Chris Johns
Anyone without even a passing interest in football will be aware that something terrible happened in London on Sunday, 11th July. No, the result of the game, all things considered, wasn’t that big a deal. In advance, we might have worried about the potential reaction to a loss from the often described tiny minority of English football fans. After all, it was pretty grim the last time they reached the end-stages of the Euros. In 1996, there was a riot.
One of the many unusual features about the 2021 final was that most of the trouble occurred before the match. That there was a serious failure of security is self evident. It was, of course, much more than that. Unlike 1996, we were able to watch the carnage in real time, if we were so inclined, via images, texts and videos posted on social media. Men (almost exclusively) ingesting class A drugs, consuming industrial quantities of lager and placing lit flares in bodily orifices. In ways that must have made GP surgeries on Monday morning somewhat vile places to be. The debris left in Trafalgar and Leicester Squares was undoubtedly quickly cleaned up by council workers but the images will last a lot longer.
Numerous journalists attended the match, both in an official capacity and as fans. Their Tweets and subsequent newspaper columns revealed too many horrific personal experiences. Some of those eye-witness accounts are contained in a forensic examination of what actually happened, compiled by the excellent BBC journalist, Ros Atkins.
While we now know what happened it is much harder to say why it did. Some foreign journalists simply concluded that English football hooligans never went away and this return to the past speaks volumes about the sub-culture that too many soccer fans still inhabit. That’s an easy take but it can, at best, only be a partial explanation.
That word culture is important here. Britain, particularly England, has been fighting a culture war for more than half a decade now, one that was unleashed during the Brexit referendum. A finger (at least one) must be pointed at Boris Johnson’s evident determination to reap what he sees as the obvious electoral advantages of stoking the culture wars at every available opportunity. No cabinet minister is immune from this and no cabinet minister is more loyal, more assiduous in waging culture war, than the Home Secretary, Priti Patel.
Humanity’s tribal tendencies have long been documented by anthropologists and other students of behaviour. That we are hard-wired to fear the ‘other’ and to coalesce into warring tribes has been evident since the first cave paintings. The thin veneer of civilisation is a well-worked trope throughout literature and art. While there are those who reject this fundamentally bleak view of human nature some of us at least thought that the Enlightenment, if not evolution, was making things better.
Maybe, maybe not. Any return to our caveman roots seems, to me at least, to require a favourable environment for ugly tribalism to flourish. That’s where the culture war comes in. This is not to argue that this is necessarily the prime cause of what was witnessed. But the whole ‘them and us’ posturing of Johnson, Patel and all the others will, at least, have poured fuel on the fire.
The demonising of immigrants, the constant disparagement of effete Southern elites, the brickbats hurled at ‘North Londoners’ - the list is a long one. Britain’s populists remind their electors - at every opportunity - that there is someone out there, all willing to do ‘the people’ down. It might be Islington dwellers, judges, people in inflatable dinghies, Black Lives Matter protestors or, for the pseudo-intellectuals, Critical Race theorists. Who it is doesn’t really matter: someone is out to get you, someone is seeking to thwart the will of the people.
One small example: a cabinet minister has vowed to tie himself to Nelson’s statue when the elites try to take it down. Try finding a serious, credible threat to the monument to Britain’s most famous Admiral. Imagine, if you can, a portly politician climbing that column. Invented threats and imagined enemies are tried and trusted tactics of the extreme right. I could mention the F-word. It’s a playbook familiar down the ages. For contemporary resonance, for the ‘Fascism for Dummies’ playbook, just look at Trump’s tactics. Britain’s populists don’t even have to read up on what to do next, they just need to watch Fox.
There are so many parallels between Britain and America. Just as few Republicans and Democrats are friends with each other, so it is with Britain’s political tribes. Brexit remains the fault line that dominates everything. Even racism, the ugliest aspect of the Euro 2021 final. Not all Brexiters are racists but most, if not all, racists are Brexiters.
Patel and Johnson offered subliminal support to those who loudly booed the English footballers while taking the knee. That now looks to have been a political mistake, one which they are unsuccessfully trying to row back from. Many commentators have made the point that starting a war, especially a culture war, is easy. It is often harder to win one. Picking a fight with England’s young, ethnically diverse football team looks stupid. It may play well with older, Brexity voters but Johnson will, I can only hope, sooner or later find out that the English team is far more representative of the country at large than he is.
Cutting the international aid budget is a classically populist measure. It plays to the ‘bloody foreigner’ mindset that, sadly, cuts across the political divide. When Keir Starmer opposes it, he know’s there aren’t too many votes in it. However, allowing Starmer to be the one offering unequivocal support to the English football team does not look like an astute political move.
The abuse suffered by the penalty takers has led all of us to question the progress we thought we had made on racism. This thoughtful article from Prospect summarises things well.
This spring, the prime minister’s own race adviser, Samuel Kasumu, left his Downing Street role warning that “there are some people in the government who feel like the right way to win is to pick a fight on the culture war and to exploit division.”
Sunder Katwala thinks there has been progress, this is a society with less racism than before but, not unreasonably, thinks there is much more to do. Those of us left in despair watching our screens on Sunday might take some comfort from that. Perhaps it just tells us how big the problem was; how Enoch Powell was more representative than we could possibly have imagined. Perhaps shame on us for thinking that he was in a tiny minority. At the very least, we have had a sharp reminder that there is much, much more to do.
Many political insiders and commentators think that the culture war has been so successful for Johnson that it is inevitable that it will be deployed ever more broadly in the run-up to the next general election. If so, there is more ugliness to come.
One rather obvious conclusion. Nobody in there right mind would award the UK the next world cup. Ireland (the joint bidder) will be collateral damage here. That said, they did award it to Qatar. How will those English footballers feel about playing in that bastion of freedom, tolerance and equality?
Sadly BJ and crew are true “egotists” that believe they can do what they like and no one will touch them!
Sadly, it looks like they are right😢
Racism and other diversity knocking activities is the realm of the uncultured & disenfranchised but is being weaponised by the so-called ruling parties.