BRITAIN’S TOP football teams will find it easier to hire players from overseas under

BRITAIN’S TOP football teams will find it easier to hire players from overseas under new rules being drawn up by the Government. Ministers are planning to relax the guidelines on work permits for international soccer stars in an attempt to boost standards. They are also working on proposals to bring talented young foreign players for training in Britain. The moves, revealed before yesterday’s FA Cup Final, will delight Premier League managers, long frustrated by restrictions on recruitment of players from outside the EU.
But it will infuriate traditionalists who say the development of young British stars is hampered by the import of international players.

Glenn Hoddle said when he was England manager that the flood of foreign footballers would undermine the growth of UK talent.Margaret Hodge, the Education minister, and Tony Banks, the Sports minister, agree that work permits for international players should be easier for clubs to get, after high-profile rows over the issue.Foreign footballers will no longer have to prove they have played in 75 per cent of their team’s international games over the previous two years to qualify for UK residency rights. The minimum annual salary requirement – often running into millions – will be lifted.The Government will also change the rules so clubs do not have to renew their foreign players’ work permits every year. The right to live and work in Britain will last as long as a player’s contract.Ministers have come under increasing pressure from clubs frustrated by the tough restrictions. There are 48 international footballers in England and seven in Scotland, although clubs are allowed to have only three international players in any one match.Southampton took six weeks to get a work permit for the Latvian star Marian Pahars after signing him because he did not earn enough to qualify. The club had to increase his salary to take him over the threshold.”We want to draw on the best available talent wherever it is in the world,” one Whitehall source said “The aim is to speed the process and to be seen to be fair.

We want to make sure there is no cartel amongst the rich clubs who can afford to pay the top-notch salaries required by the current rules.”Ministers are also considering ways to spot and sign young overseas players to be trained in Britain. They could have places at the Government’s new sports academies, or apprenticeships in top teams.Teams including FA Cup finalists Newcastle United have long said international players have a valuable contribution to make, recruiting several stars from abroad including the Georgian Temuri Ketsbaia and the Croatian Silvio Maric.. IT IS supposed to be an everyday story of country folk set in Ambridge, a sleepy village. But according to the Tories, it is a hotbed of leftie propaganda. Conservative Central Office is writing to the BBC to complain about bias in The Archers.

The Tories plan to make a formal protest to Ann Sloman, the BBC’s chief political adviser, that Radio 4’s most popular drama series has “gone mad” and become dominated by “political correctness” in recent weeks.
They intend to highlight several recent storylines which they claim demonstrate that the producers are increasingly following the Labour Party’s agenda and are presenting Tory values in a bad light. They are also concerned that a fan club called Socialists in Ambridge has recently been set up.The characters in The Archers, normally detached from party politics, have become increasingly exercised by political issues in recent weeks. Alastair, the vet, has made several vicious attacks on private education during discussions with his wife Shula about where she should send her son to school.Marjorie Antrobus was so supportive of the Government’s handling of the National Health Service that she was delighted that the waiting list to have her cataracts removed was “only” eight months long.The village has become obsessed by Jubilee 2000, the campaign for the relief of Third World debt, with people queuing up to take part in a sponsored walk. And the Tories believe listeners up and down the country could get ideas from the Archers’ plan to hold a parish referendum on whether or not there should be a trial of genetically modified crops in their area.The Archers, followed avidly by many a Tory voter up and down the country, has recently become the topic of increasingly angry debate at Conservative Central Office.”There is undoubtedly a left- wing political agenda intruding into what is supposed to be a drama programme,” one senior Tory said.

“This creeping politicisation does not just lead to intrusive political correctness, it also debases the integrity of the characters. The situation is becoming more and more ridiculous.”The Government has openly used soap operas in the past to get its messages across – David Blunkett, the Education Secretary, persuaded the Brookside scriptwriters to include a line about adult literacy. Tony Blair also threw his weight behind the campaign to “free” Coronation Street’s Deirdre Rachid after she was imprisoned for fraud.The Archers began life in 1950 as a vehicle for the Ministry of Agriculture to promote farming in the aftermath of the Second World War. However, the Tories suspect that today’s producers have also been influenced by No10 to broadcast propaganda. They plan to write to the BBC saying it is “utterly implausible” that the mild-mannered residents of Ambridge have suddenly become political warriors.Ian Sanderson, Tory campaign director for the south-east and director of the fan club, Archers Anarchists, agrees that the programme has become “rather peculiar” in the past few weeks. “It’s getting particularly politically correct and that is rather insidious,” he said.