tournament? During the past few short weeks, not much at all. For all the incessant and patronising establishment lectures force-feeding us a diet of “diversity” and “tolerance”, it often takes the simplest things to break down barriers.

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I predict, however, that it won’t be long before we are back to normal. Those members of our political and cultural elites who are instinctively hostile to any overt demonstration of Englishness — seeing it as an inherently reactionary and destructive force — will regroup and seek to ensure that the phenomenon does not take firm root. Not for nothing did George Orwell say that England was perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals were ashamed of their own nationality.

The sense of English national dispossession which has been in evidence since the advent of devolution and has intensified in more recent years, coming to a head over the issue of Brexit, will continue to be ignored — but it won’t go away. Those living in our post-industrial and neglected coastal towns, where a heightened sense of Englishness exists — not by coincidence, but because it is in those types of places that citizens are most likely to feel a disconnect with an ‘unEnglish’ liberal establishment — will continue to see national identity as a tool of resistance. The sentiment will remain inchoate and uncoordinated, but it will not abate. And it will continue to develop outside of normal political structures, not least because none of the major parties has any serious plan for giving the English a dedicated voice in the institutions of our democracy, nor for addressing the democratic imbalances created by devolution.

This patriotic sentiment will continue to be misunderstood by many of our cultural influencers. It is dismissed as the fruits of unenlightened and nativist English mentality which refuses to be persuaded of the merits of a global cosmopolitan liberalism – almost certainly synonymous with white superiority and a longing for the age of Empire. It was this patronising attitude — a refusal to recognise the legitimate grievances of England beyond the cities, or to understand the motivation behind an instinctive affinity for country that is considered normal in most other nations — that has created so many of the faultlines in our recent politics.

It has taken a team of 11 multiracial young men to show these people why they are so wrong. Let us savour the moment.