Three cheers for last week’s news leak, indicating government plans to support English chess. According to Dominic Lawson, the president of the English Chess Federation (ECF) and The Spectator’s former editor, his conversation with Rishi Sunak, setting out the significant role played by chess players in the wartime codebreaking effort at Bletchley Park, proved particularly compelling. The plans include expanding chess in schools and public parks, as well as £500,000 of funding over a couple of years for the ECF to develop the men’s and women’s international teams.
As I wrote in April, chess has been starved of funds due to not being officially classified as a sport. In the late 1980s, England was second only to the Soviet Union in international competition, but our status has declined. We don’t have the pipeline of talent developed by other countries, including in western Europe. England’s men’s team now ranks 18th and our women are 24th.
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