ENGLAND footballer Tyrone Mings has a point, doesn’t he?

By taking the knee, the England footballers were not supporting the more extreme elements of Black Lives Matters. They were reclaiming the gesture, just as football supporters have also reclaimed the cross of St George from the extreme elements of the British National Party, and were using it to express values of fairness and solidarity, and to take issue with racism on social media.

Earlier in the season, the footballers took a four-day holiday from social media in protest at the racial abuse, but the message clearly didn’t get through.

It was politicians like Home Secretary Priti Patel who politicised the gesture by saying it was acceptable for people to boo the footballers’ protest.

Seriously, did she think super-sensible Gareth Southgate, on £3m-a-year, was an anarchist who wants to defund the police?

She might not have liked their actions, but at the very least she should have understood – and indeed supported – the motivation behind them.

Now, in the aftermath of the final, we have all seen exactly what the footballers were taking a stand against.

The Government must take every possible action to stamp out racism and this hateful abuse of minorities, to force the social media companies to use some of their vast profits to expose the cowards who send these messages and ensure they are prosecuted and their accounts deleted.