Padraic P. McGuinness,
“Shattering the urban myths about mindless football mobs,”
The Australian, April 19, 1989, p. 2.
The tragedy of the latest British football disaster has led to the usual rash of excuses, blame, diagrammatic expositions of where the problem originated, and so on. But for some reason the central problem is being avoided.
This is that the football fans acted like a mindless mob, stampeded like a herd of cattle, and the resulting deaths and injuries were the fault of nothing except the crowd psychology which seems to dominate such events especially in Britain, but of course not only there.
The police are a favourite target of blame at the moment. But all the police in Sheffield can really be blamed for is that they are unskilled in cattle management.
How can they be expected to act on the assumption that the football crowds are operating as a mindless mob, not as a collection of rational human beings?
The more sophisticated are blaming the tragedy, and previous examples of mindless hooliganism, on the Thatcher Government. In a sense this is nearer the reality.
Why is there so much unemployment in cities like Liverpool and Sheffield in the United Kingdom? Why is there so much inner city crime and violence, drunkenness and hopelessness?
It is easy to blame it on the policies of Mrs Thatcher. This is the fashionable theme among the English middle classes, who are among the major sufferers, as they see it, of policies which have cut back on public spending and which have broken the power of the most intransigent unions.
But of course the demise of a great port like Liverpool preceded Mrs Thatcher. It was the result of the mindless stupidity of the British unions. And the problems of the British middle classes derive as much from their asinine resistance to change and adjustment as from the policies of the Thatcher Government.
Not that these policies can or should be defending in their entirety. On the contrary, if there is anybody more repellent in Britain than a mindless opponent of Thatcherism it is a mindless supporter.
But what the string of football tragedies, the violence, disasters, fires caused by sheer filthiness and lack of maintenance of public premises, and persistent unemployment in the face of every opportunity offered, are demonstrating is that there is a sickness in British society which goes far deeper than anything the Iron Lady has done in the last decade.
Anyone who has observed a British football crowd must have wondered how human beings could behave like this. There are of course a majority of decent people, looking however for a kind of communal experience of emotion which in itself is basically irrational. There is not a great distance between a British football crowd and the kind of fascist mob analysed in Elias Canetti’s classic Crowds and Power.
There are no clear social causes for this kind of behaviour. But it is obvious enough that the ritual drunkenness of football crowds in Britain has a lot to do with deep-rooted tribal traditions. There is, for example, not much difference between a Scottish football-fan mob in London today and a cross-border marauding mob of Scots 200 years ago — unless it be that the latter group was probably better educated.
Most of the myths about the British are upper-class manufacture, Left or Right. Thus the notion that the “decent British working man” was the salt of the earth, or at least the countryman was, is pure Tory fantasy. The truth was, of course, that they were mainly tribal louts or peasants, corrupted and debauched by many centuries of aristocratic exploitation.
The French, in this bicentennial year of their revolution, are having similar difficulties in explaining the sheer violence and horror of the outbreak of murder they call the Revolution.
These days, violence in Britain is essentially an urban problem.
A recent analysis of the problem of drinking and disorder in Britain published by the Government was described in The Financial Times (April 10) thus:
The perpetrators of violence, moreover, tended to be inarticulate youths who could not talk without swearing. They were typically on the dole or languishing in dead-end jobs, having left school at 16. They were adorned with macho symbols of male toughness such as tattoos and big boots. They were, in other words, another species of football hooligan.
Among the interesting conclusions of this study was that the enforcement of fixed closing times on pubs exacerbated the problem of public disorder. It is hard to think of a more stupid policy than throwing large numbers of drunks out on the street at the same time, rather than allowing them to filter away in their own times, as happens in more civilised countries.
This of course being us back to the problem last weekend in Sheffield. The notion that crowds could and should forgather in such circumstances ought to any rational human being be repugnant. Especially since it is known that there is a proportion which will get as drunk as possible beforehand.
The British system of football clubs is clearly part of the problem, along with their traditional means of financing their sport by gate entrance.
One of the great achievements in more civilised countries is the simultaneous showing of sporting events on television, so that it is possible to disperse potential crowds between their own homes and the pub. (In Australia, satellite broadcasts to pubs as well as normal TV are achieving this.)
Probably the only real solution to football violence and mob hysteria in Britain would be simply to bar public access to football stadiums, and let the games be played out under optimum conditions for television broadcasting. A similar policy would not be a bad idea in Australia, where similar problems on a much smaller scale are seen at cricket matches. Fortunately, cricket is so slow and boring that the scale of violence can never really build to great heights.
But it suits the half-baked sociologists to claim that the problem derives from economic policies, however ill-designed, which are trying to address the decline of the British economy.
That decline is a much deeper and longer term phenomenon which has a lot more to do with the prevailing mores of the English upper classes than those of the British lower class. (In the North of England and Scotland the term “working” class is too often a misnomer.)
But the misinterpretation of the problem is not the fault of the victims of it. It is the fault of those, whose interpretations began within minutes of the first deaths, who want to look for the wrong explanation of everything so long as it fits their own political prejudices.
