Football fans would have more civil liberties in prison
From The New Scottisg review
Stuart Waiton
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.
(Karl Marx, The German Ideology)
The outrage and apologies by the authorities following the Hillsborough
revelations suggests that society has changed, progressed and that
nothing like this would or could happen again. However the reality for
football fans is that they face an ever increasing barrage of laws and
regulations many of which criminalise their behaviour way beyond
anything the Thatcher government ever dreamt was possible in the 1980s.
Changes in football since the disaster in 1989 have been dramatic but
one thing that remains is a profound distain for the 'great unwashed'
who watch and play the beautiful game. Today, however, it is no longer
the Conservative establishment who have created the framework for
criminalising football supporters, but the cosmopolitan elite.
The Sun's disgusting portrayal of Liverpool supporters urinating on
police officers and stealing from the dead should not be seen as an
anomaly, but rather as the norm for how football fans were portrayed by
both press and politicians in the 1980s. The editorial of the
'respectable' Times newspaper, for example, had earlier in the decade
discussed football as a 'slum sport played in slum stadiums increasingly
watched by slum people'.
Despite the generally accepted idea today that there was a 'hooligan
problem' in the 80s, we should recognise that the violence associated
with games involved only a tiny minority of fans and that the issue of
'hooliganism' was constructed in the way it was as part of a law and
order crusade by the British establishment.
At the same time as football fans were being separated and labelled as
different, they were also targeted as part of a wider group of
'deviants' in society, loosely known as the 'enemy within'. At the 1985
Conservative Party Conference, for example, the home secretary Douglas
Hurd, after receiving a standing ovation for his praise of the
aggressive policing of the riots, promised a new law to target trade
union pickets and hooligans. Here, the trade union militant and the
hooligan were presented as part of the same problem, with both being
used to sully the name of the other: trade unionists were hooligans, and
hooligans were part of the leftist problem of violence, criminality and
irresponsibility that was destabilising society.
The result was the Public Order Act 1986, an act that, as the name
suggests, was focused on the issue of public disorder and the need to
enforce order. In a variety of ways this act targeted groups of people,
including football crowds and pickets, making it easier for the police
to regulate and arrest people who were part of these 'mobs'.
Consequently, policing of fans was carried out by an intimidating mass
of police officers. Supporters, especially away supporters, were at
times treated as a virtual invading army, escorted to and from grounds
by lines of officers and welcomed to the ground by riot vans, police
dogs and mounted police. Football fans also became the guinea pigs for
new forms of surveillance and crowd control mechanisms, with CCTV and ID
cards first proposed as a way to regulate fans.
Of course, most crucially on top of all of this, the 'scum' were caged
like animals, and in this respect Hillsborough was an accident waiting
to happen.
Today we throw our hands up in horror and disgust at the Hillsborough
findings but often ignore or endorse the latest panics about the vile
nature of football fans. Panics about supporters remain but now they are
generated not by people who talk about being 'tough', but by those who
promote the need for 'tolerance'.
Under the guise of both 'safety' and 'offensiveness', fans now face a
level of monitoring more intensive than in some British prisons, with
regular stop and searches, police head-mounted cameras pointing into
fans' faces and high-tech listening equipment being used in many
grounds. On top of this the number of laws to regulate fans after the
Hillsborough event did not decline but actually accelerated.
As Tony Evans, the Times football editor, recently noted, 'People
attending matches have to suffer assaults on their civil liberties on a
weekly basis. In almost any other walk of life, these restrictions on
individual freedom would cause a national uproar'.
Myths about fans today have become as accepted as the old hooligan panic
– indeed more so. We generally accept that there is a problem with fans
being racist, sexist, homophobic – even that they are wife beaters (as
with the constructed 'Old Firm domestic violence' issue generated by the
now politically-correct Scottish police force).
Yet when we look at the statistics for racist incidents at football for
example we find they are incredibly small. In the 2000-1 football season
there were only 17 arrests for race-related incidents in the English
Premier League. This was a slight fall from 23 the previous season. This
may well be one incident too many, but these were 17 arrests out of a
total of 13 million people who went to watch the games, a problem of
significance for 0.0001% of football fans. Nevertheless a new law was
passed in this same year to increasingly police racism in football and
to promote anti-racism at games.
Summit after summit is called to tackle various problems of bigotry
amongst football fans by the 'progressive' elite regardless of the lack
of evidence to support the notion that there is a serious problem within
football.
In Scotland the problem of sectarianism in football is relentlessly
promoted (at a time when religion has little meaning, especially to
young people, and when the political and military conflict in Ireland is
over) and yet even where individual court cases of sectarian fans
shouting at grounds come to light, it is rare to see the caricatured
hate-filled bigot. Instead, we are left with cases of young men, often
from multi-denominational backgrounds, who are apologetic, embarrassed
and frequently devastated by the experience of being arrested and, at
times, losing their jobs because of songs they sang or words they
wittered online.
Further afield, in Europe, we have witnessed the myth of the
sex-slave-abusing football fan falsely formulated during the Germany
World Cup finals in 2006. Before the German World Cup kicked off, the
international feminist organisation Coalition Against Trafficking in
Women, launched a 'worldwide campaign' about the abuse of prostitutes,
noting in particular their concern that, '40,000 women will be imported
into Germany from Africa, Asia and central and eastern Europe' for the
competition.
Television adverts, increased border policing, government helplines,
even concern expressed by the president of the United States, resulted
from the concern about trafficked prostitutes. This again turned out to
be a total fiction built on fantasies generated by both old Conservative
and the new cosmopolitan elites.
As Euro 2012 kicked off, the question of racism and even fascism hit the
headlines. Will English fans be safe in the Ukraine? Should players walk
off the pitch if they are abused in Poland? Should UEFA officials resign
if there is any sign of racism at the grounds? Questions were even being
asked about whether the competition should ever have been given to
countries that are clearly not as tolerant and enlightened as us Brits.
Johnny Foreigner is still inferior it seems, but now it's because he
hasn't been to one of our anti-racist finishing schools.
Don't go to the Euros, Sol Campbell tells us in the hysterical BBC
Panorama documentary entitled 'Stadiums of Hate', or you could 'come
back in a coffin'. And yet the army of Polish and Ukrainian
racist/fascist killers did not materialise. Again, a phenomenally biased
and malevolent representation of football fans was produced – a fiction
presented and consumed by the 'enlightened' and 'tolerant' British elites.
Hatred and prejudice may exist in football, but some kinds of hatred are
more acceptable than others. In reality, the prejudices of the
'right-thinking people' compete with and often outdo those of fans.
Exaggerations, falsehoods, myths and even name-calling are typically
used in public and political discussions about football supporters.
Accompanying these prejudices, the policing and regulation of supporters
has escalated relentlessly over the last few decades. Today, grounds are
filling up with police officers armed with the latest surveillance
equipment more suited to an apocalyptic science fiction film than an
afternoon of entertainment.
Worse still, it is no longer simply the physical activities that are
policed and caged in today, but also the verbal activities of fans and
indeed Scotland has put itself at the forefront of illiberal intolerance
with its Offensive Behaviour at Football Act – an act that could see any
fan being imprisoned for up to five years for singing 'offensive' songs.
The elite has changed its spots but remains an elite. We rarely see
their prejudices because they are the prejudices of our time – they are
our prejudices. There may not be another Hillsborough but the current
contempt for white working-class football fans is, if anything, more
hate-filled and reactionary than the Tory tirade against hooligans.
As philosopher Joel Feinberg has noted: 'We have moved from the harm
principle to the offence principle'. He is right. Consequently,
authoritarianism has increased today around anything that
'right-thinking people' deem to be offensive, and young men are being
arrested on a weekly basis not for their actions but their words.
Say what you like about the brutality of Margaret Thatcher but she never
dreamed of caging people for the songs they sang at football games.
Welcome to 'modern tolerant Scotland'. Welcome to authoritarianism
cosmopolitan-style.
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PETE CASS (1962 - 2011) Rest In Peace Mate
